Interface: a journal for and about social movements Volume 5 (1): i - iii (May 2013)

Contents

Interface volume 5 issue 1 Struggles, strategies and analysis of anticolonial and postcolonial social movements
Interface: a journal for and about social movements Volume 5 issue 1 (May 2013) ISSN 2009 2431 Table of contents (pp. i iii)

Editorial Aziz Choudry, Mandisi Majavu, Lesley Wood, Struggles, strategies and analysis of anticolonial and postcolonial social movements (pp. 1 10) General material Call for papers (volume 6 issue 1): The pedagogical practices of social movements (pp. 11 13) Anticolonial and postcolonial social movements Dip Kapoor, Trans-local rural solidarity and an anticolonial politics of place: contesting colonial capital and the neoliberal state in India (peer reviewed article, pp. 14 39) Ian Hussey and Joe Curnow, Fair Trade, neo-colonial developmentalism, and racialized power relations (peer reviewed article, pp. 40 68) Julia Cantzler, The translation of Indigenous agency and innovation into political and cultural power: the case of Indigenous fishing rights in Australia (peer reviewed article, pp. 69 101) Hilde Stephansen, Starting from the Amazon: communication, knowledge and politics of place in the World Social Forum (peer reviewed article, pp. 102 127)
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Interface: a journal for and about social movements Volume 5 (1): i - iii (May 2013)

Contents

David Austin, Aziz Choudry, Radha dSouza and Sunera Thobani, Reflections on Fanons legacy (four short pieces, pp. 128 150) General articles Cynthia Cockburn, A movement stalled: outcomes of womens campaign for equalities and inclusion in the Northern Ireland peace process (peer reviewed article, pp. 151 182) M. Dawn King, The role of societal attitudes and activists perceptions on effective judicial access for the LGBT movement in Chile (peer reviewed article, pp. 183 203) Paul Sneed, Infotainment and encounter in the pacification of Rocinha favela (peer reviewed article, pp. 204 228) Mark Stoddart and Howard Ramos, Going local: calls for local democracy and environmental governance at Jumbo Pass and the Tobeatic Wilderness Area (peer reviewed article, pp. 229 252) Anna Feigenbaum and Stevphen Shukaitis with Camille Barbagallo, Jaya Klara Brekke, Morgan Buck, Jamie Heckert, Malav Kanuga, Paul Rekret and Joshua Stephens, Writing in a movement: a roundtable on radical publishing and autonomous infrastructures (roundtable, pp. 253 271) Special contribution Toms Mac Sheoin, Framing the movement, framing the protest: mass media coverage of the antiglobalisation movement (peer reviewed article, pp. 272 365) Reviews [single PDF] (pp. 366 388) Ral Zibechi, Territories in resistance: a cartography of Latin American social movements. Reviewed by Colleen Hackett. Peter Dwyer and Leo Zeilig, African struggles today: social movements since Independence. Reviewed by Jonny Keyworth. D. Roderick Bush, The end of white supremacy: black internationalism and the problem of the color line. Reviewed by Hleziphi Naomie Nyanungo. Jean Muteba Rahier, Black social movements in Latin America: from monocultural mestizaje to multiculturalism. Reviewed by Mandisi Majavu.
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Interface: a journal for and about social movements Volume 5 (1): i - iii (May 2013)

Contents

Christian Scholl, Two sides of a barricade: (dis)order and summit protest in Europe. Reviewed by Ana Margarida Esteves. Alice Te Punga Somerville. Once Were Pacific: Mori connections to Oceania. Reviewed by Ella Henry. General material List of editorial contacts [no PDF] List of journal participants [no PDF] Call for new participants [no PDF] Cover art Photo credit: Adrian A. Smith is an activist-scholar and image maker based in Canada. His written and photographic work engages with law and resistance. Adrian teaches in legal studies and political economy and is a member of Justicia For Migrant Workers, an anti-capitalist activist collective which supports migrant worker struggles. The cover image is taken at a political demonstration on Parliament Hill in Ottawa. To see more of his work please visit www.adriansmith.ca. About Interface Interface: a journal for and about social movements is a peer-reviewed journal of practitioner research produced by movement participants and engaged academics. Interface is globally organised in a series of different regional collectives, and is produced as a multilingual journal. Peer-reviewed articles have been subject to double-blind review by one researcher and one movement practitioner. The views expressed in any contributions to Interface: a journal for and about social movements are those of the authors and contributors, and do not necessarily represent those of Interface, the editors, the editorial collective, or the organizations to which the authors are affiliated. Interface is committed to the free exchange of ideas in the best tradition of intellectual and activist inquiry. The Interface website is based at the National University of Ireland Maynooth.

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Interface: a journal for and about social movements Editorial Volume 5 (1): 1 - 10 (May 2013) Choudry, Majavu,Wood, Anticolonial and postcolonial social movements

Struggles, strategies and analysis of anticolonial and postcolonial social movements

Aziz Choudry, Mandisi Majavu, Lesley Wood As a political idea and a philosophical concept, postcolonialism has gained some level of popularity, particularly in academic circles. However, many grassroots activists and social movements from countries with colonial histories have not incorporated the concept in their vocabulary or political toolbox. Yet besides the knowledge and analysis that they are producing in their own struggles, activists in some of these movements are paying renewed attention to the ideas of anti-colonial thinkers such as Frantz Fanon and Amilcar Cabral, whose work calls into question the conceptual accuracy and appropriateness of the terms postcolonialism and postcolonial to describe the nature of the world today and the limits of liberation achieved. Theory building and critique is also coming from Indigenous scholars and activists (L.T. Smith, 1999; Venne, 2004; Jackson, 2004, 2007; Coulthard, 2011; Watson, 2007; A.Smith, 2005) and critical race feminists (Thobani, 2007) based in settler-colonial states such Australia, Canada, Aotearoa/New Zealand and the USA. There may be many reasons for a less-than-enthusiastic embrace of the term postcolonial by such social movements. One reason is that postcolonial theorists tend to use opaque academic jargon to discuss what some may consider to be commonplace concerns. Another may be, according to Dirlik (1994: 329), that the popularity of the concept postcolonial has
less to do with its rigorousness as a concept or with the new vistas it has opened up for critical inquiry than it does with the increased visibility of academic intellectuals of Third World origin as pacesetters in cultural criticism.

An example is that according to Henry Louis Gates Jr. (1991: 457), Frantz Fanon has now been reinstated as a global theorist. This is partly because postcolonial theorists such as Homi Bhabha have made Fanon fashionable in global academic circles. Yet unlike those postcolonial critics who use Fanon to give their writings an element of authenticity and radicalism, many social movements are engaging with thinkers like Fanon and Cabral to search for liberating theory. Notwithstanding the insistence by some scholars that postcolonialism is not a temporal concept the term postcolonial remains, in part, a problematic concept because colonialism still exists, something which many movements are all too aware. Indian journalist and activist Chakravarthi Raghavan (1990), for example, described economic globalization through the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT - now the World Trade Organization (WTO)) as recolonization of the nominally independent states of the Third World. This frame is quite common in both scholarly literature and activist networks in the
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Interface: a journal for and about social movements Editorial Volume 5 (1): 1 - 10 (May 2013) Choudry, Majavu,Wood, Anticolonial and postcolonial social movements

Third World (Shiva, 1997; Bagchi, 2005; DSouza, 2006) although some, such as the late Eqbal Ahmed (interviewed in Barsamian, 2000) ask whether it is accurate to talk of recolonization when they question if there was ever decolonization in any real sense of the word. Neo-colonialism is also used to describe 21st century colonialism. According to Pan-Africanist and Ghanaian independence movement leader Kwame Nkrumah (1965), neo-colonialism occurs when a countrys economic system and political policy is directed by outside forces. Although this direction can take various shapes, neo-colonialist control tends to be exercised through economic means. Radha DSouza (2006) (see elsewhere in this issue) argues that the development project is a post-war project of the elites, serving to reconstitute relations between the colonies and imperial powers and consolidate monopolyfinance capitalism, while also containing and undermining struggles against capitalism and imperialism. In much of Africa, Latin America and Asia, neo-colonialism has manifested itself in the form of World Bank and International Monetary Fund structural adjustment programmes during the past thirty years. At a macro-economic level, under neoliberalism, Faraclas (2001) sees the debt-driven model of colonialism imposed on the South through structural adjustment connected to the repauperization of the North (p.70). Eqbal Ahmad (2000) contended that for the most part, the structure of capitalism has not changed fundamentally, but that its intensity and scope have (p.113). Ahmad argues that globalization has changed neither the political nor economic reality of many Third World countries since the days of formal colonial rule. Rather, it is another phase of colonialism and imperialism. Ngati Kahungunu (Maori) lawyer Moana Jackson (1999 and 2007) argues that for Indigenous Peoples, in the global North and South, globalization is not a new phenomenon. As he (1999) puts it, we are faced with a two-fold challenge, to struggle as best we can to deal with the immediate consequences of globalization. Secondly, and more difficult, to contextualize those problems within the 500-year-and-more history of the culture of colonization (p. 105). Kelsey (1999) observes that conflicts between transnational corporations and Indigenous Peoples are rooted in colonization, with the former being new actors in an older, ongoing struggle for selfdetermination. Yet, she argues, power is also being transferred from the colonial state, which can be challenged at the very least on moral grounds, to more remote international corporations whose sole responsibility is to their shareholders (p. 167). As Jackson (1999 and 2007) and others (L. T. Smith, 1999; Venne, 2001; McNally, 2002; Bargh, 2007) have argued, key elements of modern-day neoliberalism the commodification of peoples, of nature, and of social relations, the favouring of individual over collective rights, and indeed the forebears of some of its major beneficiaries, transnational corporations (in the form of charter colonizing companies such as the East India Company) are not new (Kelsey, 1999; McNally, 2002; DSouza, 2006; M. Jackson, 2007).

Interface: a journal for and about social movements Editorial Volume 5 (1): 1 - 10 (May 2013) Choudry, Majavu,Wood, Anticolonial and postcolonial social movements

These dynamics play out in different forms across the world (McEwan 2001). In some contexts, neo-colonialism can be seen as an arrested decolonization in the post-independence period (Jeyifo 2007: 125). According to Edward Said (1989), poverty, underdevelopment, and various pathologies of power and corruption are some of the colonial legacies that characterise post-independent societies. This mix of characteristics designated the colonized people who had freed themselves on one level but who remained victims of their past on another (Said 1989: 207). Writing many years before, in the context of the liberation struggle against French colonial rule in Algeria, Fanon (1963) warned against the dangers and false liberation posed to newly independent territories by a bourgeois anticolonial nationalist elite describing its mission as being the transmission line between the nation and a capitalism, rampant though camouflaged, which today puts on the mask of neo-colonialism (152) From land to water, to the corporate enclosure of nature through biotechnology and bioprospecting, Indigenous and other colonized peoples are at the forefront of both analysis of, and mobilizations against neoliberal capitalism which emphasize the way in which it commodifies everything, is fundamentally predicated on exploitation of people and nature, and embodies a colonial mindset. Richard Lee (2006) argues that the current prominence of indigenous social movements indicates a new global acceptance of Indigenous Peoples and the legitimacy of their claims. Lee (2006) adds that Indigenous Peoples use this global acceptance of their struggle to engage in the politics of embarrassment.
Land invasions, road blocks and guerrilla theatre, such as setting up an aboriginal tent camp on the lawn of the Australian parliament, send messages that official spin doctors find difficult to counter, the most eloquent of these being the ongoing Zapatista rebellion in Chiapas. (Lee 2006: 470)

The 1994 Zapatista uprising in Chiapas, Mexico, and its subsequent articulation, transmitted worldwide via the Internet and other media, as an Indigenous Peoples struggle rooted in resistance to centuries of colonial injustice now confronting the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA)1 and other neoliberal instruments also drew attention to the relationship between contemporary and older forms of imperialism (Gedicks, 2001; McNally, 2002; Flusty, 2004). Importantly, however, progressive organizations and movements, and the left in general have not always been inherently sympathetic or supportive of Indigenous Peoples struggles for self-determination (Bedford and Irving, 2001; Churchill, 1983). Indigenous Peoples movements, in the global South and North, often express their resistance to this post-independence paradox, or assertions of sovereignty over their lands and lives by liberal social democracies, through struggles for
Free trade and investment agreement signed between Mexico, USA and Canada, which took effect on 1 January 1994.
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Interface: a journal for and about social movements Editorial Volume 5 (1): 1 - 10 (May 2013) Choudry, Majavu,Wood, Anticolonial and postcolonial social movements

decolonization and self-determination or autonomy. The politics and the struggles of the Zapatistas are a well-documented example of how indigenous movements are grappling with these challenges in the 21st century. The Zapatistas statements resonate with many Indigenous Peoples around the world when they argue that more than 500 years of exploitation and persecution have not been able to exterminate us (Subcomandante Marcos 2001: 75). Indigenous Peoples from diverse places like Australia, Aotearoa (New Zealand), Southern Africa and throughout the Americas can identify with that observation. Indigenous Peoples have in many cases been resisting corporate power, social and environmental destruction and militarization predicted as the scenario for the rest of the world under neoliberalism, for many years. For example, Dip Kapoors work on Dalit and Adivasi struggles against mining and forestry development in Orissa, India, and the knowledge produced within these movements is featured in this issue and elsewhere (Kapoor, 2013). To overlook, or underestimate the value of Indigenous Peoples analyses and strategies of resistance in relation to capitalist globalization is to seriously constrain analysis and action to meaningfully transform the dominant economic, political and social order, locally and internationally. Maori scholar Linda Smith (1999) highlights the way in which international indigenous networks with a colonial analysis of development can offer and share alternatives to the dominant model. The sharing of resources and information may assist groups and communities to collaborate with each other and to protect each other. The development of international protocols and strategic alliances can provide a more sustained critique of the practices of states and corporations. (p. 105). Burgmann and Ure (2004) suggest that in the context of the struggle for opponents of neoliberalism to theorize a convincing alternative, the contributions of Indigenous Peoples struggles for selfdetermination are very useful. They assert that the practical critique of neoliberalism embodied in indigenous peoples resistance to their incorporation into the global market is one informed by an often acute recognition of not only the global dimensions of such resistance but also an acknowledgement of antiimperialist struggles stretching back over many hundreds of years (p. 57). This has enabled non-indigenous groups and movements to root their critique in an anti-capitalist perspective that emanates from non-Western sources (p. 57). The authors argue that the desire for self-determination in the face of neoliberalism often finds its most intense expression in indigenous struggles and that, as such, the role of indigenous peoples in struggles against neoliberalism has been crucially significant to its spread to other sectors of global society (pp. 56-57). As new generations launch mobilizations with anti-colonial elements such as the Idle No More campaign in Canada, ongoing struggles for immigration justice in Europe as well as popular resistance movements in South Africa have illuminated the ongoing legacy of colonial injustice in different ways, the ideas of anti-colonial writers and activists such as Fanon and Cabral remain relevant. Younger movement activists and students especially racialized people - are
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Interface: a journal for and about social movements Editorial Volume 5 (1): 1 - 10 (May 2013) Choudry, Majavu,Wood, Anticolonial and postcolonial social movements

discovering their lives, works and struggles, sometimes for the first time in such work. The current issue of Interface includes a number of articles that engage postcolonial scholarship and anticolonial critique to discuss various struggles happening in different parts of the world. Dip Kapoors article explores the politics and the struggles of the Lok Adhikar Manch (LAM), a trans-local rural solidarity network of 15 social movements which include Adivasi (original dweller) and Dalit ("untouchable" out-castes) marginal and landless peasants, nomads, pastoralists, horticulturalists and fisherfolk, in Orissa, India. According to Kapoor, LAM is primarily located outside and against the state-market-civil society nexus. LAM participants regard NGOs as subordinate partners in the state-corporate nexus. Kapoor points out that this nexus undermines anticolonial movements by constructing and deploying laws and institutions to legalise and normalise displacement and dispossession. Simply put, this article advances an anticolonial critique of post-colonial capitalist colonizations exercised through a state-market-civil society nexus predominantly committed to the reproduction of a colonial capitalistmodernity/development. In their article Fair Trade, neocolonial developmentalism, and racialized power relations, Ian Hussey and Joe Curnow explore ways in which North American fair traders reinforce racialized, neocolonial power relations between the between the Global South producers and Global North consumers. The authors argue that as Global North fair traders strive to help Global South producers, they re-entrench neocolonial narratives of white supremacy. Additionally, the article highlights the relationship between Fair Trade, commodity fetishism, and the developmentalist conception of space/time propagated by Fair Trade advocates. It is important to note that the article does not suggest that people involved in Fair Trade are intentionally racist or have bad intentions or that shopping for non-labeled products would be a better way of engaging in the world. Rather, the point is to highlight ways in which historical-geographical-material conditions shape the interaction between Global South producers and Global North consumers. as far as the authors are concerned, they believe that the better we understand the ways the Fair Trade system and movement are shaped by and reproduce racialized, neocolonial power relations, the better able we can become to acknowledge and address them, so that we can strive toward anticolonial relationships rooted in solidarity rather than help, charity, or developmentalism. Julia Cantzler examines the neocolonial narratives of white supremacy in her article, which is called The Translation of Indigenous Agency and Innovation into Political and Cultural Power: The Case of Indigenous Fishing Rights in Australia. This article underscores structural constraints that shape Indigenous-state relations in Australia. It does this by investigating the historical and contemporary conflict over Indigenous fishing rights in Australia. Further, the article argues that despite constraining legal and political obstacles,
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Interface: a journal for and about social movements Editorial Volume 5 (1): 1 - 10 (May 2013) Choudry, Majavu,Wood, Anticolonial and postcolonial social movements

Indigenous Australians have been able to employ innovative strategies to achieve greater control over traditional aquatic resources on terms that are consistent with the values of Indigenous traditional laws and customs. By highlighting the discriminatory colonial legacies that continue to marginalise Indigenous Peoples and their aspirations within mainstream regulatory frameworks, this article shines a light on these barriers and provides ammunition for those on both sides of the debate who seek to move beyond the past in order to construct more equal and bicultural blueprints for citizenship and governance in Australia. In her article Starting from the Amazon: communication, knowledge and politics of place in the World Social Forum, Hilde Stephansen explores ways in which communication activists in Belm, Brazil, engaged with the 2009 World SocialForum and sought to make use of it for their own purposes. The logic that underpins the argument of the article is that although the WSF has been conceived as an important site for the elaboration of alternative knowledge projects that can challenge dominant modes of thought, [it] is also criss-crossed by various axes of exclusion. Suggesting that one such axis relates to the role and status of place-based movements and their knowledges, and emphasising the centrality of place to the construction of alternative epistemological imaginaries that can contribute to decolonisation of knowledge, Stephansen analyses efforts of communication activists to facilitate autonomous knowledge production among movements in the Amazon. The article demonstrates that strengthening the capacity of local grassroots movements to communicate on their own terms is not simply a matter of enabling their inclusion within the global space of the WSF; rather, it is a matter of facilitating the proliferation of alternative knowledge projects at different scales, within and beyond the social forum process. The last article in the themed section of this issue of Interface comprises four short pieces discussing the legacy of Frantz Fanon for theory, education and action. A collaboration between Aziz Choudry, David Austin, Radha DSouza, and Sunera Thobani, the article brings together personal, political and intellectual reflections on a series of themes and issues raised by or in relation to Fanons writing. Each contributor was asked, In what context did you first encounter Fanon and how did it impact you? In addition to thinking together about these questions, each contributor also provides her/his own analysis of Fanons writing and its legacy. In addition to the themed section, this issue includes a number of articles that highlight the drawbacks and roadblocks to movement success. Cynthia Cockburn article, A movement stalled: outcomes of womens campaigns for equalities and inclusion in the Northern Ireland peace process, revisits feminist activists in Northern Ireland who contributed to the peace process in the 1990s by developing a framework that envisioned a transformed society, one rid of the inequities of a colonial past and sought to address the poverty, disadvantage and exclusion afflicting the working class of both Catholic and Protestant communities. Twenty years later, her interviews reveal that these activists are
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Interface: a journal for and about social movements Editorial Volume 5 (1): 1 - 10 (May 2013) Choudry, Majavu,Wood, Anticolonial and postcolonial social movements

deeply disappointed with the progress towards their earlier vision, and explores how policy work and institution building did not achieve intended goals. M. Dawn Kings article, The Role of Societal Attitudes and Activists Perceptions on Effective Judicial Access for the LGBT Movement in Chile explores by LGBT activists dont make greater access of the judicial system and finds that perceptions of widespread homophobia by these activists helps to explain their strategy. King argues that understanding the role of culture in movement strategy can allow us to transcend our understandings of legal opportunity. Paul Sneeds piece Infotainment and encounter in the pacification of Rocinha favela uses anthropological analysis of dark tourism, concepts of relational philosophy, and auto-ethnography to show how infotainment based approaches to learning that are intended to support movements, can inflict further violence by turning people and their suffering into objects, in contrast to encounter-based learning, in which people meet in dialogue, mutuality, reciprocity, and community. Mark Stoddart and Howard Ramos piece Going local: Calls for local democracy and environmental governance at Jumbo Pass and the Tobeatic Wilderness Area, also highlights the role of perception on movement strategy, showing that Canadian environmentalists highlighted the local aspects of their campaign because of the scale of the environmental problem, a perceived exclusion from environmental governance, and the potential for successful mobilization in the local context. Were also delighted to include a roundtable on radical publishing by Anna Feigenbaum and Stevphen Shukaitis. Toms Mac Sheoins lengthy but satisfying special contribution on media framing of the anti-globalization movement will be an invaluable resource for those interested in the patterns and research surrounding this question. He reviews and consolidates the empirical evidence presented in the literature, showing the ways that the media dismiss and marginalize the anti-globalization movement and the implications of this framing for mobilization. This issue includes reviews of the following books: Ral Zibechis Territories in resistance: a cartography of Latin American social movements (Colleen Hackett); Peter Dwyer and Leo Zeiligs African struggles today: social movements since independence (Jonny Keyworth); Roderick Bushs The end of white supremacy: Black internationalism and the problem of the color line: from monocultural mestizaje to multiculturalism (Hleziphi Naomie Nyanungo); Jean Muteba Rahiers (ed.), Black social movements in Latin America (Mandisi Majavu); and Christian Scholls Two sides of a barricade: (dis)order and summit protest in Europe (Ana Margarida Esteves) and Alice Te Punga Somervilles Once were Pacific: Mori connections to Oceania (Ella Henry). Finally, we draw your attention to the call for contributions to the May 2014 issue of Interface on the theme The Pedagogical Practices of Social Movements. The editors of this special issue will be Sara C Motta and Ana Margarida Esteves. The call for papers follows this editorial.
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Interface: a journal for and about social movements Editorial Volume 5 (1): 1 - 10 (May 2013) Choudry, Majavu,Wood, Anticolonial and postcolonial social movements

References Bagchi, Amiya. Kumar. 2005. Perilous Passage: Mankind and the global ascendancy of capital. Lanham, MD.: Rowman and Littlefield. Bargh, Maria. (ed.). 2007. Resistance: An indigenous response to neoliberalism. Wellington: Huia. Barsamian, David. 2000. Eqbal Ahmad, confronting empire: Interviews with David Barsamian. London: Pluto. Bedford, David, and Irving, Danielle. 2001. The tragedy of progress: Marxism, modernity and the Aboriginal question. Halifax: Fernwood. Burgmann, Verity, and Ure, Andrew. 2004. Resistance to neoliberalism in Australia and Oceania. Pp. 52-67 in Globalizing resistance: The state of struggle edited by Francois Polet and CETRI. (). London: Pluto. Churchill, Ward. (1983). Marxism and the Native American. Pp. 183-203 in Marxism and Native Americans, edited by Ward Churchill. Boston: South End. Coulthard, Glen. 2011. Subjects of empire: Indigenous peoples and the "Politics of Recognition" in Canada. Pp. 31-50 in Home and Native Land: Unsettling Multiculturalism in Canada, edited by May Chazan, Lisa Helps, Anna Stanley and Sonali Thakkar. Toronto: Between the Lines. Dirlik, Arif. 1994. The Postcolonial Aura: Third World Criticism in the Age of Global Capitalism. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 20 (2): 328-356. DSouza, Radha. 2006. Interstate disputes over Krishna Waters: Law, science and imperialism. New Delhi: Orient Longman. Fanon, Frantz. 1963. The wretched of the earth. New York: Grove Press. Faraclas, Nicholas. 2001. Melanesia, the banks, and the BINGOs: Real alternatives are everywhere (except in the consultants briefcases). Pp. 67-76 in There is an alternative: Subsistence and worldwide resistance to corporate globalization, edited by Veronika Bennholdt-Thomsen, Nicholas Faraclas, and Claudia von Werlhof.. London: Zed Books. Flusty, Steven. 2004. De-coca-colonization: Making the globe from the inside out. New York: Routledge. Gates, Henry. L. 1991. Critical Fanonism. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 17 (3 ): 457470. Gedicks, Al. 2001. Resource rebels: Native challenges to mining and oil corporations. Cambridge, MA.: South End Press. Hanson, Margaret and Hentz, James. J. 1999. Neocolonialism and Neoliberalism in South Africa and Zambia. Political Science Quarterly, Vol. 114 (3): 479-502. Jackson, Moana. 2007. Globalisation and the colonising state of mind. Pp. 167-182 in Resistance: An indigenous response to neoliberalism, edited by Maria Bargh. Wellington: Huia.
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Jackson, Moana. 1999. Impact of globalization on marginalized societies and the strategies by indigenous people. Pp. 101-106 in Alternatives to globalization: Proceedings of International Conference on Alternatives to Globalization, edited by Antonio Tujan. Manila: IBON Books. Jeyifo, Biodun. 2007. An African Cultural Modernity: Achebe, Fanon, Cabral, and the Philosophy of Decolonization. Socialism and Democracy, 21 (3): 125141. Kapoor, Dip. 2013. Social Action and NGOization in Contexts of Development Dispossession in Rural India: Explorations into the Un-civility of Civil Society. Pp.45-74 in NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects, edited by Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor. London: Zed Books. Kelsey, J. 1999. Reclaiming the future: New Zealand and the global economy. Wellington: Bridget Williams Books. Lee, Richard B. 2006. Twenty-first century indigenism. Anthropological Theory, Vol. 6 (455). Marcos, Subcomandante. 2001. The word and the silence. Pp. 75-77 in Our word is our weapon: Selected writings Subcomandante Insurgente Marcos edited by Juana Ponce De Leon,. Serpents Tail: London. McNally, David. 2002. Another world is possible: Globalization and anticapitalism. Winnipeg: Arbeiter Ring. McEwan, Cheryl. 2001. Postcolonialism, feminism and development: intersections and dilemmas. Progress in Development Studies, (1) 93. Mills, Charles. W. 1997. The racial contract. Cornell University Press: New York. Nkrumah, Kwame. 1965. Neo-Colonialism, the Last Stage of imperialism. Marxists Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/nkrumah/neocolonialism/introduction .htm (Accessed 21.3.2013) Raghavan, Chakravarti 1990. Recolonization: GATT, the Uruguay Round and the developing world. London: Zed Books. Said, Edward. W. 1989. Representing the Colonized: Anthropology's Interlocutors. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 15 (2): 205 225. Shiva, Vandana. 1997. Biopiracy: The plunder of nature and knowledge. Cambridge, MA.: South End. Smith, Andrea. 2005. Conquest: Sexual violence and American Indian Genocide. Cambridge, MA.: South End. Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. 1999. Decolonising methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples. Dunedin: University of Otago Press and London: Zed Books.

Interface: a journal for and about social movements Editorial Volume 5 (1): 1 - 10 (May 2013) Choudry, Majavu,Wood, Anticolonial and postcolonial social movements

Thobani, Sunera. 2007. Exalted subjects: Studies in the making of race and nation in Canada. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Venne, Sharon.H.. 2004. She must be civilized: She paints her toe nails. Pp. 126-140 in A Will to Survive: Indigenous Essays on the Politics of Culture, Language, and Identity, edited by Stephen Greymorning. Boston: McGrawHill. Venne, Sharon. 2001. Same beast, new name. Colours of Resistance. http://www.coloursofresistance.org/418/same-beast-new-name/ (Accessed 21.03.2013) Walsh, Catherine. 2012. Afro in/exclusion, resistance, and the progressive state: (De) colonial struggles, questions, and reflections. Pp. 15 34 in Black social movements in Latin America: From monocultural mestizaje to multiculturalism, edited by Jean Muteba Rahier. Palgrave Macmillan: New York. Watson, I. 2007. Settled and Unsettled Spaces: Are we free to roam? Pp 15-32 in Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Critical Engagement, edited by Aileen Moreton-Robinson. Allen and Unwin, North Sydney.

About the issue editors Aziz Choudry is a longtime activist who is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University, Canada. He is co-author of Fight Back: Workplace Justice for Immigrants (Fernwood, 2009), and co-editor of Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Organize! Building from the Local for Global Justice, (PM Press/Between the Lines, 2012), and NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects (Zed Books, 2013). He is on the global spokescouncil of, and a regional editor, for Interface. He can be contacted at aziz.choudry AT mcgill.ca Mandisi Majavu is the Book Reviews Editor of Interface. He is a member of the International Organisation for Participatory Society. He is a PhD candidate in the Sociology Department, University of Auckland. He is co-author, with Michael Albert, of the book Fanfare for the future: Occupy theory, Vol 1. He is currently co-editing, with Chris Spannos, a book on Michael Alberts debates with leading leftist thinkers. He can be contacted at majavums AT gmail.com Lesley Wood is Associate Professor of Sociology at York University in Toronto, Canada. She is the author of Direct Action, Deliberation and Diffusion: Collective Action After the WTO Protests in Seattle. She is an active member of the Ontario Coalition Against Poverty. She can be contacted at ljwood AT yorku.ca

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Interface: a journal for and about social movements Volume 5 (1): pp. 11 - 13 (May 2013)

Call for papers Vol 6 (1): pedagogy and movements

Call for papers vol 6 issue 1 (May 2014) The pedagogical practices of social movements
Sara C Motta and Ana Margarida Esteves The May 2014 issue of the open-access, online, copyleft academic/activist journal Interface: a Journal for and about Social Movements (http://www.interfacejournal.net/) invites contributions on the theme of The Pedagogical Practices of Social Movements. The pedagogical, understood as knowledge practices and learning processes, often takes a pivotal role in the emergence, development and sustainability of social movements and community struggles. In this issue of Interface we seek to explore the pedagogical practices of movements by expanding our understanding of knowledge and how movements learn beyond solely a focus on the cognitive to the ethical, spiritual, embodied and affective. Our aim is to systematize and document these practices and to provide conceptual, methodological and practical resources for activists, community educators and movement scholars alike. Pedagogical practices can constitute important elements in the process of unlearning dominant subjectivities, social relationships, and ways of constituting the world and learning new ones. They can be central in the how of movement construction and community building in spaces such as workshops, teach-ins, and through popular education. They can contribute to the building of sustainable and effective social movements through music, storytelling, ritual or through processes that surround strategy building, the sharing of experiences or simply friendship. They can help activists and organizers to learn through their participation in counter-hegemonic, grassroots initiatives such as community banks, local currencies and workers cooperatives. They can also be important aspects of movement relevant research. In this special issue of Interface we ask the broad question, What role do pedagogical practices have in the praxis of social movements and their struggle for political change and social transformation? The practices we would like to explore include formal methodologies such as Open Spaces for Dialogue and Enquiry (OSDE), participatory action research, as well as methodologies of popular and community education inspired by feminist, Freirean, post-colonial and Gramscian approaches, among others, but also the more informal pedagogical practices which remain under-conceptualized and theorized and which include the role of the affective, the embodied (the body and earth for example) and the spiritual. However, we also understand the politics and dynamics of movement and community education and learning to be contested terrain. We see how mainstream institutions and actors have co-opted the language and methods of popular education and movement methodologies. These processes of co11

Interface: a journal for and about social movements Volume 5 (1): pp. 11 - 13 (May 2013)

Call for papers Vol 6 (1): pedagogy and movements

optation often neutralize their radical and political potential. We also understand that social movements often end up reproducing, through these practices, inequalities based on factors such as class, gender, race/ethnicity, educational level, expertise and role within movement organizations. Therefore, we would be very interested in receiving contributions based on insider knowledge about power dynamics behind knowledge production and learning within social movements (i.e. relationship between experts and non-experts, leaders and other members, impact of gender, class, race, educational level and expertise), and how such power dynamics determine whose "voices" end up being represented in the process and outcome of knowledge production and learning, and whose voices end up being silenced. Among the more specific questions we would like to address in the issue are: What learning processes and knowledge practices are developed by movements? What is the role of formal methodologies and pedagogies in movement praxis? What is the role of informal pedagogies of everyday practice in the building of movements, the development of their political projects and fostering their sustainability and effectiveness? What is the role of the affective, embodied and spiritual in learning processes? What is the role of ethics in movement learning? What is the role of counter-hegemonic economic practices, such as those classified as Solidarity Economy, in learning processes within social movements? In what way do activist researchers contribute to the learning of movements? What politics of knowledge underlie the politics of social movements? Do the processes of alternative education within social movements and collective struggles transform, disrupt or replicate hegemonic social relations? What pedagogical and political insights can be gleaned from exploring education for mobilization and social change? We are very happy to receive contributions that reflect on these questions and any others relevant to the special issue theme and that fit within the journals mission statement (http://www.interfacejournal.net/who-we-are/missionstatement/). 12

Interface: a journal for and about social movements Volume 5 (1): pp. 11 - 13 (May 2013)

Call for papers Vol 6 (1): pedagogy and movements

Submissions should contribute to the journals mission as a tool to help our movements learn from each others struggles, by developing analyses from specific movement processes and experiences that can be translated into a form useful for other movements. In this context, we welcome contributions by movement participants and academics who are developing movement-relevant theory and research. Our goal is to include material that can be used in a range of ways by movements in terms of its content, its language, its purpose and its form. We thus seek work in a range of different formats, such as conventional (refereed) articles, review essays, facilitated discussions and interviews, action notes, teaching notes, key documents and analysis, book reviews and beyond. Both activist and academic peers review research contributions, and other material is sympathetically edited by peers. The editorial process generally is geared towards assisting authors to find ways of expressing their understanding, so that we all can be heard across geographical, social and political distances. We can accept material in Afrikaans, Arabic, Catalan, Croatian, Danish, English, French, German, Hebrew, Hungarian, Italian, Latvian, Maltese, Norwegian, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish, Turkish and Zulu. Please see our editorial contacts page (http://www.interfacejournal.net/submissions/editorial-contact/) for details of who to submit to. Deadline and contact details The deadline for initial submissions to this issue, to be published May 1, 2014, is November 1, 2013. For details of how to submit to Interface, please see the Guidelines for contributors on our website. All manuscripts, whether on the special theme or other topics, should be sent to the appropriate regional editor, listed on our contacts page. Submission templates are available online via the guidelines page and should be used to ensure correct formatting.

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Interface: a journal for and about social movements Volume 5 (1): 14 - 39 (May 2013)

Article Kapoor, Trans-local rural solidarity

Trans-local rural solidarity and an anticolonial politics of place: Contesting colonial capital and the neoliberal state in India
Dip Kapoor

Abstract Lok Adhikar Manch (LAM), a nascent trans-local rural solidarity network of 15 social movements or struggles in South Orissa including Adivasi (original dweller) and Dalit ("untouchable" out-castes) marginal and landless peasants, nomads, pastoralists, horticulturalists and fisherfolk in defence and affirmation of place-based ruralities (Zibechi, 2005) and enduring histories, advance a critique of post-colonial capitalist colonizations (Sankaran, 2009; Sethi, 2011) and a global/national coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000; Mignolo, 2000) exercised through a state-market-civil society nexus predominantly committed to the reproduction of a capitalist-modernity / development. LAM also identifies productive directions for anticolonial movements addressing capital, given the predominance of current capitalist colonizations. The emergent analysis is instructive for parallel and amplifying activisms cognizant of the significance of an anticolonial politics of place against and beside the dominant cartesian-capitalist colonial conception of global space as terra nullius or as space emptied of histories, peoples and cultures and subsequently free for capital to exploit. Place-based rural anticolonial movements "as bearers of other worlds" (Zibechi and Ryan, 2012: 12) contest the process of capitalist accumulation typified by rural displacement and accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003), subsequently problematizing death of the peasantry (and other rural social groups, communal and indigenous modalities subsumed under and/or erased by this term) prognostications predicated upon Europe's experience with the enclosure movement and then proferred (by simple extension from the metropole outwards) as the inevitable fate of the contemporary global rural experience in all locations touched by capital. Introduction: Coloniality, capitalism and rural anticolonial social movements/struggles The complexity, peculiarity and differences of societies fragmented by colonization and neocolonization (postcolonial colonization) and related social struggles are not entirely comprehensible through European and North American social histories of working/peasant class cultures and movements. With reference to the Latin American experience and the trajectory of the seringueiros (rubber tappers in Brazil's Amazon forests) for instance, Raul
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Article Kapoor, Trans-local rural solidarity

Zibechi (2005: 17-18) notes how new subjects emerge by instituting new territorialities, as Indians and landless peasants engage in prolonged struggles to create or broaden their spaces by seizing millions of hectares from estates or landowners or consolidating the spaces they already had (as in the case of indigenous/Indian communities) by recovering control over their own communities. He also observes that the "new urban poor movements are in tune with the indigenous and landless movements (and are in fact living through what rural movements have already experienced), operating with a very different logic from that of narrow interest-based worker associations" (2005: 18). Their political subjectivity is determined by its subordination to capital, i.e., as new urban occupants (asentados) they create forms of organization closely tied to territory while relying on assemblies of all the people in the urban settlement (asentameinto) to decide on the most important issues. The antisystemic disposition and militancy of these movements is made possible by their partial control over the re/production of their living conditions (also see Interface, 2012, Volume 4, issue 2 and the related question of wider movements of labour raised by Dae-Oup Chang with respect to urban workers movements in the East Asian development context and similar deliberations in this issue around crucial questions facing workers movements in the 21st century). The revolt against capitalism and imperialism has much to learn and understand from these new urban-poor movements and social activism contesting colonial relations and accumulation by dispossession in rural geographies (Guha, 2001; Sarkar, 2000; Zibechi and Ryan, 2012) or "subaltern and indigenous mobilizations, their articulation with new and old political traditions, their amalgamation of democracy and collective interests and their simultaneous deployment of reform, insurgency and rebellion". This is what Peruvian Marxist Jose Carlos Mariategui described in the 1920s "as the fruit of confluence between socialist objectives and indigenous political traditions and struggles" (Renique, 2005: 9) and Anibal Quijano references as the "anticolonial ideological flags (of the indigenous communities) vis-a-vis both the national problem and democracy" (2005: 73). That said, there are significant differences between indigenous concepts like the communal and leftist notions of the commons and communes; differences that need to be acknowledged or by reading them from "within leftist and European logics, we perpetuate forms of violence and coloniality that indigenous movements have been fighting against" (Walter Mignolo http://turbulence.org.uk/turbulence-5/decolonial/). Indian leader Fausto Reynaga (1906-1994), an admirer of Karl Marx whom he called 'the genius Moor', drew clear lines between the project of the Bolivian left influenced by Marx's Communist Manifesto and his book on The Indigenous Revolution wherein the indigenous revolution is against western civilization as such, including the left which originated in the west, while Marxist revolution confronts the bourgeoisie from the perspective and interests of the working class and proposes a struggle within western civilization (a critical colonial analytic reminiscent of the works of Aime Csaire and Frantz Fanon, who for instance recognized the complicity of the European working class with the bourgeoisie "in their support of racism, imperialism and colonialism" Kelley,
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Article Kapoor, Trans-local rural solidarity

2000:24), i.e., according to Walter Mignolo (referenced above), perhaps it is more accurate to speak of an indigenous de-colonial as opposed to an indigenous left. This political analytic is apparent in the contemporary context as indicated in a statement on land redistribution by the world's largest network of peasant and indigenous organizations, Via Campesina, which says, "No reform is acceptable that is based only on land redistribution. We believe that the new agrarian reform must include a cosmic vision of the territories of communities of peasants, the landless, indigenous peoples...who base their work on the production of food and who maintain a relationship of respect with Mother Earth and the oceans" (Available at: http://www.viacampesina.org/en/index.php/main-issues-mainmenu27/agrarian-reform-mainmenu-36/165-final-declaration.) In keeping with this line of analysis, it is generally understood that rural and indigenous anticolonial movements, with their respective contextual specificities and historical variations, have germinated in relation to a system of power which began to form five centuries ago and has become (variously) globally hegemonic since the 18th century--a global coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000; 2005: 56-57) defined by: a) a new system of social domination built around the idea/foundation of 'race' (a modern European mental construct bearing no relation to previous reality) and racialization of relations between European colonizers and the colonized in order to normalize the social relations of domination created by conquest and the new system of capitalist exploitation; b) the formation of a new system of exploitation (capitalism) which connects in a single combined structure all the historical forms of control of work and exploitation (slavery, servitude, simple commodity production, reciprocity, capital) to produce for the capitalist world market--a system in which a racialized division of labour and control of resources of production is foundational; and c) a new system of collective authority centreed around the hegemony of the state or a system of states with populations classified in racial terms as "inferior" being excluded from the formation and control of the system. In relation to the global coloniality of power and the foundational character of race (and racialization), according to Frantz Fanon (1963: 32), "When you examine at close quarters the colonial context, it is evident that what parcels out the world is to begin with the fact of belonging to or not belonging to a given race, a given species. In the colonies, the economic sub-structure is also a superstructure and the cause is a consequence." Stuart Hall (1980: 320) takes this further when explaining why pre-capitalist modes of production (e.g. slavery) persisted despite the emergence of industrial capitalism, i.e., what he alludes to as "an articulation between different modes of production, structured
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Article Kapoor, Trans-local rural solidarity

in some relationship of dominance", given that the latter continues to benefit from older forms of exploitation (e.g. global coloniality and the racialized relationship between pre- and capitalist modes of production made evident in Adivasi/marginal rural-dweller ways of existence and the hegemony of the capitalist state in India and the selective imposition of modernization and capitalist development on the former). A racial project includes an effort to restructure the political economies of subordinate races in an effort to siphon, divert, destroy and selectively re-integrate resources along particular racial lines, subsequently helping to create and/or reproduce racialized relations (and associated essentialized race categories). As Fanon (1963:76) suggested, "Europe is literally the creation of the Third World...an opulence that has been fuelled by the sweat and the dead bodies of Negroes, Arabs, Indians and the yellow races". Others (Alavi, 1972; Galeano, 1972; Rodney, 1982) have demonstrated how the economies of the colonized were restructured to produce the requisite imbalance necessary for the growth of European industry and capitalism; a unique characteristic of modern European capitalist colonialism as distinguished from earlier pre-capitalist colonialisms. In the latest round of colonial capitalist globalization, it is peasants (landless/marginal), indigenous peoples, nomads and pastoralists and fisherfolk belonging to racially marginalized social classes, groups and ethnicities (e.g. see -http://www.oaklandinstitute.org/omo-local-tribes-under-threat) that continue to be disproportionately targeted in the global South. For instance, "this period has witnessed a vast expansion of bourgeois land rights... through a global land grab unprecedented since colonial times...as speculative investors now regard 'food as gold' and are acquiring millions of hectares of land in the global South" (Araghi and Karides, 2012: 3); a process that has explicitly targeted these racially marginalized social classes/groups/ethnicities on a global scale (GRAIN, 2012) and in India (Menon and Nigam, 2007; Patnaik and Moyo, 2011). According to an Oxfam (2011) study some 227 million hectares--an area the size of Western Europe--has been sold or leased in the decade since 2001, mostly to international investors, the bulk of these taking place over the last two years alone (e.g. in Africa 125 million acres have been grabbed by rich countries for outsourcing agricultural production). International development aid (e.g. see- http://www.waronwant.org/about-us/extra/extra/inform/17755-thehunger-games) is implicated in the process of dispossession of small and marginal peasants (including land grabs) through private-public partnerships (DfID (UK governments Department for International Development)Monsanto, Unilever, Syngenta, Diageo, SABMiller) which continue to extend the power of TNC agri-business in agriculture in Africa, Asia and Latin America and the Caribbean and exacerbate global inequality. In the Indian context more specifically, the global coloniality of power was first realized under British colonization in the 1880s and the detribalization and depeasantization or restrictions of tribal/subaltern rights over land and forest through the various Forest Rights Acts reducing them to encroachers on their own territories (Davis, 2002; Guha, 1997). In the post-independence period, the reproduction of this power has relied on an internal political-economic class
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Article Kapoor, Trans-local rural solidarity

and caste elite (Alavi, 1972) who are not "white" nor "European" (Fanon's, (1963), warning in the African context) but are none-the-less associated with a global bourgeoisie (and civil society) "whose hegemony is European and white" (Quijano, 2005: 58). Subsequently, rural subaltern anticolonial movements and rebellions were faced with the daunting challenge of addressing what Ranajit Guha (2001: 11) identified, as the "double articulation" where dominance is predicated on two types of governance. One was by the British and the other by the Indian class-caste elites, as Hamza Alavi (1972) also noted in his analysis of the complicity of internal class elites and external western and corporate interests in continuing to perpetuate underdevelopment and colonial control in the postcolonial period. This remains the case today as the "double articulation" ties the politics of the local (national) to the global (international, colonial, imperial) and the old and new agents of the globalization of a colonial capitalism, i.e., "the colonial experience has outlived decolonization and continues to be related significantly to the concerns of our time (Guha, 2001: 4142). Or, in the words of a Kondh Adivasi activist from the Niyamgiri Bachao Andolan (NBA) contesting Vedanta/Sterlite's (UK) bauxite mining project in Lanjigarh, Orissa, "We know all our problems today are because of colonialism (samrajyobad) and capitalism (punjibad) and these MNCs, NGOs, DfID/UK and the government are its forces" (L, NBA activist, interview notes, February, 2011). Adivasis and Dalits constitute 22 per cent of the population in Orissa while accounting for 42 per cent of Development Displaced Peoples (DDPs in state terminology) while Adivasi alone account for 40 per cent of DDPs at a national level (Fernandes, 2006: 113). The liberalization of agriculture has meant land and seed grabs (for example, Monsanto currently has patent control over 90 percent of the cotton seed supply in the country) and the neoliberal agro-industrial model approach continues to decimate peasants in India as the corresponding debt burdens have prompted some 198,000 to 250,000 farmer suicides since 1998 and up to 2008 and beyond (over a third clearly attributed to being debt-driven), based on different estimates (Patnaik and Moyo, 2011: 40). Caste and tribe together impose an institutionalized system of discrimination and oppression (often based on pollution-purity divides and constructions of barbarism/primitives on the margins of civilization), potentially intensifying the foundation of racial discrimination and exploitation which continues to justify the redirection, redistribution and reorganization (in the interests of class-casteurban-industrial dominance) and the destruction (via displacement and dispossession), of the material base and relations of so-called backward and polluted peoples or untouchables in the interests of an Indian conception of Eurocentric-progress and modernization first imposed under British rule. Scheduled Tribes/Adivasis and Scheduled Castes/Dalits (in state parlance) and rural subalterns in India continue to experience the "colonial difference" (Mignolo, 2000: 7) and the global coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000), as the Indian state simultaneously works to establish alliances with metropolitan colonial powers (a process that has been accelerated since the adoption of the New Economic Policy or neoliberalism in 1991) while deploying an internal
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Article Kapoor, Trans-local rural solidarity

colonial politics (Alavi, 1972; Guha, 1997; 2001) towards Adivasis and Dalits. This is expressed in the words of a Kondh Adivasi elder from the east coast state of Orissa (the research context for this paper) who says, "We fought the British thinking that we will be equal in the independent India" (interview, January 2007). According to a Dalit leader, "where we live, they call this area adhusith (akin to a pest infestation) ... we are condemned to the life of the ananta paapi (eternal sinners), as colonkitha (dirty/black/stained), as ghruniya (hated and despised)" (interview, February 2007). An estimated 150 million semi-nomadic or nomadic tribes belonging to some 400 groups are still criminalized, harassed and humiliated by dominant society and the agencies of the state under the DeNotified and Nomadic Tribes Act, which replaced the Criminal Tribes Act devised by the British colonialists and is used to similar effect (Munshi, 2012). The Dilip Singh Bhuria Commission's Report (2000-01) unequivocally concluded that the state, which is supposed to protect tribal interests as per Constitutional guarantees, has contributed to their exploitation through the location of industries and other development projects in tribal areas which are rich in natural resources. It estimated that 40 percent of related displacement of 9 to 20 million people is accounted for by tribals alone (quoted in Munshi, 2012: 4) while some 75 per cent were still awaiting "rehabilitation" at the turn of the century (Bharati, 1999: 20). The colonial mentality and neoliberal response of the current class-caste elites towards these occurrences has been described as follows:
There is no understanding of communities as the subjects of dislocation or ways of life that are destroyed. There is an abyss of incomprehension on the part of the Indian elites toward rural and tribal communities. Ripping them out from lands that they have occupied for generations and transplanting them overnight in to an alien setting (which is the best they can expect) is understood as rehabilitation and liberation from their backward ways of life (Menon and Nigam, 2007: 7273). ... they are presented as inhabiting a series of local spaces across the globe that, marked by the label "social exclusion" , lie outside the normal civil society... their route back is through the willing and active transformation of themselves to conform to the discipline of the market (Cameron and Palan, 2003: 148)

These processes of colonial exploitation and capitalist accumulation by dispossession (including CPI(M)-led ex-Left Front governments in Bengal where recent land reforms under their watch, according to one estimate, have been accompanied by an increase of 2.5 million landless peasants--Banerjee, 2006:4719), exacerbated since the adoption of the New Economic Policy in 1991 (neoliberalism), continue to be contested across the country (Baviskar, 2005a, 2005b; Da Costa, 2009; Martinez-Alier, 2003; McMichael, 2010; Mehta, 2009; Menon & Nigam, 2007; Nixon, 2011; Oliver-Smith, 2010; Pimple & Sethi, 2005; Prasad, 2004; Sundar, 2007) and in the state of Orissa (IPTEHR, 2006; Kapoor, 2011a; www.miningzone.org; Munshi, 2012; Padel & Das, 2010;
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Article Kapoor, Trans-local rural solidarity

www.sanhati.org ), prompting one observer to note that these struggles are "moving from resistance to resurgence...reaffirming of tribal self, recapturing the control over resources, reclaiming political domain, and redefining development" (Prabhu, 1998: 247). This paper advances an anticolonial critique of post-colonial capitalist colonizations (Sankaran, 2009; Sethi, 2011; Goonatilake, 2006) and a global/national coloniality of power (Quijano, 2000; Mignolo, 2000) exercised through a state-market-civil society nexus predominantly committed to the reproduction of a colonial capitalist-modernity/development. The critique is developed by a trans-local solidarity network (Da Costa, 2007) of Adivasi and Dalit marginal and landless peasants, nomads, pastoralists, horticulturalists and fisherfolk social movements and organizations in defence and affirmation of ruralities collectively referred to as the Lok Adhikar Manch (LAM), a network of 15 rural movement organizations and a nascent trans-local solidarity formation in the state (see Table 1). LAM (collectively and/or as specific network participants) also identifies productive directions for parallel and amplifying activisms cognizant of the significance of an anticolonial politics of place against and beside the dominant cartesian-capitalist colonial conception of global space as terra nullius, or as space emptied of histories, peoples and cultures and subsequently free for capital to exploit. In terms of social movement cartographies and locations, the critique put forward by LAM problematizes (and distinguishes itself from) civil society movements and actors (e.g. NGO-led movements or mainly urban, middleclass/bourgeois ecology, human rights, civic responsibility, anti-corruption movements), including industrial/labour movements and medium-large farmer/agricultural movements (with feudal-capitalist and caste-specific interests) working within capitalist, modern time-space teleologies. In keeping with Zibechi's (2005; 2012) observations, numerous rural, subaltern and indigenous social action formations offer new insights and strategic possibilities in relation to social movement activism and the revolt against capitalist colonizations (Guha, 2001; Sarkar, 2000). Summarily dismissed or trivialized as scattered militant particularities (read as: politically impotent) only consumed with the politics of daily survival and the mundane and subsequently incapable of understanding the macro-politics of accumulation by dispossession (Harvey, 2003:168) or as a politics of localism that does not seek capture of the bourgeois state towards revolutionary ends and hence referenced as anti-Marxist new populist postmodernist movements (Brass, 2007: 584), such left-ideological positions fail to acknowledge or dodge a politics and a burgeoning critical indigenist anticolonial literature (Alfred, 2011; Bargh, 2007; Grande, 2004; Meyer and Alvarado, 2010; Smith, 2012) aimed at the coloniality of power which implicates the colonial projects (despite their variations and specificities around social/distributive and productive commitments) of both European Marxism and capitalism as externally-imposed alien developmentalisms (replete with the use of development/state-market sponsored violence to secure compulsory industrialization and modernization) (Kapoor, 2011a). Thus the class-warfare of the enclosure movement in Europe is erroneously equated and
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Article Kapoor, Trans-local rural solidarity

conflated with similar processes of accumulation by dispossession in the (post) colonies or in indigenous contexts where the coloniality of power and the racialization of political-economic and socio-cultural relations understandably remains a primary ethico-political preoccupation. Similarly, indigenous, rural and peasant consciousness in colonial societies have also been dismissed by the dominant European (-centered) scholarship on the subject (arguably yet another act of colonial erasure) as being pre-political, automatic/natural phenomena or irrational/mad politics (Jesson, 1999). Hence the insurgency is considered some thing external to peasant consciousness, and the Cause is presented as a ghost of Reason (Ranajit Guha quoted in Zibechi, 2012: 61). This colonial position is exposed or at the very least problematized by the likes of LAMs political articulations. A case in point on a global scale, the indigenous and peasant movement of movements, Via Campesina (or the peasant way) came into being in 1993, a year before a similar dismissal in Eric Hobsbawms publication of the The Age of Extremes: A History of the World 1914-1991. Paying attention to fallible rural movements and constituencies engaged in networks such as LAM is politically instructive and revealing given the magnitude of the existential crisis being confronted in these rural locations, if not their historical and contemporary experience with an anti/colonial politics now being waged in relation to capital over forests, land, water-bodies and ways of being (Kapoor, 2011a). The insights and propositions advanced in this paper are based on: (a) the author's association with Adivasi, Dalit and landless/displaced peoples in the state of Orissa, India since the early 1990s; (b) a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada funded participatory action research (PAR) (Kapoor, 2011b) initiative between 2006-2009/10 (which derived its direction from several previous localized PAR efforts addressing forest, land and agricultural concerns and maturing political and organized assertions over time) contributing towards and simultaneously developing knowledge about social movement learning in Adivasi/Dalit movements in south Orissa; and (c) specific research assignments (e.g. collective examination of civil society/NGO-rural movement political relations with LAM--see Kapoor, 2013) conducted by the Centre for Research and Development Solidarity (CRDS), a rural Adivasi/Dalit people's organization that was established with the help of SSHRC funds in 2005/06. Anticolonial movement analysis of colonial capitalist development and rural displacement and dispossession Ranajit Guha (1989) suggests that the Raj never achieved hegemony and was based on coercion and a facade of legality and that the end of the universalizing tendency of bourgeois culture, based on the colonial expansion of capital, finds its limit in colonialism. That is to say that post/colonial capitalist development has relied primarily on violence and coercion, backed by a legalism embedded in colonial relations, to dispossess subalterns. According to LAM's manifesto [people's statement]:
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Article Kapoor, Trans-local rural solidarity

More than at any other point of time in our lives as traditional communities, today we feel pressurized and pushed hard to give up our ways and systems and give way to unjust intrusions by commercial, political and religious interests for their development and domination (shemano koro prabhavo abom unathi). We have been made to sacrifice, we have been thrown out throughout history by these dominant groups and forces for their own comfort and for extending their way of life while we have been made slaves, servants and subordinates (tolualoko). (LAM Statement, field notes, April 2009) We are gathered here today as Adivasi, Dalit and peasant and fisher folk, as people of nature.... We are also burnable [expendable] communities.... With the help of the big companies and industrialists and multinationals, the state and central governments want to continue to exploit our natural resources to the maximum and we know what this means for us. (Field notes, April 2009) They have the power of dhana (wealth) and astro-shastro (armaments). They have the power of kruthrima ain (artificial laws and rules)--they created these laws just to maintain their own interests ... (Dalit leader, interview notes, February 2007). Today the sarkar (government) is doing a great injustice (anyayo durniti)... and the way they have framed laws around land-holding and distribution, we the poor are being squashed and stampeded into each other's space and are getting suffocated (dalachatta hoi santholito ho chonti). This creation of inequality (tara tomyo) is so widespread and so true, we see it in our lives" (Kondh Adivasi leader, interview notes, January 2007).

"The advance made by the 18th century shows itself in this, that the law itself becomes now the instrument of the theft of people's land" (Karl Marx quoted in Menon and Nigam:61). "As a matter of fact, the methods of primitive accumulation are anything but idyllic. ... Capital comes [into the world] dripping from head to foot, from every pore, with blood and dirt" (Karl Marx quoted in Whitehead, 2003:4226). Colonial capitalist development is recognized by LAM as violence against nature and people (Kapoor, 2011a). This violence is directly inflicted on Adivasis and Dalits by the state-corporate nexus or encouraged through inciting and dividing rural subalterns.
We have people here from Maikanch who know how the state police always act for the industrialists and their friends in government who want to see bauxite mines go forward in Kashipur against our wishes, even if it meant shooting three of our brothers; we have people here from Kalinganagar where Dalits and Adivasis are opposing the Tata steel plant and there too, 13 of us were gunned down by police...many people have been killed by the state and industrialist mafias (Field notes, April 2009)

In relation to Kalinganagar, police fired on unarmed protesters on 2 January 2006 and the same incident involved the macabre spectacle of the return of six Adivasi killed by police whose hands were dismembered (see related coverage at www.sanhati.org ). Similarly, four anti-POSCO protesters were allegedly killed
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by police in a bomb blast on March 4, 2013 (POSCO project land acquisition was re-commenced in Dhinkia panchayat, Gobindpur village) while the police claim that they were blown up by a bomb being made by the victims themselves; a public statement made by Jagatsinghpur Superintendent of police prior to police personnel even making a site visit or investigating the incident (The Hindu, Bhubaneswar edition, March 11, 2013). Similarly, in the case of Chilika andolan (movement):
...there were some 5000 of us when they fired, I too was one of the 12 injured (pointing to scar) but I never spoke up for fear of police reprisals. I have endured my lot in poverty and silence and could not get treated...even in Chilika, after Tatas got shut down by the Supreme Court decision because they violated the Coastal Regulation Zone with their aquaculture project, their mafias came and destroyed people's fishing boats...it seems we act non-violently and use the law and the courts but they always respond with customary violence and break their own laws. (Focus group notes, February 2008)

As shared by several LAM activists (e.g. struggles related to Niyamgiri, Kalinganagar, Kashipur, Dhinkia/Gobindpur etc.) violence is evident not just through these specific spectacles (obvious displays) but on a daily basis. Operation Green Hunt launched by the Indian government in November 2009, ostensibly in pursuit of Maoists/Naxalites, has meant the constant surrounding presence, pressure and interference by para-military and police in the daily lives of villagers, as has the similar presence of corporate and political-party mafia hired to wear down people and opposition to mining/industrial projects in multiple locations. The constant stress of armed force in close quarters to (or within) civilian areas is a more invasive strategy than the shooting and beating spectacles at sites of protest. The Adivasi/Dalit recourse to human rights in this regard (Kapoor, 2012), which for many in the west has emerged as "the sole language of resistance to oppression and emancipation in the Third World" (Rajagopal, 2003: 172), is of questionable utility in such instances of development repression and market/economic violence as "human rights discourse is not based on a theory of non-violence but approves certain forms of violence (justified violence) and disapproves other forms" (Rajagopal, 2003: 174). Economic/market violence responsible for displacement and dispossession is an example of justified violence explained away as a social cost of capitalist development as colonialism and imperialism are not necessarily problems for international law and human rights which assume imperialism (Williams, 2010). Where LAM actors have been successful in using the law and/or human rights claims, one of the state-corporate responses has been to move to block these "legal openings" available to movements. This is done by: (a) re-opening the Fifth and Sixth Schedules of the Constitution (Panchayat Extension to Scheduled Areas or PESA Act) which have been used successfully to defend Adivasi rights in Scheduled Areas (e.g. Samatha Judgement); (b) de-notifying
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Scheduled Tribes and having them re-categorized as Other Backward Classes who cannot make the same Constitutional claims as Tribes/Adivasi in protected areas (as has happened with Jhodia and Paroja tribes in South Orissa to facilitate land acquisition around the Kashipur UAIL mining project); and (c) nullifying court decisions by passing new Bills (e.g. after the success of the Chilika movements against Tata's aquaculture project in the 1990s as the Orissa High Court decision to ban aquaculture in the Coastal Regulation Zone/CRZ followed by a Supreme Court decision which upheld the same, industry lobbied the state to pass an Aquaculture Authority Bill in 1997 that makes aquaculture permissible within the CRZ). The state-corporate nexus has, according to LAM participants, also relied on instigating conflict among Adivasi and Dalit or between Dalits and other subordinate caste groups to weaken the prospects for subaltern rural solidarity against developmental imperatives. Some recent examples cited in this context included the Jungle, Jal, Jameen Hamara (forest-water-land is ours/for Adivasi alone) campaign asserting Tribal/Adivasi rights in Scheduled Areas post-B.D.Sharma recommendations, instigating Adivasi-on-Dalit violence and a climate of suspicion, as Dalit were scapegoated (directly and indirectly by state departments and NGOs engaged in FRA-related popular education and the Bharat Jan Andolan) as usurpers of these Adivasi rights despite the longstanding Adivasi-Dalit relationship in forested regions of Orissa. The infamous case of the village of Mandrabaju in Mohana Block underscored what this meant as an entire Dalit village took shelter in the Mohana Tehsildar's office (magistrate-level revenue officer) for two years and then mysteriously disappeared without any official explanation for what had transpired. Similar violence was unleashed by Hindu religious right party-political groups and local cadres over Christmas (celebrated mainly by Dalit/Panos and some Adivasi Christians) in the Kandhamal region of South Orissa in 2007. This violence continued well into 2008 (August) with some 40,000 Dalits fleeing the area, while 25,000 were eventually sheltered in relief camps after a long overdue response from the BJD-BJP coalition government at the time, the latter party being known for its Hindu-right credentials. This alleged Adivasi-Dalit communal conflict was analyzed and discussed by ADEA movement activists as being a corporate land grab orchestrated with the assistance of Kondh Adivasis, given that the land in this region produces a unique (lucrative) variety of turmeric and was being considered for the establishment of a Special Economic Zone (SEZ) (as per the SEZ Act of 2005, a key neoliberal intervention) at the insistence of a major Indian grocery retail corporation. According to these activists, given the growing resistance to SEZs, the state-corporate nexus is allegedly not beyond experimenting with other methods to displace subalterns who are in the way of capitalist development (Prasant and Kapoor, 2010:203205).
There is communal conflict around land and forests because the political powers, in order to keep control and access to these vital resources, are promoting division and hatred among the communities [Domb/Dalit, Kondh/Adivasi, 24

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Saora/Adivasi]. Our communities once had equal access to land and forests, which today have been controlled by outside methods of the sarkar [government] and the vyaparis [business classes] and upper castes [Brahmins]. They want to perpetuate their ways and ideas among us and always keep us divided. We are garib sreni [poor classes] and land and forest are vital for our survival. And if they succeed in controlling them, they also end up controlling our lives. As has been the case over the ages, they want us to live in disharmony and difference so that they can be the shashaks [rulers] all the time. (Adivasi elder, interview notes, February 2007)

Given that there are some 8000 NGOs (Padel and Das, 2010) operating in Orissa alone, NGOs are significant players in Adivasi/Dalit and rural subaltern contexts. While a majority of NGOs follow a state-prescribed and circumscribed role predominantly in terms of service provision in areas where there are DDPs, a few NGOs claim to support, if not represent social movement activism directed at mining and other industrial development interventions in the rural areas. LAM participants see NGOs as subordinate partners in the state-corporate nexus (Kapoor, 2013), undermining anticolonial movements by engaging in political obscurantism and engaging in active attempts to demobilize and immobilize movements opposed to these projects. "In the beginning there were no people called sapakhsyabadi or pro-displacement but after these so-called activist-NGOs worked to raise the amount of compensation, people withdrew from the movement and formed the prodisplacement forum" (PM, Kalinganagar movement activist, Bisthapan Virodhi Manch, interview notes, April 2o1o). NGOs attempt to demobilize and immobilize movements (Kapoor, 2013: 54-65) by derailing, obstructing, diverting and depoliticizing through numerous avenues including: corporate espionage; sowing the seeds of division in displacement-affected communities; through persuasion as corporate propaganda merchants and projectizing dissent; disrupting movement politics with a staged politics; and disappearing when movements engaged in direct action. In APDAM activist KJ's words, "education, health, Self-Help-Groups/SHGs have no relevance at the moment where we are in the process of losing everything (ame shobu haraiba avosthare ehi prokaro kamoro kaunasi artha nahi)" (Kapoor, 2013:59).
In Baliapal we fought against the missile testing range against the government during my youth. Here I learnt that NGOs are slaves of the system--they bring people on to the roads for small issues, within-the-system issues and not systemchallenging issues like what we are talking about here today.... Ours is collective action from the people's identified issues and problems--our action is from outside the institutions and NGO action is institutional action (C, Adivasi Dalit Adhikar Sangathan activist, Focus groups notes, April 2009) NGOs often try to derail the people's movement by forcing them into Constitutional and legal frameworks and by relying on the slow pace of legal avenues to make it seem like they are working in solidarity with the people but all the while using the delaying tactic to help UAIL. ... they make us into programme 25

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managers and statisticians concerned with funding accountability and the management of our people for the NGOs...what they fail to realize is that we are engaged in an Andolan (movement struggle) and not donor funded programmes (ADEA activist, Focus group notes, February 2008)

Colonial capitalist development imposed by the state-market-civil society nexus is recognized by Adivasi/Dalits as an endless invasion of space--"We measured a hand length but always walked a foot length (make do with less) but even my ancestors would not be able to explain why they insist on the reverse (always try for more)" (Dalit elder, quoted in Kapoor, 2009:19); "...we the poor are being squashed into each other's space and are getting suffocated...our villages are being submerged and we have to leave the place, leave the land and become silent spectators (niravre dekhuchu)" (Kondh Adivasi man, quoted in Kapoor, 2009:18); and "They are selling our forests, they are selling our water and they are selling our land and may be they will sell us also..." (Kondh Adivasi woman, quoted in Kapoor, 2009:19). Despite the invasion, the attachment to place is acknowledged with an apparent sense of certitude:
We cannot leave our forests (ame jangale chari paribo nahi). The forest is our second home (after the huts). There is no distance between our homes and the forest. You come out and you have everything you need.... My friends and brothers, we are from the forest. That is why we use the small sticks of the karanja tree to brush our teeth--not tooth brushes. Our relationship to the forest is like a fingernail to flesh (nakho koo mangsho)--we can not be separated.... That is why we are Adivasi. (Adivasi elder, interview notes, quoted in Kapoor, 2011c)

The concept of abstract space (as opposed to local place-based histories expressed by Adivasi/Dalit anticolonial movement actors), emerged with the rise of colonial capital and the Enlightenment (drawing from Newton, Descartes and Galileo), wherein space was conceived of as homogenous, isometric and infinitely extended (Lefebvre, 1990). This conception provided a geometric template of nature within which western science flourished and a grid upon which the earth's resources could be mapped. As a result, place was disempowered and all power now resided in space devoid of content. As LAM participants have exposed in their own way about the space-place colonial dynamic, in processes of primitive accumulation (or accumulation by dispossession), concepts of abstract space are often forcibly imposed on local places, i.e.,
Primitive accumulation involves a rearrangement of space, since it constitutes an annihilation of pre-existing property and of customary ways of relating landscapes and waterscapes. It is usually accompanied by an erasure, or at least a denigration of pre-existing ways of relating to such resources, which are often defined as nomadic, unsettled, uncivilized etc. The concept of abstract space enables developers to maintain a highly objectified and external relationship to 26

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the landscape, which becomes emptied of people, history, entitlements, myth and magic (Whitehead, 2003:4229)

Colonialists adopt a stance of terra nullius (empty space or land of no-one) towards territory inhabited by people whose social or political organization is not recognized as 'civilized'; an example of an extreme version of colonial racial objectification enabled through non-recognition and erasure, as opposed to asymmetrical recognition, which also characterizes racialized social relations (Fanon, 1963). Whitehead (2003: 4229) notes "that most of the maps of the areas surrounding the Sardar Sarovar Dam do not contain the names of villages that hold historical importance for the Tadvi, Vassawa, Bhils and Bhilalas, even ones they consider centres of their cultural history" (Narmada Bachao Andolan in western India--see Baviskar, 2005a). This act of erasure, expressed and acknowledged by LAM in the Orissa context was referenced in several ways. These include examples of state officials taking measurements of land in predisplacement villages without explanation nor permission, "walking through their square/mandap or even through people's hutments going about their business as if there was nobody there", or in statements like "we are nothing to them, so they think they don't need to ask before taking and going ahead" (Kondh woman leader, quoted in Kapoor, 2009:19). The ensuing cultural violence is acknowledged as follows:
After displacement we stand to lose our traditions, our culture and own historical civilization...from known communities we become scattered unknown people thrown in to the darkness to wander about in an unknown world of uncertainty and insecurity (Adivasi leader, field notes, April 2009)

Da Costa (2007: 292) points to the importance of "recognizing the dispossession of meaning as a core struggle uniting" these movements, a dynamic that does not find a place in Harvey's (2003) materialist-analysis of accumulation by dispossession nor the related implications pertaining to un/freedom of labour and the full extent and import of this un/shackling. An anticolonial politics of place is informed by a sense of the sacred and the spiritual, and a unity of the sacred and the political, often the subject of colonial dismissals as being an ineffectual pre-political anti-politics or an irrational mad politics (Jesson, 1999), euphemistically speaking, which fails to comprehend the political vitality of historical connectivity between ancestral anti-colonial struggles and current movement politics. Furthermore, spiritual oversight tempers an exaggerated sense of political mission and recognizes the limits of politics; a pedagogy of limits in relation to the political (material) -- an antithetical stance or understanding to an allegedly rational and informed politics characterizing an unrelenting (endless accumulation) capitalist/material colonization of place, people and ecology (Kapoor, 2011c: 140), i.e., a failure to appreciate selfrestraint and self-imposed boundaries (and hence the coloniality of power) is also a mad politics/irrationality of sorts.
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We, the people's movements present here representing people's struggles from South and coastal Orissa have discussed and debate our issues and are hereby resolved to stand as a broad-based platform known as Lok Adhikar Manch (LAM) in support of the following manifesto (people's statement): ...we have nothing to gain from mukto bojaro (liberalization), ghoroi korono (privatization) and jagathi korono (globalization), which are talked about today. We want to live the way we know how to live among our forests, streams, hills and mountains and water bodies with our culture and traditions and whatever that is good in our society intact. We want to define change and development for ourselves (amo unathi abom parivarthanoro songhya ame nirupuno koribako chaho). We are nature's friends (prakruthi bandhu), so our main concern is preserving nature and enhancing its influence in our lives (LAM, People's Manifesto, April 2009).

Anticolonial contestations and claims on the Indian state Anticolonial movements like LAM are primarily located outside and against the state-market-civil society nexus. This nexus (despite competing visions within capitalist/other versions of Euro-American modernity and commitments to a post-industrial society) constructs and strategically deploys laws and institutions (as per LAM's preceding analysis) to 'legalize' and normalize displacement and dispossession (colonize). It also encourages postdisplacement disciplining into welfare, re-settlement and rehabilitation and related market-schemes or subjects Adivasi/Dalits and rural subalterns to abject poverty in urban slums and constant migration in search of precarious and exploitative work (re-colonize) (Kapoor, 2011c: 134). In the words of an ADEA leader, "They are fighting against those who have everything and nothing to lose. We will persist and as long as they keep breaking their own laws--this only makes it easier for us" (Focus group notes, February 2008).
We are giving importance to land occupation (padar bari akthiar) and land use (chatriya chatri). We are now beginning to see the fruits of occupations. Before the government uses vacant state land (anawadi) to plant cashew, eucalyptus or virtually gives the land to bauxite mining companies, we must encroach and occupy and put the land to use through our plantation activities and agricultural use. This has become our knowledge through joint land action. This knowledge is not only with me now but with all our people--what are the ways open to us-this is like the opening of knowledge that was hidden to us for ages (Kondh Adivasi man, interview notes, 2007). ..we will fight collectively (sangram) to save (raksha) the forests and to protect our way of life. ...this is a collective struggle for the forest (ame samastha mishi sangram o kariba)...our struggle is around khadyo, jamin, jalo, jangalo o ektha (food, land, water, forest and unity) (Kondh Adivasi woman, interview notes, 2007)

Since the agents of colonial capital rely on splintering the possibility of

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solidarity between Adivasi, Dalit and rural subaltern social classes and groups, LAM (and specific movements in the network, like the ADEA) consciously engages people in popular and informal education directed at the importance of ektha (unity) as education and organizing mutually reinforce a movement development process that has matured and penetrated to different extents in and among the various and related rural movements as part of a continuous ongoing process. The knowledge and pedagogical basis for this process is primarily informed by "own ways learning" (Kapoor, 2009) and popular education efforts by Adivasi/Dalit activists from the movement villages, politically disillusioned by their engagements with civil society organizations for the most part or party-political experiences in formal political organizations at the state level. The emphasis on a political strategy of systematic pre-emptive direct action (e.g. occupations) and a politics of measured-confrontation in relation to mining activities that displace and dispossess Adivasi/Dalit and rural subaltern classes and social groups have already been alluded to, and remains front and centre in terms of political action and the deepening of organization, unity and learning. In the words of a Saora Adivasi leader (Kapoor, 2009: 2628):
If the government continue to control lands, forest and water that we have depended on since our ancestors came, then ...we will be compelled to engage in a collective struggle (ame samohiko bhabe, sangram kariba pahi badhyo hebu)... and building a movement among us from village to panchayat to federation levels. I think this movement (andolan) should spread to the district and become district level struggle. The organization is always giving us new ideas (nothon chinta), new education (nothon shikya), awareness (chetna) and jojana (plans). We believe this will continue (ao yu eha kari chalibo amaro viswas). We have to teach each other (bujha-sujha), explain to each other and that is how education has happened and made things possible for us...we organize workshops and gatherings and have created a leaning environment for all our people--I feel so happy and satisfied, I can not tell you--we have been creating a political education around land, forest and water issues and debating courses of action. We are expanding in terms of participation and we need to keep generating more awareness on more issues that affect us. We have taken up the need for unity between us. We have seen that if we have unity, nobody can take away anything from us, be it our trees and leaves, our land and bagara areas (shifting cultivation zones). ... we have been actively spreading the message that we must have communal harmony (sampro-dahiko srunkhala).

The claims on the state (which vacillate between being anti-statist and/or statist) are in relation to recognition, local control and autonomy and state support for development on local terms and in sync with a local politicaleconomy which caters primarily to the rural regions and villages. Clearly LAM and similar rural movement formations in defence and affirmation of rurality are challenging the neoliberal Indian state's conception and power of eminent domain (Mehta, 2009) and questioning its predominant deployment on behalf
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of colonial capitalist interests subsequently equated with the preferred 'public' interest. According to a Kondh Adivasi leader and a Domb/Dalit woman activist (Kapoor, 2009: 27):
...we are laying a claim on the government who is supposed to serve all the people in this land. We are demanding a place for ourselves--we are questioning the government and asking them to help us develop our land using our ways...our livelihood should be protected and our traditional occupations and relationship to the land and forest need to be protected as community control over land and forests in our areas and this is our understanding of our Constitutional rights too. There is no contradiction. Once this is understood we can cooperate and when necessary, work with the government to take care of the land and forests. If they can help the shaharis (moderns/urbanites) destroy the forests, then they can help us protect it and listen to our story too. In relation to land and forest and water, we want that the government must not have control or rights over our natural resources (ame chaho je sarkar amo prakrutic sampader opera adhkar kimba niyantrano no kori). For example, village organization has the right to manage forests. The land that people have occupied and need, the government should not put pressure for eviction. People have a right to cultivable land which they have been using in accordance with their knowledge and traditions. The government should rather help us to develop our agriculture by finding ways to support us. And instead of big dams, it should erect check dams (small scale irrigation) to help us in our cultivable land for irrigation.

Concluding reflections: Coloniality, trans-local solidarity and the defence and affirmation of rurality In terms of the relationship between struggle and the disalienation of colonized subjects attempting to address an "arsenal of complexes" to restore their "proper place", authentic freedom in this regard cannot be achieved when colonized peoples "simply go from one way of life to another, but not from one life to another", i.e., become "emancipated slaves" because the terms of recognition remain in the possession of the powerful to bestow on their inferiors as they see fit. Subsequently, the best that the colonized can hope for is "white liberty and white justice; that is, values secreted by their masters" (read as: white-caste-class elites and consumer classes in the Indian context) (Fanon, 1967: 220-222). To identify with "white liberty and white justice" the colonized would have failed to re-establish themselves as truly self-determining, i.e., as the creators of the terms and values by which they are to be recognized or else they limit the realm of possibility of their freedom (Fanon, 1963: 9). Looking to "own ways learning" (in the words of some of the partners in LAM) and "turning away from master-dependency" from the colonial state and society is the "source of liberation" and transformative praxis that is underscored by Fanon (1967:221) and that proves to continue to be a challenge (for strategic and other reasons, including forms of "dependent thinking"--looking to the other for recognition-- which characterize experiences with sustained subordination) in
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LAM contexts, as the concerned movements oscillate between a "complete break" (in practice and theory--anti-statist) or seeking "state recognition" (claims on the state--even racially and caste-motivated asymmetrical recognition as Scheduled Tribes and Scheduled Castes). Self-recognition and anticolonial empowerment is, after all, a long term process of contradictory engagements given the parasitic and penetrating impacts of colonial structures; impacts that are recognizable along with resistances that have always tempered and limited colonial possibilities. The stress on unity (ektha), demonstrating strength in numbers and attempting to scale up Adivasi/Dalit and rural subaltern social action (hence the gradual emergence of formations like LAM) are clearly integral to the process of anticolonial contestations as is an anticolonial pedagogy of place and roots (historical, ancestral and/or spiritual) (Kapoor, 2011c). This subaltern domain of politics germinated in the precolonial period, has operated vigorously under the British, and continues to develop new strains in both form and content made evident in acts of protest, rebellion and sustained resistance (Guha, 1982: 4; 1997). As subjects and makers of their own history or "movements who are bearers of other worlds" (Zibechi and Ryan, 2012: 12) and who possess autonomy within encompassing structures of subordination (Arnold, 1984), trans-local rural solidarity and anticolonial social movement formations like LAM (as a network and as individual movements with their specificities) are actively engaged in a politics which exposes, derails, disrupts and resists colonial capitalist accumulation by displacement and dispossession in the forested and rural regions; places where over 80 percent of 37 million people in the state of Orissa live in 55,000 villages. References Alavi, Hamza. 1972. The State in Post-colonial Societies: Pakistan and Bangladesh. New Left Review, 74 (July-August): 59-81. Alfred, Taiaiake. 2011. Colonial Stains on Our Existence. Pp. 3-11 in Racism, Colonialism and Indigeneity in Canada, edited by Martin Cannon and Lina Sunseri. Don Mills Ontario: Oxford University Press. Araghi, Farshad and Karides, M. 2012. "Land Dispossession and Global Crisis: Introduction to the Special Section on Land Rights in the World System." Journal of World Systems Research on Land Rights, 18(1): 1-5. Arnold, David. 1984. "Gramsci and Peasant Subalternity in India." Journal of Peasant Studies 11(4): 155-177. Banerjee, Parthasarathi. 2006. "West Bengal: Land Acquisition and Peasant Resistance in Singur." Economic and Political Weekly, 41(46):4718-4720. Bargh, Maria (ed.) 2007. Resistance: An indigenous response to neoliberalism. Wellington: Huia. Baviskar, Amita 2005a. In the belly of the river: Tribal conflicts over development in the Narmada valley (2nd ed.). USA: Oxford University Press.

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Baviskar, Amita. 2005b. "Red in Tooth and Claw? Looking for Class Struggles Over Nature." Pp. 161-178 in Social Movements in India: Poverty, Power and Politics, edited by Raka Ray and Mary Katzenstein. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Bharati, S. 1999. "Human Rights and Development Projects in India." The PRP Journal of Human Rights 3(4): 20. Brass, Tom. 2007. A World Which is Not Yet: Peasants, Civil Society and the State. Journal of Peasant Studies 34(3/4): 582-664. Cameron, Angus and Palan, Ronen (2003). The imagined economies of globalization. London: Sage. Da Costa, Dia. 2007. "Tensions of Neo-liberal Development: State Discourse and Dramatic Oppositions in West Bengal." Contributions to Indian Sociology 41(3): 287-320. Da Costa, Dia 2009. Development drama: Reimagining rural political action in eastern India. New Delhi: Routledge. Davis, Mike 2002. Late Victorian holocausts: El Nino famines and the making of the Third World. London: Verso. Fanon, Frantz 1963. Wretched of the earth. Boston: Grove Press. Fanon, Frantz 1967. Black skin, white masks. Boston: Grove Press. Fernandes, Walter. 2006. "Development-related Displacement and Tribal Women." Pp. 112-132 in Tribal Development in India: The Contemporary Debate, edited by Gobind Rath. New Delhi: Sage. Galeano, Eduardo 1972. Open veins of Latin America: Five centuries of the pillage of a continent. NY: Monthly Review Press. Goonatilake, Susantha 2006. Recolonisation: Foreign funded NGOs in Sri Lanka. New Delhi: Sage. GRAIN 2012. The great food robbery: How corporations control food, grab land and destroy the climate. Cape Town, South Africa: Pambazuka Press. Grande, Sandy 2004. Red pedagogy: Native American social and political thought. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Guha, Ranajit 1982. "On Some Aspects of the Historiography of Colonial India." Pp. 1-8 in Subaltern Studies Number 1, edited by Ranajit Guha. New Delhi:Oxford University Press. Guha, Ranajit 1989. "Dominance Without Hegemony and its' Historiography." In Subaltern Studies Number 6, edited by Ranajit Guha. New Delhi:Oxford University Press. Guha, Ranajit 1997. Dominance without hegemony: History and power in colonial India. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Guha, Ranajit. 2001. "Subaltern Studies: Projects for Our Time and their
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Convergence." In Latin American Subaltern Studies Reader, edited by I. Rodriguez. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hall, Stuart 1980. "Race, Articulation and Societies Structured in Dominance." Pp.305-345 in Sociological Theories, Race and Colonialism. Paris: UNESCO. Harvey, David 2003. The new imperialism. Oxford & New York: Oxford University Press. Indian People's Tribunal on Environment and Human Rights (IPTEHR) 2006. An inquiry in to mining and human rights violations. Mumbai, India: IPTEHR publication. Jesson, Bruce (1999). Only their purpose is mad. Palmerston North: Dunmore Press. Kapoor, Dip. 2013. Social Action and NGOization in Contexts of Development Dispossession in Rural India: Explorations in to the Un-civility of Civil Society. Pp. 46-74 in NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects, edited by Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor. London: Zed. Kapoor, Dip. 2012. Human Rights as Paradox and Equivocation in Contexts of Adivasi (original dweller) Dispossession in India. Journal of Asian and African Studies 47(4): 404-420. Kapoor, Dip. 2011a. Subaltern Social Movement (SSM) Post-mortems of Development in India: Locating Trans-local Activism and Radicalism. Journal of Asian and African Studies 46(2): 130-148. Kapoor, Dip. 2011b. Participatory academic research (par) and Peoples Participatory Action Research (PAR): Research, Politicization and Subaltern Social Movements (SSMs) in India. Pp. 29-44 in Education, Participatory Action Research and Social Change: International Perspectives, edited by Dip Kapoor and Steven Jordan. NY & London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kapoor, Dip. 2011c. Adult Learning in Political (Un-civil) Society: Anti-colonial Subaltern Social Movement (SSM) Pedagogies of Place. Studies in the Education of Adults 43(2): 128-146. Kapoor, Dip. 2009. Subaltern Social Movement (SSM) Learning: Adivasis (original dwellers) and the Decolonization of Space in India. Pp.7-38 in Education, Decolonization and Development: Perspectives from Asia, Africa and the Americas, edited by Dip Kapoor. Rotterdam: Sense Publishers. Kelley, Robin 2000. "A Poetics of Anticolonialism." Pp. 7-28 in Discourse on Colonialism, by Robin Kelley. NY: Monthly Review Press. Lefebvre, Henri 1990. The production of space, trans D. Nicholson-Smith. Oxford: Blackwell. Martinez-Alier, Juan 2003. The environmentalism of the poor: A study of ecological conflicts and valuations. NY: Edward Elgar. Mehta, Lyla (ed.) 2009. Displaced by development: Confronting marginalization and gender injustice. New Delhi: Sage.
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Menon, Nivedita and Nigam, Aditya 2007. Power and contestation: India since 1989. London: Zed. McMichael, Philip (ed.) 2010. Contesting development: Critical struggles for social change. NY: Routledge. Meyer, Lois and Alvarado, Maldonado (eds.) 2010. New world of indigenous resistance. San Francisco, CA: City Lights Publishers. Mignolo, Walter 2000. Local histories/Global designs. NJ: Princeton University Press. Munshi, Indra (ed.) 2012. The Adivasi question: Issues of land, forest and livelihood. New Delhi: Orient Black Swan. Nixon, Rob 2011. Slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Oliver-Smith, Anthony 2010. Defying displacement: Grassroots resistance and the critique of development. Austin: University of Texas Press. Oxfam 2011. Land and power: The growing scandal surrounding the new wave of investments in land. Available at: www.oxfam.org/en/grow/policy/land (accessed 6.1.2013) Padel, Felix and Das, Samarendra 2010. Out of this earth: East India Adivasis and the aluminium cartel. New Delhi: Orient Black Swan. Patnaik, Utsa and Moyo, Sam 2011. The agrarian question in the neoliberal era: Primitive accumulation and the peasantry. Capetown, South Africa: Pambazuka Press. Pimple, Minar and Sethi, Manpreet. 2005. "Ocuupation of Land in India: Experiences and Challenges." Pp. 235-256 in Reclaiming Land: The Resurgence of Rural Movements in Africa, Asia and Latin America, edited by Sam Moyo and Paris Yeros. London: Zed. Prabhu, Pradeep. 1998. "Tribal Movements: Resistance to Resurgence." Pp. 80-94 in Towards People-Centreed Development, edited by Murli Desai et al. Mumbai, India: Tata Institute of Social Sciences. Prasant, Kumar and Kapoor, Dip. 2010. "Learning and Knowledge Production in Dalit Social Movements in Rural India." Pp.193-210 in Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production, edited by Aziz Choudry and Dip Kapoor. NY & London: Palgrave Macmillan. Quijano, Anibal. 2005. "The Challenge of the 'Indigenous Movement' in Latin America." Socialism and Democracy 19(3): 55-78. Quijano, Anibal. 2000. "Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America." International Sociology 15(2): 215-232. Rajagopal, Balakrishnan 2003. International law from below: Development, social movements and Third World resistance. Cambridge: Cambridge
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University Press. Renique, Gerardo. 2005. "Latin America Today: The Revolt Against Neoliberalism." Socialism and Democracy 19(3): 1-11. Rodney, Walter 1982. How Europe underdeveloped Africa. Washington DC: Howard University Press. Sarkar, Sumit. 2000. "The Decline of the Subaltern in Subaltern Studies." Pp. 300-323 in Mapping Subaltern Studies and the Postcolonial, edited by Vinayak Chaturvedi. London: Verso. Sankaran, Krishna 2009. Globalization and postcolonialism: Hegemony and resistance in the twenty-first century. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. Sethi, Rumina 2011. The politics of postcolonialism: Empire, nation and resistance. London: Pluto. Smith, Linda 2012. Decolonizing methodologies: Research and indigenous peoples. London: Zed. Sundar, Nalini 2007. Subalterns and sovereigns: An anthropological history of Bastar (1854-2006). Oxford: USA. Whitehead, Judy. 2003. "Space, Place and Primitive Accumulation in Narmada Valley and Beyond." Economic and Political Weekly October 4: 4224-4230. Williams, Randall 2010. The divided world: Human rights and its violence. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press. Zibechi, Raul and Ryan, Ramon 2012. Territories in resistance: Cartography of Latin American social movements. Oakland, CA: AK Press. Zibechi, Raul. 2005. "Subterranean Echos: Resistance and Politics 'desde el Sotano'." Socialism and Democracy 19(3): 13-39.

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Table 1: Lok Adhikar Manch (LAM)

Movement participant (year established) 1.Kalinga Matchyajivi Sangathana (Kalinga fisher peoples organization) (early 1980s) Location / operational area Gopalpur-on-sea (center) including coastal Orissa, from Gopalpur in Ganjam district to Chandrabhaga and Astaranga coast in Puri district Social groups engaged Fisher people (mainly Dalits) originally from the state of Andhra Pradesh called Nolias and Orissa state fisher people or Keuta/Kaivartas Key issues being addressed Trawler fishing, fish stock depletion and enforcement of coastal regulations/zones (Trans/national Corporate--TNC-investments) Occupation of coastal land by defense installations (e.g., missile bases) Hotel/tourism industry developments along coast (TNC investment) Special economic zones (SEZ) and major port projects for mining exports (TNC investment) Pollution of beaches and oceans Displacement of fisher communities related to such developments Bauxite mining (alumina) (TNC investments) Industrialization, deforestation and land alienation/ displacement Peoples rights over their own ways and systems Government/local corruption Police brutality/atrocities Deforestation and plantation agriculture (NC investment)

2. Prakritik Sampad Suraksha Parishad (PSSP) (late 1980s)

Kashipur, Lakhimpur, Dasmantpur and adjacent blocks in Rayagada district of Orissa Approximately 200 movement villages

Adivasis including Jhodias, Kondhs and Parajas and Pano/Domb Dalits

Saura and Kondh Adivasis and Panos (Dalits)

3. Jana Suraksha Manch (2007)

Adava region of Mohana block, Gajapati district including sixty or more villages

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4. Adivasi Dalit Adhikar Sangathan (2000)

5. Adivasi-Dalit Ekta Abhiyan (2000)

Jaleswar, Bhograi and Bosta blocks in Balasore district and Boisinga and Rasagovindpur blocks in Mayurbhanj including over 100 villages Twenty panchayats in Gajapati and Kandhmal districts including 200 plus villages (population of about 50,000)

Dalits, Adivasis, fisher people and Other Backward Castes (OBCs)

Kondh and Saura Adivasis, Panos (Dalits) and OBCs

6. Indravati Vistapita Lokmanch (late 1990s)

Thirty villages in the district of Nabarangapur

Several Adivasi, Dalit and OBC communities

7. Orissa Adivasi Manch (1993 to 1994)

State level forum with an all-Orissa presence (all districts) with regional units in Keonjhar and Rayagada districts and district level units in each district

Well over forty different Adivasi communities

Dalit and Adivasi land rights and land alienation Industrialization, port development and displacement of traditional fisher people (TNC investment) Land and forest rights Food Sovereignty/plantatio n agriculture (NC investment) Industrialization, modernization and protection of indigenous ways and systems Communal harmony Development of peoples coalitions/forums (no state, NGO, corporate, outsider, upper/middle castes participants) Dam displacement (Indravati irrigation and hydro-electric project) (NC investment) Land and forest rights Resettlement, rehabilitation and compensation for development displaced peoples (DDPs) Industrialization and modern development and protection of peoples ways Adivasi rights in the state Tribal self rule, forest and land rights and industrialization (SEZs) (TNC investments)

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8.Anchalik Janasuraksha Sangathan (2008)

Kidting, Mohana block of Gajapati district including some twenty villages

Kondh and Saura Adivasis and Panos (Dalits)

Land and forest rights Conflict resolution and communal harmony between Adivasis and Dalits over land and forest issues Land and forest rights Food sovereignty and livelihood issues Communal harmony Displacement due to the upper Kolab hydro-electricity and irrigation reservoir (NC investment) Compensation, rehabilitation and basic amenities for DDPs Land and forest rights Land and forest rights/issues Communal harmony Food sovereignty and livelihood issues

9. Dalit Adivasi Bahujana Initiatives (DABI) (2000) 10. Uppara Kolab Basachyuta Mahasangh (late 1990s)

Five blocks in the Kandhmal district with ten participating local movements (networks) Umerkote block, Koraput district (includes a thirty village population base displaced by the upper Kolab hydroelectric and irrigation reservoir) Three panchayats in the border areas of Kandhmal and Gajapati districts including fifty or more villages with a population of 12,000 people Kalinga Nagar industrial belt in Jajpur district (twenty-five or more villages, along with several participants in the Kalinganagar township area)

Kondh Adivasis, Panos (Dalits) and OBCs

Paraja Adivasis, Panos and Malis Dalits and OBCs

11. Jeevan Jivika Suraksha Sangathan (2006)

Kondhs and Saura Adivasis and Panos (Dalits) and OBCs

12. Adivasi Pachua Dalit Adhikar Manch (APDAM) (2000)

Adivasis, Dalits and OBCs

13. Janajati Yuva Sangathan (2008)

Baliapal and Chandanesar block in Balasore district including thirtytwo coastal villages being affected by mega port development (part of SEZ scheme).

Dalit fisher communities and OBCs.

Industrialization and displacement (TNC investment) Land and forest rights Compensation and rehabilitation Police atrocities/brutality Protection of AdivasiDalit ways and forestbased cultures and community SEZs (TNC investments) Industrialization and displacement Land alienation and marine rights of traditional fisher communities

Source: Kapoor (2011a), p.132-134

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Note: In addition to the above LAM movements, leaders from 2 other movements were also included in the research, both of which have expressed an interest in joining LAM. These include: (i) The Niyamgiri Bachao Andolan (NBA), a Dongria and Kutia Kondh (Adivasi) movement against Vedanta/Sterlite (UK) bauxite mine/refinery in Lanjigarh, and the (ii) antiPOSCO (South Korea/Wall Street owned) movement, Santal Adivasi wing from the Khandadhar region and the parent POSCO Pratirodh Manch which includes several wings including small and medium farmers (e.g. Betel leaf farmers), Adivasi, Dalits and fisherfolk affected (or potentially affected) at the plant site or due to port development (Jatadhar river basin area; this includes the Paradip Port Trust which would have to handle iron ore exports) and water-affected areas/groups in Cuttack district as water for irrigation and drinking in these areas is channeled through a proposed canal (going through 5 districts) to the POSCO plant. About the author Dip Kapoor is Associate Professor in Education at the University of Alberta, Canada and Research Associate, Centre for Research and Development Solidarity (CRDS), an Adivasi/Dalit organization in South Orissa, India. Recent edited collections from Palgrave Macmillan (London and New York) include: Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production (with Aziz Choudry, 2013/paperback); Globalization, Culture and Education in South Asia: Critical Excursions (with Bijoy Barua and Al-Karim Datoo, 2012); and Indigenous Knowledge and Learning in the AsiaPacific and Africa (with Edward Shizha, 2010). He can be contacted at dkapoor AT ualberta.ca

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Fair Trade, neocolonial developmentalism, and racialized power relations

Ian Hussey and Joe Curnow Abstract The developmentalist gaze of the Fair Trade movement is on Global South producers. In this article we turn our analytic gaze toward North American fair traders to explore the racialized, neocolonial power relations in which these movement actors are implicated. Firstly, we offer a brief historical sketch of Fair Trade certification. We argue that the certification system is a multisited, global institution that is shaped by and which shapes neocolonial power relations in Fair Trade by exploring the consolidation and more recent splintering of the international certification system. Secondly, we provide a postcolonial critique of developmentalism, with a focus on the timing of development, in order to lay a foundation for the remaining sections. Thirdly, we analyze the spatiality of Fair Trade, with an emphasis on what and who are missing from or erased by the structural and conceptual frameworks of Fair Trade. Fourthly, we explore the relationship between Fair Trade, commodity fetishism, and the developmentalist conception of space/time propagated by Fair Trade advocates. we conclude with a critical analysis of the neocolonialist and racist discourse of Fair Trade, with a focus on the helping discourse. We contend that as Global North fair traders strive to help Global South producers, they re-entrench neocolonial narratives of white supremacy and the desire to develop. Introduction Fair Trade marketing and advocacy rely on the idea that Fair Trade increases connectedness between Global South producers and Global North consumers.1 While Fair Trade does reduce the number of intermediaries in the supply chain for most certified commodities as compared to their counterparts in the conventional system (Raynolds 2000 and 2002; Nicholls and Opal 2005; Lyon 2006; Adams and Raisborough 2008), it also serves to reinforce racist distinctions between the poor Global South farmer or artisan and the
Throughout this article, we use the terminology of Global North/South. We realize that this dichotomy is not without its problems, and indeed, is indicative of the limitations of current global sociological discourse. This is as much a self-criticism as it is a criticism of others that is meant to point to the limitations of our current discourse that we try to grapple with throughout the article. The idea of Global North/South may be able to help us understand how particular people in particular places become poor and are kept poor, if it focuses attention, for example, on financial flows, power relations in the creation of international intellectual property regimes, trade and investment agreements, or relations between states and transnational corporations, but it can also easily lead to generalizations, the erasure of difference, and the flattening of history.
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benevolent Global North consumer (Dolan 2005; Lyon 2006). Fair Trade may channel more income into a select number of Global South communities (Jaffee 2007), but it fails to interrupt, and indeed, further entrenches the neocolonial and capitalist structures that produce and maintain producers impoverishment on an ongoing basis. Social scientists began to study Fair Trade more intensely in the late 1990s. Much of the early work is uncritical of the claims Fair Trade advocates make, but more critical analyses have been produced in the last decade, including many case studies on producer cooperatives and on consumerism. Although there is a burgeoning body of social science literature on the increasing corporatization or mainstreaming of Fair Trade (Low and Davenport 2006; Fridell 2007a and 2009; Davies 2007; Fridell et al. 2008; Reed 2009; Hudson and Hudson 2009; Raynolds 2009; Jaffee 2007, 2010 and 2011), there is a paucity of critical work on the role of Global North advocacy NGOs in the Fair Trade movement. Recent significant contributions have interrogated the corporate response to Fair Trade in the coffee industry (Fridell et al. 2008), scrutinized the use of different business models by Northern traders who sell certified commodities (Reed et al. 2010), and argued that the value of Fair Trade is produced through affective labour on the part of activists (Wilson and Curnow 2012). Our work contributes to this growing body of critical social scientific knowledge on the organization and operation of Fair Trade in the Global North. We turn our analytic gaze toward Global North actors to interrogate the material and discursive relations that make up the Fair Trade movement, examining specifically the role of North American middle-class advocates and consumers in challenging and reproducing neocolonial and racist ideas and relations. The end of formal colonialism is the condition of possibility for the invention of the neocolonial international development industry. Fair Trade is a global social movement rooted in the neocolonial development project that began in the latter half of the 1940s with SELFHELP Crafts (now Ten Thousand Villages) in the United States (US) and Oxfam in the United Kingdom. Following postcolonial theorist Robert Young (2001, 45), we use the concept of neocolonialism in this article to denot[e] a continuing economic hegemony that means that the postcolonial state remains in a situation of dependence on its former masters, and that the former masters continue to act in a colonialist manner towards formerly colonized states. International development in general and Fair Trade specifically are neocolonial projects that involve state, non-governmental organization (NGO), and business actors working with complicit consumers. We use the term postcolonial in this article to refer to postcolonial studies and thought, a critical field of knowledge that first emerged out of literary studies (Kapoor 2008), specifically Edward Saids Orientalism (1978/2004), and which has grown in influence in the humanities and social sciences throughout the last thirty-five years. Postcolonial theory is critical of Western liberal modernity and places emphasis on critical politics and critical historical-global analysis. The
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politics of postcolonial thought are predicated on the subaltern subversion of Eurocentric and Orientalist discourses. Postcolonial studies are inclined toward poststructuralist cultural theory that links imperialism and agency to discourse and the politics of representation (Kapoor 2008, 3). Some postcolonial thought (e.g. Spivak 1988) brings together Marxism, feminism, deconstructivism, and critical theories of hegemony and of colonialism to show how these theories bring each other to crisis. Postcolonial theory enables us to scrutinize the colonialist and racist discourses of Fair Trade. Fair Trade is a politico-economic phenomenon, so we also find occasion to draw on Marxist dialectics and Marxs concept of commodity fetishism. This theoretical framework enables us to interrogate various aspects of Fair Trade and show the dialectical relationship between the discursive and the material. To date there is a lack of postcolonial commentary on Fair Trade. In a recent essay on coffee and commodity fetishism, Gavin Fridell (2011) claims to do a postcolonial analysis of Fair Trade but falls short, through his lack of engagement with postcolonial thought and his uncritical use of the Eurocentric development-underdevelopment binary. Our argument, by contrast, draws on postcolonial thought to critique this dichotomy, especially the temporal assumptions built into it. We contend that as fair traders strive to help Global South producers, they re-entrench neocolonial narratives of white supremacy and the desire to develop, both of which are rooted in bourgeois subjectivity. Our argument is informed by ethnographic research and is shaped by our direct participation in the Fair Trade movement. Our engagement in Fair Trade includes our experience as National Coordinators of the Canadian Student Fair Trade Network (Hussey 2004-2008) and of the US-based United Students for Fair Trade (USFT, Curnow 2004-2008). The four years since our engagement puts us in the position of offering perspectives on the history and current state of Fair Trade in general, as well as the politics and problems of the Fair Trade movement in North America specifically. We also review the marketing materials, mission statements, and other texts produced by North American Fair Trade businesses and advocacy organizations. Throughout this analysis we pay close attention to the representation of farmers, Global South cooperative communities, and North American activists and consumers. We discuss the ways that these identities are dialectically related and draw on critiques of the helping imperative (Heron 2007) to locate the historic role of North American, (largely) white, middle-class activists within the Fair Trade movement. A final note: where appropriate, we implicate ourselves in our analysis by using we/our and they/their to indicate our relative positions of dominance as white North Americans. This is not intended to universalize the experiences of all Northern fair traders, but is used to note the historical-geographical-material relations that shape our standpoint as authors. Our intention throughout the article is not to suggest that people involved in Fair Trade are intentionally racist or have bad intentions or that shopping for non-labeled products would be a better way of engaging in the world. Our critique is not about individual
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actors, or businesses, or even certification schemes. Rather, we are trying to draw attention to the ways that historical-geographical-material conditions shape our ongoing relationships and cultural contexts. That is, as North American consumers and activists, our opportunities to engage in international poverty alleviation strategies and political consumerism are shaped and limited historically, geographically, and materially. Our actions are not only about our individual intentions. We are products of a colonial past and present that shapes how and why we engage be it through the development of standards and institutions or in our individual purchasing decisions. We believe that the better we understand the ways the Fair Trade system and movement are shaped by and reproduce racialized, neocolonial power relations, the better able we can become to acknowledge and address them, so that we can strive toward anticolonial relationships rooted in solidarity rather than help, charity, or developmentalism. In the next section we provide a brief history of the international Fair Trade certification system as a central component of the movements institutionalization process. The Fairtrade International (FTI) certification scheme is a global system of social relations through which certification practices organize the production, trade, and procurement of commodities that are designated as meeting the social and environmental criteria laid out in the Fair Trade certification standards. We argue that the organization of FTIs decision-making and governance structures are shaped by and shape neocolonial power relations in Fair Trade by exploring the consolidation and more recent fracturing of the certification system. In Section Two we outline a postcolonial critique of developmentalism, with a focus on the timing of development, in order to lay a foundation for our critiques of Fair Trade to come in the next three sections. In Section Three we analyze the spatiality of Fair Trade, with an emphasis on what and who are missing from or erased by the structural and conceptual frameworks of Fair Trade. In Section Four we add to the growing body of work on Fair Trade and commodity fetishism by bringing together this Marxist concept with postcolonial critiques of the timing of development. Section Five rounds out our critique of Fair Trade by scrutinizing its neocolonial, racist discourse, with a focus on the helping imperative. 1. Fair Trade certification and neocolonialism The Fair Trade movement originated as a hodgepodge of diverse interests, including anti-imperialist struggles, neocolonial developmentalist work, a variety of grassroots alternative economic activities, and more. Given this history, it is not surprising that fair traders from producers to traders to certifiers to advocates do not share a common set of values, and, indeed, these categories of Fair Trade actors are neither homogeneous nor unchanging. In the late 1980s, the diverse initiatives grouped under the banner of alternative trade began to institutionalize into the Fair Trade movement we know today. This section focuses on one of the major aspects of this institutionalization process: the invention and history of non-statist Fair Trade certification starting
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in 1988 with Netherlands-based Max Havelaar to the creation of a consolidated international certification system with the establishment of FTI in 1997 to the fracturing of FTI with Fair Trade USA (FTUSA) leaving the system in 2011. After World War II, Fair Trade was promoted as a statist regulatory model by some United Nations member-states, but in the last twenty-five years Fair Trade has operated as a non-statist, neoliberal system regulated by non-governmental agencies that create and monitor Fair Trade certification standards (Fridell 2004 and 2006). Fair Trade standards coordinate the work of producers, traders, and consumers by requiring that: (1) producer groups meet criteria for governance, democratic participation, labour standards, and sustainable farming; (2) Global North businesses pay a minimum price to producer groups for their products, sign long-term contracts with the producer groups they are buying from, and, if asked, provide up to sixty percent of the value of the contract in advance; and (3) the certification mark be used in particular ways on product packages and promotional materials to communicate to consumers that the product is Fair Trade Certified. Fair Trade certification initially focused on coffee, but the system has gradually expanded to include many additional products, ranging from agricultural products (coffee, tea, sugar, and fruit (bananas, oranges, grapes, and avocados)), grains (rice and quinoa), nuts, oils, herbs and spices, flowers, cotton, wine, and chocolate, to other products including gold and sports balls. Until recently there were almost no empirical studies on the socio-economic benefits - or lack thereof - of Fair Trade for producers. The recent impact studies (Ronchi 2002; Hudson and Hudson 2002 and 2003; Bacon 2005; UttingChamorro 2005; Jaffee 2007; Ruben 2008; Bacon et al. 2008; Lewis and Runsten 2008; Wilson 2010) generally agree that Fair Trade results in the following benefits for participating producers: higher household incomes and lower rates of indebtedness, greater food security, improved housing, higher rates of educational attainment, and greater use of environmentally sound agricultural practices (Jaffee 2011, 90). These studies and others have shown that Fair Trade certification can have significant positive impacts on producer and artisan communities. The institutionalization of non-statist Fair Trade certification has dramatically shaped the face of Fair Trade. Between 1988 and 1997, fourteen labelling initiatives (LIs) were established in three certification systems (Max Havelaar, TransFair, and the Fairtrade Foundation), predominantly across Europe and North America, to manage the certification of Fair Trade products. In 1997 these LIs and the larger certification systems they were a part of consolidated into FTI, whose central office is located in Bonn, Germany (FTI 2004). On 15 September 2003, in order to comply with ISO 65 (the worldwide quality standard for certification organisations (FTI 2004, 4)), FTI established FLOCert, a separate, independent certification company owned by FTI, which inspects producers and traders to verify their compliance with the newly consolidated international certification standards. In the consolidated international system, the national LIs license companies in their jurisdiction to
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sell certified products and to ensure they are maintaining the standards for those products. There are now nineteen LIs and three marketing organizations covering twenty-seven countries in Europe, North America, Japan, Australia, New Zealand, and South Africa. The FTI regulatory system spans the globe, but its centre of governance is in Europe. The system builds off the historicalgeographical-material infrastructure of colonial intervention and is itself part of the larger neocolonial international development industry. Decision-making and governance of FTI point to this legacy. Only in September 2003, about six years after the establishment of FTI, did FTI become a multistakeholder organization that includes producer representation on the board of directors (four of twelve seats) through three Producer Networks (PNs) representing producer organizations in Latin America and the Caribbean, Africa, and Asia.2 Producers gained four seats on FTIs board of directors in 2003 because FTI changed its governance structure to comply with ISO 65 (Renard 2005; Tallontire 2009), not because the FTI certification bureaucrats suddenly had an epiphany about producer participation in a certification system that was supposedly set up to benefit them. The disparity in power in FTI between the LIs, traders, and producers came to a head in 2007 when producers organized themselves and fought for the right to be considered members of FTI. Until 2007, FTIs member-organizations were all LIs, but producers won the right to be considered members of FTI after much outcry in the movement. In mid-October 2011, FTI announced that producers now hold twelve of the twenty-four votes in the organizations General Assembly (GA), which functions like an annual general meeting, a significant increase from their previous total of three votes. FTI likes to claim that producers now own half of FTI because the PNs have half of the votes in the GA. The PNs do not actually own half of FTI: winning the right to formal political representation in a (now) multistakeholder organization does not equate to winning half-ownership of the organization. Although they have taken more formal political power for themselves within FTI, producers still do not have enough say when it comes to determining certification policies and the structure and direction of the Fair Trade movement (VanderHoff Boersma 2002; Lyon 2006).3 Lyon (2006, 452) sees the low level of producer participation and the reinforcement of differences between producers and consumers in marketing and advocacy materials as negative trends in Fair Trade. They are not trends that somehow just innocently happened in a power-vacuum. They are products
The PNs now have four of fourteen seats on the board. The PNs did not exist in 2003 in the form they do now - that organizational development occurred in the 2-4 years following producers gaining access to the board.
2

A small producer label has been developed over the last six years by small producers in Latin America and the Caribbean in response to the increasing corporatization of Fair Trade, the increasing use of plantation production, and the persistent reality that small producers do not have enough say in the FTI system. See http://www.spp.coop/ for more details (accessed 23.8.2012). It is beyond the scope of this article to comment on this initiative in detail, but this is clearly an important topic for future research.
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of the history of Fair Trade and its material and discursive composition. The institutionalization process structured participation in ways that secured positions of dominance for so-called consumer organizations, who would as a result make decisions in the interest of their stakeholders and institutionalize policies that promoted their vision of development and progress while benefitting their members or constituents. The consumer organizations have made decisions about how to frame Fair Trade for their audiences, which we explore more in later sections, including racist tropes and denying the coevalness of producers in product advertisements and campaign materials. Low participation on the part of producer organizations results from being systematically kept from decision-making and continually represented as inferior, yet producer organizations continue to fight to be seen as equal partners in Fair Trade both materially and symbolically. One ongoing struggle in the certification system relates to the involvement of transnational corporations (TNCs) and plantation production in Fair Trade. The participation of TNCs in Fair Trade since 2000 has ushered in major qualitative changes in which producers are involved in Fair Trade and how their work and lives are organized. The most significant proposed change in the TNCera of Fair Trade is the move by FTI under strong pressure by TNCs and by FTUSA to consider allowing coffee produced on plantations to be certified. FTI has yet to allow plantation production for coffee because of a successful lobby by the Coordinadora Latinoamericana y del Caribe de Pequeos Productores de Comercio Justo (CLAC), the organization that represents Latin American and Caribbean Fair Trade producers in political fora.4 The CLACs political organizing has maintained the current policy of FTI and its members that only small-scale coffee farmers organized into cooperatives or member-driven associations can have their beans certified. Despite this significant decision made to benefit small producers, FTI has made other decisions to cater to TNCs. For instance, the development and maintenance of long-term relationships between traders and producers and the arrangement of pre-harvest credit are no longer honoured consistently as a result of the increasing corporatization of Fair Trade (Jaffee 2011). Indeed, many producers in the Fair Trade coffee sector are living in a cycle of indebtedness (Hudson and Hudson 2009; Wilson 2010). Despite the increased involvement of TNCs in Fair Trade over the last decade and despite the bending of certain Fair Trade standards for TNCs, many of the producers who have access to the Fair Trade market are not able to sell all of their produce through it (Hudson and Hudson 2003 and 2009; Wright 2004; Fridell 2007b). Furthermore, having access to the Fair Trade market for coffee means less than it did twenty-five years ago: the Fair Trade minimum price for coffee only had one indirect price increase from 1988 to 2007, and Christopher Bacon (2010) has shown that, when inflation is taken into account, the Fair Trade floor price for coffee lost forty-one percent of its real value from 1988 to 2008.
The CLAC has two votes on the FTI board, whereas the other two PNs only have one each, although this will change soon.
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FTI does not allow plantation production for some other agricultural commodities, like cacao and sugar, but it does certify products from banana, tea, wine, and flower plantations.5 The introduction of plantation production in the certification system has been contested from the start. It makes it harder for advocates to claim that Fair Trade is an alternative economic system. The battle over the organization of coffee production in the certification system should be viewed in this historical trajectory. FTUSA favours certifying plantation production for coffee, and perhaps cacao and sugar, so they split from FTI on 31 December 2011 (Hussey 2012a). FTUSA made this major decision without consulting the PNs (Sheridan 2011). In a deliciously ironic interview in May 2012, Paul Rice, the Chief Executive Officer of FTUSA, asks: Dont we want to democratize fair trade? Dont we want fair trade to be more than a white, middle-class movement? (Quoted in Sherman 2012). It seems doubtful that a more democratic Fair Trade movement can arise from the unilateral, undemocratic decision of one national LI, particularly when it directly contradicts the stated priorities of the PNs. FTIs political structure, while far from perfect, does not allow for such unilateral decision-making. Decisions on Fair Trade standards have to pass through the organizations standards committee. If the issue were significant enough, like whether to start including plantation production for coffee, then it would also need to be discussed and voted on by the General Assembly. The unilateral move by FTUSA led Jonathan Rosenthal, a co-founder of Equal Exchange, a pioneering, US-based Fair Trade cooperative, to make this comment about FTUSAs new Fair Trade for All initiative.
[I]f you choose to look at who is making this decision to radically change the imperfect tool called fair trade, you might admit that it is nearly totally driven by well intentioned white folks in the US with lots of money and big dreams. The original idea of supporting the political and economic development process of organized small farmers has been tossed aside. The voice of those farmers and their organizations has been overridden in pursuit of this bigger dream. Change comes in many forms. To me, this feels like a move right out of the colonial playbookwe know best what is good for poor people. Perhaps this arrogance was an inevitable outgrowth of the success of fair trade, as we dont have a very evolved macroeconomic strategy. Still, to drive forward over the objections of so many of the farmer and activist organizations that have built fair trade is a sad and hurtful act. (Rosenthal 2012)

Rosenthal and other similarly-situated fair traders have contested the shifting and splintering vision(s) of Fair Trade over the last twenty-five years. What
See FTIs webpages on specific products, on hired labour, and on standards for small producers for further details. See Hudson and Hudson (2009) for an analysis of the different ways production is organized for various commodities in the FTI system.
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began for these fair traders as a leftist solidarity movement tied to revolutionary action in the Global South has been reduced to a neocolonial developmentalist initiative centred on the institutionalization and mainstreaming of certification. Fair Trade, within the current certification schemes, has become a wolf in sheeps clothing, providing political and marketing cover for companies to present themselves as sustainable and fair while continuing to act in a neocolonial fashion toward producers and extract value from them. The socalled development strategy has become a neoliberal imposition of free-market ideology that further entrenches Southern communities in unequal power relations. Very little is alternative about Fair Trade, and the recent schism in FTI seems to more deeply implicate Fair Trade in neocolonial power relations.6 In order to further examine how the material and discursive relations of Fair Trade are shaped by and shape neocolonialism, we now turn to a postcolonial critique of developmentalism, with a focus on the timing of development, to lay a foundation for our analysis of the spatiality of Fair Trade, our theorization of the complex relationship between Fair Trade, commodity fetishism and the developmentalist conception of space/time propagated by fair traders, and our critique of the helping discourse in Fair Trade. 2. A postcolonial critique of developmentalism In critical development studies, a sub-field of postcolonial studies, development as a project, and indeed an industry, is understood as having been invented after World War II, as many colonial projects were formally coming to an end (see Ferguson 1994/2007; McMichael 2000; Kothari 2005; Escobar 1995 and 1999). The Eurocentric ideologies of development and of modernization still coordinate much of the work done by national and multilateral nongovernmental agencies. The major theme we investigate in this section is the timing of development and of modernity, an area of debate that goes to the heart of developmentalist and of modernizationist theories, development practice, and critical development studies. Postcolonial theorists and critical development scholars have argued that developmentalism and modernizationism are Eurocentric, teleological notions of history which view the western European nation-state and the modern individuated subject as universal models for everyone to emulate (Chakrabarty 2000/2008; Cooper 2005). Anthropologist Johannes Fabian (1983/2002, 17) asserts that terms like development, modernization, civilization, and
The future of Fair Trade certification within the US, both FTUSA and FTIUSA, is still somewhat unclear. A recent update from FTI (FTI 2012) is scant on details for the business plan being developed for the FTI system within the US. One concrete update is that FLO-Cert certified producer groups and exporters are able to sell to businesses registered with FTUSA, but the opposite is not true for producers and exporters working within the FTUSA system (the FTI seal cannot be placed on these products). Some US-based businesses have elected to continue to have their products certified by the FTI system and others have defected to the new FTUSA system. Past efforts of FTUSA suggest that they will allow plantations owned locally or by TNCs as long as they comply with FTUSAs new standards.
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Third World derive their conceptual content from evolutionary Time. These sorts of concepts involve a temporal distancing that Fabian famously came to refer to as a denial of coevalness, which he understands as a persistent and systematic tendency to place the referent(s) of anthropology in a Time other than the present of the producer of anthropological discourse (1983/2002, 31). Coevalness is thus an epistemological problem, and the developeddeveloping binary is an example of a denial of coevalness. Historian Dipesh Chakrabarty (2000/2008, 8) adds that a denial of coevalness like development is also historicist as it repeats the first in Europe and then elsewhere structure of time. The notion of development says not yet to non-Europeans and relegates them to an imaginary waiting room of history (ibid). This imaginary waiting room is an imperialist illusion. In Eurocentric capitalist transition narratives, the so-called Third World is understood as lacking, incomplete, and, perhaps, a failure, though not one beyond reform (Chakrabarty 2000/2008). Fair Trade, as a developmentalist project, is part of such reforms. In fact, in a paradoxical fashion, Fair Trade is understood by many fair traders as a reform movement meant to create certain changes in the world, yet there is also a romantic view held by some fair traders who think Fair Trade is pristinely preserving or returning to what Eurocentric neoclassical economists and many Marxists would call pre-capitalist, pre-modern or backward production. So, paradoxically, some movement actors see Fair Trade as being about reform and preserving certain socio-cultural relations. It is true that Fair Trade enables the continued maintenance of some family farms and thus reduces the number of people who have to sell or lose their farms and migrate looking for waged work; however, in many areas of the world, the smallholder production that now exists in Fair Trade is a result of historical struggles that led to land reforms. The romantic view flattens history and effaces the events that led to these reforms for example, the Sandinista Revolution in Nicaragua. As we shall see in Sections Four and Five, this is not the only paradox related to space/time and Fair Trade. To further lay the groundwork for those sections, we turn to an interrogation of the spatiality of Fair Trade, focusing on who and what is missing from the conceptual and structural frameworks of Fair Trade. 3. The spatiality of Fair Trade The distribution of power in the Fair Trade system is remarkably similar to imperial divisions of the globe. Fair Trade commodities are produced in various former colonies and sold predominantly in niche and mainstream markets in Europe, North America, Japan, Australia and New Zealand. The movement by and large does not include production from Indigenous communities located in white settler colonies like Canada, the US, Australia, and New Zealand, nor nonIndigenous producers in places like Canada and the US who often exploit

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migrant workers with little heed to basic labour rights.7 The dichotomies used to describe the consumer-producer dialectic Global North/South, developed/developing gloss over much of the complexity of the relationship between imperial powers and colonized people(s) and territories (indeed, the political and economic elite of some former colonies have become imperialists themselves). These understandings of the world are not neutral, nor are they simply natural. They erase the existence and histories of various Indigenous Peoples who were and remain colonized in white settler countries. Another example of such a process of homogenization lies in the practice of naming coffees from different areas of the globe using the name of the nationstate where the beans were farmed. This practice of naming does not question imperialist histories and nor acknowledges particular local histories and peoples. For example, a bag of coffee may be labelled Mexican, even though its producers may be Indigenous Peoples. Various Indigenous Peoples are subsumed under the banner of the nation-state. The sovereign power of the nation-state, not the Indigenous Peoples, reigns supreme.8 In the Global North, the Fair Trade movement works to change the purchasing practices of individual and institutional consumers through marketing and advocacy that attempts to shift consumer consciousness (Goodman 2004 and 2010; Bryant and Goodman 2004; Barnett et al. 2005; Guthman 2007). That is to say, the conscious consumer is in part a product of marketing. This marketed consumer consciousness, which romanticizes the lives of producers and the effect Fair Trade has in their communities (Varul 2008; Adams and Raisborough 2010), fuels demand for Fair Trade and is coordinated by discourses of ethics, justice, international development and sustainability. Businesses that sell Fair Trade products do so by commodifying social justice (Fridell 2007b), morality (Fisher 2007; MCloskey 2010) and consciousness in order to market them through images and discourses that render producers lives and landscapes knowable and authentic to middle-class consumers (Wright 2004). Fair Trade coffee roasters across Canada and the US use slogans such as coffee with a conscience, brewing justice, common ground, level ground, and higher ground in trying to sell their products as ones that are making a difference and helping to end poverty one purchase at a time. As Michael Goodman (2004, 896) quips: Robin Hood comes to town, latte in hand. Fair Trade products are personified, often touted in advertisements, packaging, and campaigns as having a conscience and the capacity to speak to consumers. Fair Trade advertising appeals to and tries to produce a specific type of
For a troubling example that complicates this point, see MCloskey (2010) for an analysis of how Novica, a fair trade artisan organization, supports the reproduction of historic Navajo designs by Zapotec weavers located in Oaxaca, Mexico (259).
7

For a different but related example, see Fridell (2011) for an analysis of the 2005-2007 battle Ethiopian coffee farmers organizations won with global civil society support against Starbucks over the trademarking of Sidamo, Oromia, Harar and Yirgacheffe coffee beans.
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conscious consumer who is called upon to vote with their money (Waridel 2002) and realize their imagined heightened connection to producers. One possible effect of this shift in consciousness is that some consumers of Fair Trade products may feel a sense of distinction vis--vis unconscious consumers (Wright 2004; Adams and Raisborough 2008; Cole 2008). The composition of the affective relationship between the Global North middleclass and poor people pivots on proximity. The politics of proximity, according to Adams and Raisborough (2008, 1177), is a spatial process of class distinction that involves a double dialectic. There is a dialectical relationship between the Global North middle-class and the local working class who are understood in the context of Global North de-industrialization and the rise of consumer society as being undeserving poor. There is a related dialectical relationship between the Global North, middle-class, conscious consumer and distant poor people who are understood as deserving in and through Fair Trade marketing and advocacy campaigns (ibid, 1174-1175) that commodify the colonial difference (Wright 2004; Goodman 2004; Lyon 2006). This points to Fair Trades involvement in commodity fetishism, which we analyze in the next section before scrutinizing the helping discourse in Fair Trade in Section Five. 4. Commodity fetishism, developmentalist space/time, and producer-consumer relations Several articles address the relationship between Fair Trade and commodity fetishism. Commodity fetishism is a Marxist term to describe the process endemic to capitalism in which the social relations involved in the production and distribution of commodities appear as relations among things money and various other commodities and through which commodities appear as abstract, independent products on store shelves and on the websites of eretailers seemingly with their own intrinsic economic value and with no apparent connection to the people and work processes that produced them (see Marx 1867/1990). Fair Trade, for Fridell (2007b), symbolically challenges commodity fetishism, but this challenge is limited by Fair Trades market-driven structure and by the structural imperatives of the global capitalist market. Commodity fetishism is an effect of the organization of the relations of production (Hudson and Hudson 2003), so disrupting commodity fetishism requires changing the organization of productive relations in the Global South and in the Global North into democratically run and regulated processes in which both producers and consumers are involved and are accountable for the decisions they make (Fridell 2007b, 93). Fair Trade falls short of disrupting commodity fetishism because it does not deal with the productive relations in the Global North and because Fair Trade consumers remain alienated individuals who are disconnected from producers and who are unaccountable for their market decisions (Fridell 2007b, 101). Ian and Mark Hudson tease out a contradiction in the relationship between Fair Trade and commodity fetishism. For them, Fair Trade is an assault on
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commodity-fetishism because the movement does, to a certain extent, make it more difficult to maintain a system of collective blindness concerning the relations of production and their pathologies (Hudson and Hudson 2009, 250). However, as they point out, the FTI system also contributes to commodity fetishism by not only failing to accurately represent and make visible productive relations but by also putting extraordinarily different production processes, in some cases for the same commodity, under the same label. Yet, addressing the collective blindness of Global North consumers is not only about providing information about the people and productive processes behind a small portion of the commodities available in the market. It is also about what, whom, and how Global North consumers see when they look at a commodity, and how they understand the world and the various people in it. In this case that means the plethora of people, places, and processes involved in Fair Trade production what and whom do hegemonic ears and eyes perceive? Taken together, the studies on Fair Trade and commodity fetishism show that Fair Trade contributes to commodity fetishism in complex and uneven ways. While Fair Trade campaigns may partially defetishize certain products by making visible some of the unjust conditions of production in particular and partial ways (Hudson and Hudson 2003 and 2009; Fisher 2007; Fridell 2007b and 2011), many of these same campaigns also fetishize products and their producers by imbuing them with a reified exotic character (Wright 2004; Lyon 2006; Adams and Raisborough 2008). Many Fair Trade promotional materials rely on a perception of producers as primitive people from exotic, far-off lands. This understanding of producers is constructed and supported by the neocolonial international development industry. The developed-developing dichotomy is predicated on the dubious idea that industrialization equals progress and development. In the developed-developing denial of coevalness, those who are said to be developing are thought of as existing in a time previous to those who are considered developed, a simpler time that the developed world grew out of long ago. Developing people and places need to reform, to improve themselves and to emulate developed people and places, whose responsibility it is to help them reform, improve and emulate, or so the developmentalist story goes (Escobar 1995). This model assumes everyone in the world is working toward the same end, which the superior developed world has already reached, and that everyone understands development as the same thing. Development, like other Eurocentric notions, such as pre-capitalist and pre-modern, is claimed to be a universal concept, but it is not. Eurocentrism distorts representations of the past, present, and projected future in particular ways through conceptual practices of power (Amin 1989; Dussel 1998; Quijano 2000). A central narrative of Fair Trade marketing and advocacy is that Fair Trade brings consumers and producers closer together. Logos abound in Fair Trade materials that show producers and consumers reaching across time and space to shake hands through the exchange of Fair Trade products (see the appendix for the USFT logo from 2003, the Fair Trade Los Angeles logo from 2012, and the Unidas Para Vivir Mejor (UPAVIM) logo from 2012). These images feature a
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phenotypically white person in Western clothing holding the hand of a nonwhite farmer or artisan, as with the African-idealized mother or the Latin American campesino. These images point to the developed-developing dichotomy and a central paradox of Fair Trade: Fair Trade claims to bring people who are understood to be from two orders of humanity closer together. Global North fair traders extend a hand to producers while simultaneously banishing them to a previous social order. Consumers and producers cannot be brought closer together when they are thought of as existing in different times and worlds. Reducing the number of intermediaries in the global commodity chain cannot close this distance, and simply coming up with new terms to describe the relationship will not do it either. Eurocentric moralistic narratives of progress and development are what tug on the hegemonic sensibility of conscious consumers. Colonial relations are not just material, but also relate to specific systems of knowledge and discourse (Escobar 1995). It is impossible to fully represent the actualities of producers in marketing and advocacy materials, but many Fair Trade marketing and advocacy campaigns romanticize the actualities of producers (Wright 2004; Varul 2008; Adams and Raisborough 2010). This romanticism is both a product of and reproduces colonial imaginaries and histories. Take, for example, the former certification mark of Fairtrade Canada and the current label used by FTI and its national LIs. The certification mark used by Fairtrade Canada until 2011 The certification mark used by FTI and its national LIs

The certification mark used by Fairtrade Canada until 2011 (FTUSA used an almost identical label until October 2011) portrays a half black, half white person whose black hand holds a white basket at the same height as their white hand which holds a black basket. This label looks like Lady Justice with her blindfold and balanced scales, and promotes the idea that Fair Trade is about justice and equality. Since Fair Trade producers are not generally seen as white, this label racializes consumers as white and producers as black, portraying the relationship between two categories of people consumers and producers, developed and developing, metropole and colony. The image suggests that North Atlantic imperialism is in the past, that Europe and its others are now fused as one. The FTI mark suggests a similar idea. FTI claims that the image represents a human figure with an outstretched arm (FTI n.d.), which could be a producer reaching toward a consumers hand, or vice versa, invoking the fantasy that Fair Trade involves a heightened connectedness between producers and consumers. The mark also looks like the yin-yang symbol, and suggests a dialectical relationship between two seemingly polar opposites, which, when
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viewed together, reveal their interconnectedness and interdependence. These images invoke the racialized, colonial tropes of difference and relationality that underpin much of the Fair Trade movements ideology, discourse, and marketing. The representations of producers and producer communities in Fair Trade marketing and advocacy materials are fraught with exoticized images and discourses of the primitive and the traditional. These images and discourses are engineered for Northern audiences to evoke particular feelings, like pity and the need to help, and to paint a particular picture of the realities of producers and their communities. These images rely on Orientalist ideas of what the Other is and should be. Paige Wests (2010, 701) critique describes one fair traders representations of Papua New Guinea and his claims that through Fair Trade he reached uncontacted tribes, bringing new levels of development to their primitive existences. While most representations within Fair Trade are not as overtly colonialist and racist, we find that the same sentiment underlies a significant amount of Fair Trade materials. It is common for growers and artisans to be asked to don their traditional costumes for pictures that enable businesses to market their difference and authenticity to Northern consumers so that they can know the producer and benevolently extend their wallet to help them. Some people within and outside of the Fair Trade movement may argue that its just practical that the need of businesses to move products and advocacy organizations to try to increase demand for Fair Trade and for both to appeal to the sensibilities of Global North consumers to be (financially) successful is the reason why many businesses and organizations propagate Eurocentric and racist ideas and discourses. That is, it is supposed that these businesses and organizations are not uncritically advancing these ideas and discourses, but doing so strategically in the context of a market-driven movement. Some movement actors argue that these representations are incidental, claiming that these images do, in fact, promote higher sales, and thus it is not the Fair Trade businessperson who is implicated, but the end consumer who drives this racialized, colonial production. We believe that these explanations misunderstand the complex relationship between colonialist cultural representations and capitalist markets that cater to those tastes. In reproducing those images, whether strategically, intentionally or not, North American fair traders commodify and further entrench colonialist and racist ideas. In attempting to address the role of Canadians and US Americans in Fair Trade as a neocolonial developmentalist movement, we now turn our attention to the rationale and underlying ideology that coordinates most white, middle-class North Americans in their participation in Fair Trade.

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5. Turning the gaze on Global North NGOs: Fair Trade and the helping imperative A relatively small number of actors are involved in creating and sustaining the movement (see Hussey 2012b; Wilson and Curnow 2012). For most people in North America the limit of their engagement in Fair Trade is as end consumers.9 Many of these consumers look for the label, as they have been trained to do by the certifiers and some advocacy organizations. The role of consumers has been discussed elsewhere at length (Wright 2004; Bryant and Goodman 2004; Goodman 2004 and 2010; Barnett et al. 2005; Lyon 2006; Varul 2008; Adams and Raisborough 2008 and 2010), so here we shift our attention to some of the reasons why people are engaged, either as consumers or as activists. We do not question that individual actors are making choices in good faith out of a genuine desire to alleviate poverty, but we do suggest that this desire is culturally produced out of an historical narrative through which peoples whiteness an d related superiority emerge from their relationship with the Other. Whiteness only makes sense as a relational concept, and Fair Trade and many other strategies are ultimately ways of distinguishing oneself. In trying to explore the ways that white-supremacy and neocolonialism are enacted within the Fair Trade market and movement, we have found Barbara Herons (2007) concept of the helping imperative useful. Heron interrogates the implicit and explicit motivations, subjectivities, and their historical antecedents that white Canadian women indicate when discussing their decisions to become development workers in Africa. She argues that involvement in development work enables people to know the distant Other, to benevolently and innocently work to establish themselves as moral, and to claim a sense of agency, all of which serve to reinforce their own racialized bourgeois subjectivity. Herons analysis maps nicely onto ideas of Fair Trade activism, as mostly white and middle-class people from North America and Europe shop and promote others shopping in order to satisfy an urge to help an unknown, homogenized Other, a colonialist idea with important and problematic assumptions embedded within it. First, there is the assumption that everything is so bad there all the time. This homogenizes the experiences of others and ascribes meaning to an unchanging, essentialized Other. In homogenizing massive areas of the world and the majority of the worlds population as a uniform whole that is uniformly poor and marginalized, we lose our ability to usefully engage in the historical-geographical-material specificity of the experiences of various communities and, in so doing, entrench our likelihood of pathologizing poverty on the unknown and unspecified Other. Such homogenization in no way develops an understanding of the systemic ways that the poverty of particular
The North American Fair Trade movement is predominantly, but not entirely, white and middle-class. We are focusing on those movement actors here because the discourse in Fair Trade arises from a historically constructed discourse of whiteness and because this focus enables us to interrogate neocolonial relations in Fair Trade.
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people in particular places is created and sustained, both in North America and beyond. Rather, it facilitates a process of de-historicization in which North Americans equate our ways of life with development and progress (while effacing the myriad differences among North Americans and the existence and histories of various Indigenous Peoples in North America), as detailed above, and assign inferiority to other ways of being and of knowing. Whiteness is reinscribed with development in a self-perpetuating cycle that reinforces dominance. Second, there is the assumption that these othered spaces and places are available to us (middle-class, white people), and that the people living there need and want our interventions, and that they are awaiting our help. Third is the assumption that something must be done and that we are the people to do it indeed, that we are entitled to intervene. This is where many deeply held problematic ideas around Fair Trade present themselves. Embedded within this assumption is the agency of North Americans to act. Most Fair Trade craft marketing is written in such a way to make artisans seem as needy as possible, but also empowered through their sales, thus implicating consumers as agents of change, benevolently bestowing gifts of empowerment, financial sustainability, and political agency upon otherwise helpless artisans. Take, for example, this excerpt from a Fair Trade craft organization:
Each Freeset Bag tells a story of one woman's journey to freedom. She used to stand with 6,000 other prostitutes in a small but well known area of North Calcutta. She didn't choose her profession; it chose her. Poverty does that. It robs people of their dignity and children of their innocence. She still lives in the same area, but instead of selling her body she makes Freeset Bags. Now she has choices, the choice to work decent hours for decent pay, to reestablish her dignity in her community and to learn to read and write. Now her daughter won't have to stand in the street selling her body like her mother used to. Freedom has been passed on to the next generation. By purchasing a Freeset Bag, you become part of the story of freedom. Thank you!

In our review of Fair Trade craft promotional materials, descriptions like this frequently called for us to seize our potential to save some disempowered person (usually a racialized woman), employing our agency and guaranteeing her appreciation for our unquestionably benevolent action. Image after image from Fair Trade materials show the farmer or artisan as obviously poor, certainly by North American standards, yet smiling and grateful. Global North consumers are not only able to act, but also entitled to act, interceding in the lives of Others. This strategy implicitly suggests that the farmers and artisans on behalf of whom Fair Trade claims to advocate lack the agency to make the changes to their lives that they/we seek. Many Fair Trade marketing materials try to combat this idea, claiming that Fair Trade is a grassroots development strategy and that farmers do have agency. Within this line of argument, the North Americans role is in amplifying the voices of
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farmers, and making their actions more effective (Wright 2004). Inherent in this strategy of intervention is the judgment that farmers strategies are insufficient without us. We also assume here that we have the education and knowledge necessary to intervene and promote a development agenda that is appropriate to the myriad producer organizations involved in Fair Trade around the world. Fair Trade activism and other helping actions directed at the Global South also serve as containment strategies where Global North actors can acknowledge colonial history while limiting their self-perceived complicity by positioning themselves as good (Heron 2007, 124-126). Many consumers recognize the relative poverty farmers live in; some even have a critique of the exploitation of farmers under capitalism. In supporting Fair Trade, they imagine themselves as shopping for a change rather than buying sweatshop coffee. They see themselves as subverting the ills of global capitalism and doing what they can to end poverty. In doing so, many consumers absolve themselves of any greater responsibility to address the poverty they identify or to interrogate the ways that they perpetuate and benefit from the poverty of others. Undoubtedly, some consumers recognize and struggle with the insufficiency of political consumption. There are yet other conscious consumers we have met many of them over the last decade that feel secure, even righteous at times, in their perceived morally superior position. Based on our involvement in Fair Trade and other trade justice movements, we assume there are nuanced and numerous and at times contradictory reasons for such actions. There is some evidence (Stolle, Hooghe and Micheletti 2005) that for some people political consumption does not displace other forms of political engagement. Many people, including the two of us, participate in political consumption and other forms of political activity like street protests. We are not saying that buying Fair Trade necessarily displaces other forms of political engagement; however, we have also found that a significant portion of Fair Trade movement participants and organizations do not think of their work in explicitly political terms, but rather through a sentiment of helping/charity. Regardless of whether or not Fair Trade participants are politically active beyond their personal consumption or if they understand their actions in terms of helping or in terms of solidarity, none of us are innocent and all of us are implicated in historical and ongoing colonial relations. Unfortunately, the dominant practices and discourses of Fair Trade continue to hinge on neocolonial developmentalist ideas that reinscribe bourgeois status on the consumer while depriving farmers of agency. In his classic book, Albert Memmi (1965/1991) argues that whether people ignore or deny their implication in the colonial past or work to reject colonial relations, they/we are inextricably bound to that history and present. Buying Fair Trade products is not an escape hatch out of our implication in neocolonial relations. Rather, buying Fair Trade for many is a manifestation of bourgeois subjectivity. It is a way to assert ones own desires to help a distant Other in order to establish oneself as good, effective, and empowered. Thus, we claim
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that Fair Trade is a neocolonial developmentalist movement; one that relies on colonialist discourses and ideologies to reinscribe roles of racial supremacy and inferiority while affirming the goodness of white consumers, enabling them to abdicate their implication in ongoing colonial relations. In positioning oneself as able, effective, knowledgeable, and good, one asserts oneself in contrast to the Other and secures a position of superiority and righteousness. Yet, how does this simultaneously exist alongside the promotion of Fair Trade as democratic, farmer-driven, alternative development? In the previous section we discussed the paradox of how Northern fair traders extend a hand to producers while simultaneously banishing them to a previous social order (the neocolonial developmentalist waiting room of history, to borrow a phrase from Chakrabarty (2000/2008, 8) mentioned earlier).Here we want to highlight a related paradox, which Heron calls the Paradox of the Other:
Our ongoing justifications to ourselves for our presence there are contingent on repeated assertions of racialized difference or Othering that cannot be acknowledged as such...because we are not supposed to engage in the process of Othering. We want some African people to be subjects with whom we can form equal relations and yet simultaneously we require Africans to take the position of Other. This Other can be construed, often, through putative cultural limitations, as needing our presence in order to improve in some way, affirming directly what racialized discourse in the North persistently infers: the superiority of the white bourgeois subject who bears the knowledge that counts. (Heron 2007, 150)

Although the Fair Trade movement is different from the context Heron describes, through our years of experience we have found the same contradictions embedded within Fair Trade. The movement at its core is about manufacturing and representing the relationship between producers and consumers in Fair Trade in specific ways through the marketing done by businesses, the educational materials that NGOs circulate, and the definitions and standards promoted by the certification and accreditation institutions. Because of this coordinated work directed at coordinating the consumption of individuals and institutions, engaged consumers want to know and be in a relationship with the farmers who grow their coffee, cocoa, and so on. Yet, the information in Fair Trade promotional materials racializes the relationship between producers, traders and consumers and sets producers apart as Other. These relationships between producers and consumers are not simply immaterial fictions designed to dupe consumers.10 Rather, they are integral to the ongoing production of the Fair Trade system. Fair traders critique helping narratives and counter them with messages of selfhelp and solidarity. Promotional materials tout Fair Trade as empowering,
Besides the fact that one should not think of discourse as somehow severed from materiality, there are, of course, myriad historical-geographical-material relations between producers and consumers in both Fair Trade and the conventional system.
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affirm[ing] human dignity by promoting fair wages, telling [farmers and artisans] own stories and support[ing] organizations in poor communities overseas in their struggle to secure basic rights. Yet, at the same time that fair traders reject the discourse of helping and embrace notions of solidarity and producers pulling themselves up by their own bootstraps, they employ implicitly and sometimes explicitly colonialist assumptions that producers agency is dependent upon the actions of Global North businesses and consumers to be realized (Wright 2004). The very idea of intervention through conscious consumption reproduces that which fair traders deny: while we claim that we want to be in solidarity, supporting the agency of farming and artisan communities, our actions serve to reinforce difference and dependence. Conclusion There are serious problems and limitations with Fair Trade, some of which are inherent to the movements neocolonial capitalist structure and cannot be overcome by minor reforms to the movement and its institutions. Some of these troublesome dynamics have worsened since the turn of the millennium with the institutionalization of international certification and the imposition of unequal decision-making and governance policies. Other dynamics have deteriorated since the introduction of TNCs in the certified system. FTUSAs unilateral move to leave the FTI system without farmer consultation and consent, indeed against the expressed concerns of the PNs and several Global North advocacy organizations, and the increased reliance on and promotion of plantation production only serve to deepen the problems of Fair Trade. These structural power differentials, in turn, have had significant consequences for the discursive relations of Fair Trade. Fair Trade is built upon and reinscribes colonial ideas of progress and development rooted in assumptions of evolutionary Time and the denial of coevalness of producers. Although Fair Trade claims to bring consumers and producers together, in the process of fetishizing producers and products as exotic, it reinforces the Otherness of producers and the bourgeois subjectivity of consumers. In seeking to know and be in relationship with producers, consumers and activists assert themselves as superior in relationship to producers who become the object of reform and development. If we as white North Americans want to be in this movement as allies in solidarity, we must reject the idea of development, which requires us to see our lifestyles as developed and to see certain others as in need of our help so they can become more like us. There is a tendency amongst many social scientists that write critically about Fair Trade to qualify or retract their critiques in the conclusions of their articles and books and to express their continued support for Fair Trade in general. We are not going to do that here. We are not issuing a flat denunciation of Fair Trade in general; however, our support for Fair Trade is limited to producer-led initiatives and collaborations, co-op-to-co-op ventures, and anti-racist and anticolonial trade justice organizing. Building and maintaining solidarity relationships is always difficult and fraught. We are not saying that cross59

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cultural or transnational solidarity is impossible. Instead, we suggest that the helping imperative is antithetical to solidarity. Notions of help and development rely on and reinscribe power relations rooted in the colonial past and present that must be acknowledged and actively undermined if we aspire to working in solidarity. There are examples of solidarity through producer-led initiatives in Fair Trade. Take, for example, the CLACs labeling initiative, Smbolo de Pequeos Productores (SPP), and companies that are buying SPP labeled products. Co-ownership ventures between producers and traders, like Divine Chocolate, provide other examples of solidarity in Fair Trade. These examples, and precious few others, demonstrate what solidarity relationships can look like led by producer organizations, framed in terms of justice rather than charity, and benefitting producer communities in ways that they articulate as welcome and necessary for their own vision of development. It is, however, too often the case that such examples are used to shield or deflect criticism from Fair Trade in general or from specific aspects of it. Furthermore, these initiatives are not without their own problems and these, too, should be scrutinized.11 From our work in Fair Trade throughout the last ten years, we know that some producer cooperatives are accomplishing important things for their communities practicing radical democracy, fomenting alternative forms of grassroots development, and challenging FTIs and FTUSAs Eurocentric vision of development and fair trade. It is time for more North American advocates to follow the leadership of these producers as the Fair Trade movement and market struggle to reorient themselves. Acknowledgement Hussey and Curnow thank the journals editors and reviewers as well as Andrew Kohan and Genevieve Ritchie for their constructive feedback. Hussey thanks the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for their financial support. References Adams, Matt and Jayne Raisborough. 2008. What can sociology say about FairTrade? Reflexivity, ethical consumption and class. Sociology 42(6): 11651182. ---. 2010. Making a difference: ethical consumption and the everyday. The British Journal of Sociology 61(2): 256-274. Amin, Samir. 1989. Eurocentrism. Translated by Russell Moore. New York: Monthly Review Press.

Cafdirect, the company that Caroline Wright (2004) analyzes, can in many ways be said to be operating in solidarity with producers; however, Wright nonetheless critiques them, and is correct in doing so, for propagating racist and colonialist ideas in some of their advertisements.
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Bacon, Christopher M. 2010. Who decides what is fair in fair trade? The agrienvironmental governance of standards, access, and price. Journal of Peasant Studies 37(1): 111-147. ---. 2005. Confronting the coffee crisis: can Fair Trade, organic, and specialty coffees reduce small-scale farmer vulnerability in Northern Nicaragua? World Development 33(3): 497-511. Bacon, Christopher M., V. Ernesto Mndez, Mara Eugenia Flores-Gmez, Douglas Stuart, Sandro Ral Daz-Flores. 2008. Are sustainable coffee certifications enough to secure farmer livelihoods? The millenium development goals and Nicaraguas fair trade cooperatives. Globalizations 5(2): 259-274. Barnett, Clive, Paul Cloke, Nick Clarke, and Alice Malpass. 2005. Consuming Ethics: Articulating the Subjects and Spaces of Ethical Consumption. Antipode 37(1): 23-45. Bryant, Raymond L. and Michael K. Goodman. 2004. Consuming narratives: the political ecology of alternative consumption. Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers, New Series 29: 344-366. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. 2000/2008. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Cole, Nicki Lisa. 2008. Global Capitalism Organizing Knowledge of Race, Gender and Class: The Case of Socially Responsible Coffee. Race, Gender & Class 15(1-2): 170-175, 177-187. Cooper, Frederick. 2005. Colonialism in Question: Theory, Knowledge, History. Berkeley: University of California Press. Davies, Iain A. 2007. The eras and participants of fair trade: an industry structure/stakeholder perspective on the growth of the fair trade industry. Corporate Governance 7(4): 455-470. Dolan, Catherine S. 2005. Fields of Obligation: Rooting ethical sourcing in Kenyan horticulture. Journal of Consumer Culture 5: 365-389. Dussel, Enrique. 1998. Beyond Eurocentrism: The World-System and the Limits of Modernity. Pp. 3-31 in The Cultures of Globalization, edited by Frederic Jameson and Masao Miyoshi. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Escobar, Arturo. 1995. Encountering Development: The Making and Unmaking of the Third World. Princeton: Princeton University Press. ---. 1999. The Invention of Development. Current History 98, 631: 382-386. Fabian, Johannes. 1983/2002. Time and the Other: How Anthropology Makes Its Object. New York: Columbia University Press. Fairtrade International (FTI). n.d. About the Mark. http://www.fairtrade.net/about_the_mark.html?&L=title (accessed 18.12.2012).

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---. 2004. Shopping for a better world: Fairtrade Labelling Organizations International annual report 03-04. http://www.fairtrade.net/annual_reports.html (accessed 11.2.2013). ---. 2012. Overview of Fairtrade in the USA. 30 July 2012 update. http://www.fairtrade.net/overview-usa.html?&L=0 (accessed 28.8.2012). Ferguson, James. 1994/2007. The Anti-Politics Machine: Development, Depoliticization, and Bureaucratic Power in Lesotho. Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press. Fisher, Carolyn. 2007. Selling Coffee, or Selling Out?: Evaluating Different Ways to Analyze the Fair-Trade System. Culture & Agriculture 29(2): 78-88. Fridell, Gavin. 2011. Coffee and Commodity Fetishism. Pp. 277-298 in Power and Everyday Practices, edited by Deborah Brock, Rebecca Raby, and Mark P. Thomas. Toronto: Nelson. ---. 2009. The Co-Operative and the Corporation: Competing Visions of the Future of Fair Trade. Journal of Business Ethics 86(3): 81-95. ---. 2007a. Fair Trade Coffee: The Prospects and Pitfalls of Market-Driven Social Justice. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. ---. 2007b. Fair Trade Coffee and Commodity Fetishism: The Limits of MarketDriven Social Justice. Historical Materialism 15(4): 79-104. ---. 2006. Fair Trade and Neoliberalism: Assessing Emerging Perspectives. Latin American Perspectives 151, 33(6): 8-28. ---. 2004. The Fair Trade Network in Historical Perspective. Canadian Journal of Development Studies 25(3): 411-428. Fridell, Mara, Ian Hudson and Mark Hudson. 2008. With Friends Like These: The Corporate Response to Fair Trade Coffee. Review of Radical Political Economics 40(1): 8-34. Goodman, Michael K. 2004. Reading Fair Trade: political ecological imaginary and the moral economy of fair trade foods. Political Geography 23(7): 891-915. ---. 2010. The mirror of consumption: Celebritization, developmental consumption and the shifting cultural politics of fair trade. Geoforum 41: 104116. Guthman, Julie. 2007. The Polanyian Way? Voluntary Food Labels as Neoliberal Governance. Antipode 39: 456-478. Heron, Barbara. 2007. Desire for Development: Whiteness, Gender and the Helping Imperative. Waterloo, ON: Wilfrid Laurier University Press. Hudson, Ian and Mark Hudson. 2009. Dissecting the Boom: Is Fair Trade Growing Out of Its Roots? Historical Materialism 17: 237-252. ---. 2003. Removing the Veil?: Commodity Fetishism, Fair Trade, and the Environment. Organization & Environment 16(4): 413-430.

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---. 2002. How alternative is alternative trade? Unpublished manuscript. Hussey, Ian. 2012a. Kun Reilu kauppa mailman valloitti. Pp. 55-68 in Reilumman kaupan jljill: Kirjoituksia reilust kaupasta ja solidaarisesta vaihdosta, edited by Ehrstedt Johan and Mervi Leppkorpi. Helsinki: Into Kustannus. ---. 2012b. Political Activist as Ethnographer, Revisited. Canadian Journal of Sociology 37(1): 1-23. Jaffee, Daniel. 2011. Fair Trade and Development: A Changing Paradigm. Pp. 87-104 in The Politics of Fair Trade, edited by Meera Warrier. London: Routledge. ---. 2010. Fair Trade Standards, Corporate Participation, and Social Movement Responses in the United States. Journal of Business Ethics 92: 267-285. ---. 2007. Brewing Justice: Fair Trade Coffee, Sustainability, and Survival. Berkeley: University of California Press. Kapoor, Ilan. 2008. The Postcolonial Politics of Development. London: Routledge. Kothari, Uma. 2005. A radical history of development studies: individuals, institutions and ideologies. Pp. 1-13 in A Radical History of Development Studies: Individuals, Institutions and Ideologies, edited by Uma Kothari. London: Zed Books. Lewis, Jessa and David Runsten. 2008. Is Fair Trade-Organic Coffee Sustainable in the Face of Migration? Evidence from a Oaxacan Community. Globalizations 5(2): 275-290. Low, Will and Eileen Davenport. 2006. Mainstreaming fair trade: adoption, assimilation, appropriation. Journal of Strategic Marketing 14: 315-327. Lyon, Sarah. 2006. Evaluating Fair Trade consumption: politics, defetishization and producer participation. International Journal of Consumer Studies 30(5): 452-464. Marx, Karl. 1867/1990. The Fetishism of the Commodity and Its Secret. Pp. 163-177 in Capital: A Critique of Political Economy, Volume 1. Translated by Ben Fowkes. London: Penguin in association with New Left Review. MCloskey, Kathy. 2010. Novica, Navajo Knock-Offs, and the Net: A Critique of Fair Trade Marketing Practices. Pp. 258-282 in Fair Trade and Social Justice: Global Ethnographies, edited by Sarah Lyon and Mark Moberg. New York: New York University Press. McMichael, Philip. 2000. Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective. 2nd ed. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage/Pine Forge Press. Memmi, Albert. 1965/1991. The Colonizer and the Colonized. Boston: Beacon Press.

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Nicholls, Alex and Charlotte Opal. 2005. Fair Trade: Market-Driven Ethical Consumption. London: Sage. Quijano, Anibal. 2000. Coloniality of Power and Eurocentrism in Latin America. International Sociology 15(2): 215-232. Raynolds, Laura T. 2009. Mainstreaming Fair Trade Coffee: From Partnership to Traceability. World Development 37(6): 1083-1093. ---. 2002. Consumer/Producer Links in Fair Trade Coffee Networks. Sociologia Ruralis 42(4): 404-24. ---. 2000. Re-embedding global agriculture: the international organic and fair trade movements. Agriculture and Human Values 17: 297-309. Reed, Darryl. 2009. What do Corporations have to do with Fair Trade? Positive and Normative Analysis from a Value Chain Perspective. Journal of Business Ethics 86: 3-26. Reed, Darryl, Bob Thomson, Ian Hussey, Jean-Frdric LeMay. 2010. Developing a Normatively Grounded Research Agenda for Fair Trade: Examining the Case of Canada. Journal of Business Ethics 92: 151-179. Renard, Marie-Christine. 2005. Quality certification, regulation and power in fair trade. Journal of Rural Studies 21: 419-431. Ronchi, Loraine. 2002. The impact of fair trade on producers and their organisations: A case study with Coocaf in Costa Rica. PRUS Working Paper No. 11. Brighton, UK: Poverty Research Unit at Sussex. Rosenthal, Jonathan. 2012. Comment 926. Catholic Relief Services Coffeelands Blog. http://coffeelands.crs.org/2012/05/how-crs-came-to-beinvolved-in-ft4all-in-colombia/#comment-926 (accessed 9.9.2012). Ruben, Ruerd. (Ed.). 2008. The Impact of Fair Trade. Wagenigen, Netherlands: Wagenigen Academic Publishers. Said, Edward W. 1978/2004. Orientalism. New York: Vintage Books. Sheridan, Michael. 2011. Merling Preza makes the case against FT4All. Catholic Relief Services Coffeelands Blog. http://coffeelands.crs.org/2011/11/merling-preza-makes-the-case-againstft4all/ (accessed 24.8.2012). Sherman, Scott. 2012. The Brawl Over Fair Trade Coffee. The Nation. http://www.thenation.com/article/169515/brawl-over-fair-trade-coffee (accessed 9.9.2012). Small Producers Symbol. http://www.spp.coop/ (accessed 23.8.2012). Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. 1988. Can the Subaltern Speak? Pp. 271-313 in Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg. Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press.

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Stolle, Dietlind, Marc Hooghe, and Michelle Micheletti. 2005. Politics in the Supermarket: Political Consumerism as a Form of Political Participation. International Political Science Review 26(3): 245-269. Tallontire, Anne. 2009. Top Heavy? Governance Issues and Policy Decisions for the Fair Trade Movement. Journal of International Development 21: 10041014. Utting-Chamorro, Karla. 2005. Does Fair Trade make a difference? The case of small coffee producers in Nicaragua. Development in Practice 15(3/4): 584599. VanderHoff Boersma, Franz. 2002. Poverty Alleviation through Participation in Fair Trade Coffee Networks: The Case of UCIRI, Oaxaca, Mexico. Fort Collins, CO: Fair Trade Research Group. Varul, Matthias Zick. 2008. Consuming the Campesino: Fair trade marketing between recognition and romantic commodification. Cultural Studies 22(5): 654-679. Waridel, Laure. 2002. Coffee with Pleasure: Just Java and World Trade. Montreal: Black Rose Books. West, Paige. 2010. Making the Market: Specialty Coffee, Generational Pitches, and Papua New Guinea. Antipode 42(3): 690-718. Wilson, Bradley R. 2010. Indebted to Fair Trade? Coffee and crisis in Nicaragua. Geoforum 41: 84-92. Wilson, Bradley R. and Joe Curnow. 2012. Solidarity TM: Student Activism, Affective Labor, and the Fair Trade Campaign in the United States Antipode (Early View). http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.14678330.2012.01051.x/abstract (accessed 9.12.2012). Wright, Caroline. 2004. Consuming lives, consuming landscapes: interpreting advertisements for Cafdirect coffees. Journal of International Development 16(5): 665-680. Young, Robert J.C. 2001. Neocolonialism. Pp. 44-56 in Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction. Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing. About the authors Ian Hussey is a PhD candidate in sociology at York University. His previous publications include articles in the Canadian Journal of Sociology, Socialist Studies, and the Journal of Business Ethics. Joe Curnow is a PhD student at the University of Toronto. She has previously published in Antipode. Corresponding author: Ian Hussey, ihussey AT yorku.ca.

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Appendix: images Image 1: The USFT logo from 2003

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Image 2: The Fair Trade Los Angeles logo from 2012

Image 3: The UPAVIM logo from 2012

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Interface: a journal for and about social movements Article Volume 5 (1): 69 101 (May 2013) Cantzler, Indigenous agency and innovation

The translation of Indigenous agency and innovation into political and cultural power: the case of Indigenous fishing rights in Australia
Julia Miller Cantzler

Abstract This paper examines the historical and contemporary conflict over Indigenous fishing rights in Australia to demonstrate that, despite resilient and constraining legal and political obstacles, Indigenous Australians have been able to employ innovative and culturally-relevant strategies to achieve greater control over traditional aquatic resources on terms that are consistent with the dictates of Indigenous traditional laws and customs and that adhere to the needs of Indigenous communities as they define them. These revelations contribute to an undertheorized area of social movement research by demonstrating the power of human agency through the innovative deployment of alternative tactical solutions in order to sustain political challenges and affect change. Further, the findings reveal that Indigenous tactical innovation is a fundamental ingredient in the broader process of decolonizing culturally and economically significant Indigenous resources.

Introduction Because Indigenous Peoples in many settler societies continue to occupy remote territories or remain marginalized within urban populations, it is easy for nonIndigenous citizens to hang onto antiquated beliefs that native societies are disappearing cultures. Despite these beliefs, Indigenous communities have not disappeared, nor have they been fully assimilated into mainstream societies. While Indigenous Peoples continue to confront huge challenges when it comes to disparities in their education, overall health and poverty levels, many are starting to experience positive changes in their abilities to control their own destinies while achieving culturally relevant solutions to the obstacles they face. Much of this positive change is directly linked to the significant political, cultural and economic revitalization that is occurring within Indigenous communities (Nesper 2002). At the heart of revitalization efforts are claims to greater self-determination over traditionally harvested natural resources that remain central to Indigenous Peoples cultural identities, their subsistence needs, and their economic aspirations. These claims are contentious, however, due to the fact that many traditionally harvested Indigenous resources are often highly valued by non-Indigenous stakeholders for predominantly economic reasons. This is certainly the case with Indigenous fisheries, which have been systematically dismantled by laws and policies aimed at removing them from

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Indigenous Peoples control and placing them into the hands of non-Indigenous commercial and recreational stakeholders. Notwithstanding the evidence of Indigenous revitalization and the relevance of Indigenous activism in bringing about broader political transformations, relatively little theoretical work within the social movements literature has explored the dynamics of political contention between states and Indigenous actors (A few notable exceptions include Cornell 1988; Fenelon 1998; Nagel 1996; Petray 2010; SinghaRoy 2012; Stotik, Shriver and Cable 1994). Much of the earlier work that focuses on these types of political interactions tends to highlight the formidable structural factors that influence the rise and fall of Indigenous social movements, while underemphasizing the importance of Indigenous agency in shaping the dynamics of contention (Fenelon 1998; Johnson, Nagel and Champagne 1997; Stotik et al. 1994). While this work has provided valuable insights into the power-laden dynamics of ethnic conflict during early colonial periods and at the inception of modern day Indigenous activism, such a framework may not be well-suited to capture contemporary realities of Indigenous mobilization through which native peoples are achieving greater local autonomy over their lands and resources and increased influence within mainstream decision-making arenas. Recognizing these limitations, a small but growing body of research has begun to focus more explicitly on the tensions between the structural and agential dynamics of contention involving Indigenous political actors and the state (Cornell 1988; Gedicks 1993; Maaka and Fleras 2005; Petray 2010; SinghaRoy 2012). Such research reveals the implications of Indigenous agency for native peoples continued, and in many cases, increasing autonomy over their own political affairs. This article synthesizes this small but important body of research on Indigenous agency while contributing new theoretical insights into the dynamics of political contention between Indigenous actors and the state. I specifically examine the historical and contemporary conflict over Indigenous fishing rights in Australia. My findings demonstrate that, despite resilient and constraining legal and political obstacles, Indigenous Peoples have been able to employ innovative, culturally-relevant strategies to achieve greater control over traditional aquatic resources on terms that are consistent with Indigenous traditional laws and customs and that adhere to the needs of Indigenous communities as they define them. These revelations contribute to an undertheorized area of social movement research by demonstrating the power of human agency through the innovative deployment of alternative tactical solutions to sustain political challenges and affect change. The findings reveal that Indigenous tactical innovation is fundamental to the broader process of decolonizing culturally and economically significant Indigenous resources. In addition to its theoretical contributions, this article seeks to encourage dialogue between academic research and movement practitioners, as well as facilitating greater engagement between Indigenous activists and state actors currently embroiled in struggles for control over vital natural, cultural and economic resources. First, the findings in this study reveal the tactical
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approaches that have been most effective for Indigenous fishers in achieving modest yet important transformations of the laws and policies that impact their rights. It is hoped that this information will assist Indigenous parties in becoming more central players in political decision-making processes over matters that are fundamental to their cultural, political and economic wellbeing. Second, this study reveals the formidable structural constraints that shape Indigenous-state relations in Australia. In so doing, it reveals the institutional obstacles that hinder negotiation and resolution of resource disputes as well as the sites of structural vulnerability most susceptible to Indigenous claims of rights. By exposing the discriminatory colonial legacies that continue to present obstacles to the inclusion of Indigenous Peoples and their aspirations within contemporary regulatory frameworks, this study highlights these barriers and provides ammunition for those on both sides of the debate who seek to move beyond the past in order to construct more equal and bicultural blueprints for citizenship and governance in Australia. Why fishing rights? Struggles over natural resources, whether they involve access to land or competition over fish and game, have long been primary sources of conflict between European settlers and Indigenous Peoples (Fenelon 1998; Wilmer and Alfred 1997). Traditional subsistence hunting and fishing activities are particularly crucial to the cultural continuity and political and economic selfdetermination of Indigenous communities (Freeman, Bogoslovskaya, Caulfield, Egede, Krupnik, and Stevenson 1998; Nesper 2002; Wilkinson 2000). Oftentimes, however, Indigenous Peoples long-standing interests in animal and fish species come into direct conflict with the ever-changing, but predominantly economic, interests of mainstream corporate and governmental actors. Not surprisingly, the operation of non-Indigenous recreational and commercial fisheries directly conflicts with the interests of Aboriginal Peoples who have long relied on access to fisheries to satisfy their own subsistence, spiritual and economic needs. In addition to maintaining significant economic and regulatory interests in fisheries, State and Commonwealth (i.e. federal) governments in Australia are increasingly answering to a growing constituency of environmental advocates who demand preservation of the fisheries in light of mounting evidence of resource depletion. Some vocal preservationists, as well as representatives of the fishing industry, contend that Indigenous harvests of marine resources are to blame for declining fish stocks, despite little evidence of this. Fishing and hunting marine animals is deeply rooted in the traditional identities of Indigenous Peoples, who view these activities as integral to their political, cultural and economic self-determination (Ross and Pickering 2002). While fishing and hunting provide for their subsistence needs and present opportunities for economic self-sufficiency, the actions themselves, and the
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bounty that they supply, are fundamentally linked to deeply-held notions of the sacred that continue to shape their worldviews and practices. Through creation stories and oral traditions that root Indigenous Australians1 to the sea, a body of law is derived that establishes Aboriginal Peoples as stewards of their sea country with enduring and definitive obligations to protect it from destruction (Coombs 1994). Aboriginal traditional laws remain at the heart of Indigenous cultural meaning systems and provide the motivation and moral authority for challenges to non-Indigenous incursions into their sea country. The maintenance of traditional fishing and hunting practices implicates the very survival of Indigenous communities because it ensures that sacred knowledge regarding their sea country will be passed down to future generations. Given the centrality of marine resources to Indigenous Peoples way of life, it is not surprising that infringements upon their customary fishing and aquatic hunting practices are viewed as unacceptable threats to the preservation of traditional knowledge and their communities health and welfare. In light of these conflicting interests, struggles over fishing have developed into intense battles, the outcomes of which have the potential to alter the playing fields upon which the political relationships between Indigenous Peoples and the Australian government are structured. After centuries of colonial domination, however, these playing fields are in no way equal, with the Australian state wielding significant institutional and ideological authority over Indigenous affairs. While on a superficial level state authority in Australia and other settler states appears impermeable, a deeper examination of these types of struggles reveals that Indigenous Peoples around the world are often able to exert meaningful influence over processes of resource allocation in colonial societies and, in many cases, they do so on terms that they define as culturally meaningful (Freidman 1999; Nesper 2002; Maaka and Fleras 2005). This, however, begs the question of how, in the face of such lopsided political power structures, Indigenous Peoples are able to remain relevant players in struggles over natural resources. Data Capturing the strategic and interactive dynamics of contention that emerge during struggles over Indigenous fishing and aquatic rights requires multiple levels of data. To capture aspects of the broader political landscape as well as movement level dynamics, I drew primarily from archived legal documents such as treaties, legislation, and court decisions as well as legislative debates, court transcripts and newspaper articles that explicitly deal with the controversy over
Indigenous Australians also refer to themselves as Aboriginal Australians and Traditional Owners, which implies their original and uninterrupted autonomy over traditional lands and natural resources. In addition, many Indigenous Peoples in Australia choose not to refer to themselves as Australian, preferring instead to identify as Peoples or as a Nation. These terms will be used interchangeably in this article to refer to the indigenous inhabitants of what is presently Australia.
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Indigenous fishing. Primary and secondary sources, including anthropological literature and official documentation from Indigenous organizations and representative bodies, including press releases and policy statements, as well as interview data from Indigenous activists and experts on Aboriginal fishing and economic development were also analyzed to reveal the repertoires of contention activated during these political campaigns. These analyses take a particularly expansive view of who comprises the Aboriginal fishing rights movement in Australia, and have incorporated viewpoints from local Traditional Owners with a direct interest in their traditional fisheries, as well as their representatives and advocates. The latter include attorneys who represent Traditional Owners in native title cases, Indigenous Land Council representatives, Indigenous Land Management Facilitators, and experts affiliated with the Northern Australia Land and Sea Management Alliance (NAILSMA) and the Torres Strait Regional Authority, among others, who all have an interest in restoring and advancing native peoples cultural, political and economic rights to their sea countries. Archived documents were collected from comprehensive online and library databases managed by the Indigenous Law Centre at the University of New South Wales in Sydney, the Native Title Studies Centre and the Cape York Land Council in Cairns, Queensland, the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies in Canberra, the Queensland Department of Primary Industries in Brisbane, CRC Reef Research Centre Limited and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority in Townsville, Queensland, the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research in Canberra, the National Native Title Tribunal in Perth, Western Australia, and NAILSMA in Darwin, Northern Territory. Supplementary interviews were conducted with Indigenous and nonIndigenous stakeholders in the government, public and private sectors, as well as with legal, political and economic experts, during a two month research trip to Australia (January-March 2008). Analytical approach In order to capture the structural and agential tensions that persist in Indigenous Australians political struggles for fishing rights, I focus on the interactions that occur between the political opportunity structure, on the one hand, and the mobilizing strategies activated by Indigenous political actors, on the other. My primary objectives are to reveal: the role of human agency in driving the tactical choices of Indigenous actors despite formidable institutional constraints; how the cultural, economic and political prerogatives of Indigenous challengers inform their tactical solutions; and, how the tactical breakthrough of Indigenous claimants in more receptive settings impacts the sustainability and outcomes of challenges to enduring colonial structures of domination. To facilitate these objectives, this study utilizes Tilly and Tarrows (2006) interactional, mechanism-process approach for explaining episodes of contention. This approach was developed as a companion to McAdam, Tarrow
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and Tillys (2001) Dynamics of Contention, in order to provide a methodological foundation for exploring and understanding interactions between fundamental, relational mechanisms of contention -- namely, political opportunities, mobilizing structures, and framing processes. During episodes of contentious politics, groups make claims through coordinated efforts on behalf of shared interests or programs that essentially involve interactions with agents of the government. Through analogy or comparison of similar episodes of contention, or through in-depth case immersion, the mechanism-process approach is able to provide a more general account of the broader processes at work during periods of political conflict. In-depth case analysis is facilitated by identifying the central mechanisms that operate during periods of political contention. Mechanisms are interactional events that alter relations among sets of elements in similar ways over a variety of situations (Tilly and Tarrow 2006:29). Depending on the political contexts in which they operate (i.e. the political opportunities afforded by particular state regimes), and the social resources available to challengers (such as their mobilizing structures, cultural predispositions, and political and ideological traditions regarding contention), such mechanisms will combine in particular ways to produce divergent forms of contention across sites. As such, this approach is ideally suited to comparative analyses. This paper is part of a larger study that applies this method in a comparative fashion, seeking to explain divergent trajectories of contention across national contexts.2 These analyses were facilitated through the use of the NVivo software package. NVivo provides an interface through which documents and interview data can be easily coded and managed, and through which analytical concepts, rhetorical frames, and historical episodes can be linked in a manner that is theoretically meaningful. Prior to analyzing any of the 250 documents or 28 semi-structured interviews, I created general codes, which were inductively extracted from the broad themes revealed in the social movement literature. Codes pertaining to political opportunities include references to colonial histories, prevailing policies for managing Indigenous fishing rights, institutional structures for making claims, state responses to Indigenous claims-making, and mainstream and political discourses regarding race, ethnicity and indigeneity, as well as dominant beliefs regarding the causes of environmental and species declines. General codes pertaining to mobilizing structures include references to decisions about where to address Indigenous fishing rights claims, the content of those claims (whether politically, economically, or culturally focused), and any innovations in the ways that Indigenous groups pursued their interests. After reviewing and coding the data and identifying the general themes, I created additional sub-categories to flesh out the general themes and aid in the analyses. These subcategories were coded in accordance with themes revealed in the literatures on Indigenous movements, culture, and racial and ethnic
The larger project compares episodes of political contention between Indigenous political actors and the state over access to and development of traditional fisheries in Australia, New Zealand and the United States.
2

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identities, and also reflected the political and cultural mechanisms that emerged through data immersion. These codes were then systematically applied to the archival and interview data. Once the coding was completed, an in-depth narrative was constructed that provides a detailed snapshot of the political and legal landscape confronting Indigenous activists and the strategic ways that Indigenous claims-makers innovate in the face of broader constraints in order to maximize their potential to achieve greater authority over traditionallysignificant aquatic resources. Indigenous mobilization While a growing body of research by Indigenous and non-Indigenous scholars focuses on Indigenous political action both locally and globally (Barker 2005; Bergeron 2010; Gedicks 2001), few empirical studies have grounded Indigenous activism within the framework of social movement theory (notable exceptions include Bobo and Tuan 2006; Cornell 1988; Fenelon 1998; Hall and Fenelon 2008; Johnson, Nagel and Champagne 1997; Merlan 2005; Nagel 1996; Petray 2010; SinghaRoy 2012; Stotik, Shriver and Cable 1994). This is unfortunate, as the topic can reveal important theoretical insights into key cultural dimensions of political contention, particularly as they inform the role of human agency in sustaining political challenges, as well as the social mechanisms that facilitate broad political and cultural change. Indigenous mobilization is a uniquely cultural phenomenon. Instead of seeking inclusion within, or accommodation by, the broader society, Indigenous Peoples often demand rights to political selfdetermination and cultural autonomy. Research on Indigenous activism can contribute to the broader social movement literature by highlighting the influence of culture on repertoires of contention, including the unique strategies of action and movement objectives of Indigenous activists (see, for example, SinghaRoys (2012) study of Indigenous environmental activism in New South Wales). It can also provide unique insights into the interactional and, fundamentally, agency-laden mechanisms of contention that make it possible for the alternative logics of Indigenous activists to transform long-accepted and institutionalized discourses regarding citizenship, democracy and multiculturalism (Alvarez, Dagnino and Escobar 1998). According to Alvarez (1998) and Maaka and Fleras (2005), contemporary Indigenous mobilization is marked by the infusion of democratic politics with discourses of culture and identity. Indigenous Peoples mobilize around deeply alternative views of citizenship and identity, and demand that states recognize their right to live together differently with members of the dominant population (Maaka and Fleras 2005:12). While these claims are often rooted in local cultural identities and are based on the continual or original occupation of geographic spaces, they do not relegate native lifestyles to traditional ways of the past. Instead, claims by Indigenous Peoples are simultaneously rooted in the past, where their legal, ethical, and cultural legitimacy is based, and oriented toward the future, in their emphases on economic opportunities, cultural

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revitalization, political autonomy and co-governance within broader governmental regimes. The fact that Indigenous Peoples, especially those in British settler societies, occupy politically, culturally and geographically distinct spaces within larger nations is highly relevant for understanding key mechanisms that drive counterhegemonic resistance, including the significance of oppositional culture, the construction of alternative political identities, and the activation of culturally consistent tactical solutions. According to Gramsci (1971), hegemony consists of the power to dominate through unseen structures and the uncritical acceptance of dominant ideologies by oppressed groups. To the extent possible, hegemonic power seeks to neutralize dissent and promote political passivity. Resistance, then, requires the ability to see through these systems of domination. This can only happen when a population acquires historical perspective and political consciousness. Indigenous Peoples unique and separate political and geographic positions in many settler societies have resulted from their historical struggles and, oftentimes, this is written directly into the law. As such, Indigenous Peoples, more than other politically marginalized groups, may already have the historical perspective and political consciousness necessary to engage in active, counter-hegemonic resistance. Billings (1990), expanding upon Gramsci, asserts that in order to engage in resistance, individuals must experience a conversion. This is only possible where there are autonomous organizations operating outside of hegemonic control (what Fantasia and Hirsch (1995) and others refer to as free spaces), where organic intellectuals are able to activate alternative ideologies, and where existing networks operate to legitimize the plausibility of counter-hegemonic views. In Australia, many Indigenous communities occupy remote territories that remain relatively removed from non-Indigenous interference and within which traditional systems of knowledge are fostered. Semi-autonomous Indigenous communities are agency-laden institutions through which alternative cultural meaning systems are sustained, solidarity is produced and tactical solutions are derived. Moreover, the past thirty years have witnessed the emergence of new Indigenous leaders in Australia who have played an ever more important role in reimagining and reasserting Indigenous Peoples claims for increased political and cultural autonomy. Within these geographically bounded communities, as well as in the growing urban Indigenous population, are likeminded individuals who reinforce counter-hegemonic claims and mobilize around them. Mara Loveman (2005) contends that state-making is an inherently cultural and symbolic endeavour. State power consists of the naturalization of state legitimacy in particular bureaucratic realms as well as the imposition of ideological power through the assertion of cultural myths and nationalistic identities. Loveman asserts, however, that state hegemony is not inevitable and it does not occur all at once. Rather, it happens as a result of conflict over state legitimacy in different bureaucratic realms. State victories in a particular realm tilt the playing field in favour of the state such that all future conflicts happen on
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its terms. While most settler governments have achieved legitimate authority in the vast majority of bureaucratic realms, state legitimacy over Indigenous affairs remains contested, as the undiminished stream of lawsuits concerning Indigenous rights illustrate. In the Australian case, the unsettled nature of Indigenous policy has been reinforced by the governments shift to a more reconciliatory approach toward Indigenous Peoples, which was influenced by Indigenous activism from below and United Nations pressure from above (SinghaRoy 2012). According to SinghaRoy, The policies of accommodation and reconciliation that have been introduced in the wake of proliferation of selfconscious indigenous movements since early 1970s have opened up new possibilities and challenges in re-establishing linkages between indigenous culture and environment (2012:6). These recent trends are meaningful to Indigenous fisheries activists, providing them with new openings from which to dismantle and reframe the cultural discourses and structural hierarchies that have historically oppressed them. Issues of Indigenous sovereignty, self-determination, and decolonization remain hotly contested by Indigenous activists and scholars who have widely divergent views on not only what these ideas stand for, but whether or not they are advantageous pursuits for Indigenous communities seeking to live their lives on their own terms (Alfred 1999; Barker 2005; Falk and Martin 2007; Ontai 2005). These debates have far-reaching ramifications for Indigenous social movements. They must decide whether to pursue tactics within mainstream legal and political channels, or focus their efforts on more autonomous and nonhegemonic strategies for achieving meaningful cultural, political, and economic autonomy that is not necessarily reliant on the states formal recognition of Aboriginal rights. Some persuasively argue that the utilization of dominant discourses and institutions by Indigenous activists reinforces hegemonic power and formal structures of racial domination (Alfred 1999; Petray 2010 citing Maddison 2008, 2009; Barker 2005 citing Morris). While these more accommodating strategies of action may not be best suited for Indigenous aspirations of independent sovereignty, they are in line with a vision of decolonization that foresees more moderate transformations of colonial systems of governance to shared governance regimes based on overlapping jurisdictions within a joint sovereignty rather than on the absolute and undivided sovereignty of the state (Maaka and Fleras 2005:59). According to Young,
few Indigenous peoples seek sovereignty for themselves in the sense of the formation of an independent, internationally recognised state with ultimate authority over all matters within a determinately bounded territory. Most Indigenous peoples seek significantly greater and more secure selfdetermination within the framework of a wider polity (2000:252).

I contend that Indigenous mobilization strategies that utilize and innovate within dominant political structures for the purpose of asserting culturally relevant alternatives that embrace Indigenous rights and autonomy over
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traditional lands and resources are consistent with these broader aspirations. They also provide insights into the agency-generating mechanisms that can sustain political challenges and produce positive outcomes despite a relatively closed political system. Mainstream structural and cultural barriers to meaningful recognition of Indigenous fishing rights In general, broad-based Aboriginal mobilization over fishing rights has been relatively rare in Australia. Instead, resistance against unilateral state and industry control of marine and estuary resources has been far more localized and piecemeal. One explanation for this is that the Australian government has favoured the native title system a single, overarching institutionalized process for adjudicating Indigenous rights to land and sea resources. Because this system is particularly ill-suited to address the cultural and economic facets of Indigenous aquatic rights, Traditional Owners have little choice but to mobilize their efforts elsewhere if they hope to achieve recognition of the full-breadth of their authority. Contemporary native title law in Australia evolved out of the landmark case of Mabo and Others v. The State of Queensland. In the Mabo decision, the Australian High Court struck down the longstanding legal fiction of terra nullius, which had provided the philosophical foundation upon which the Australian colonial state was built. Specifically, the High Court held that the Indigenous inhabitants of Australia held customary native title in their traditional lands so long as [it has] not been validly extinguished by legislative or executive action, provided that they have not surrendered their title or lost their connection with the land (Horrigan 2003 citing Mason 1996:3). Despite its promise, the native title process poses major obstacles to meaningful assertions of Indigenous authority over traditional natural resources. Firstly, native title tribunals deal with the claims of Indigenous Peoples separately, hindering cooperation between Indigenous communities and the pooling of resources in order to achieve shared benefits. Secondly, native title courts have the authority to determine whether Indigenous groups have proven a continuous application of traditional law over a particular resource. This gives primacy to determinations by non-Indigenous judges about the content and the authenticity of traditional Aboriginal culture (Brennan 2007). By anointing the courts as the final arbiters of traditional culture, the native title system thereby reduces Indigenous Peoples power to define their own cultural prerogatives. In order to maximize their chances of achieving meaningful authority over valuable marine resources, Traditional Owners often choose to assert their rights through political channels outside the native title system. This presents its own challenges. Generally, the regulatory structure for
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managing natural resources in Australia is divided between the states and the Commonwealth (Reilly 2006). Within these regimes, authority is further spilt amongst a number of bureaucratic agencies with conflicting agendas. This has resulted in a hodgepodge of incongruent fishing regulations and rulings that, for the most part, have given short shrift to Indigenous customary rights and have proscribed commercial fishing altogether. Traditional Owners are thereby compelled to negotiate individually with Federal and State governments with no guarantee of a consistent outcome (National Native Title Tribunal 2005). The tendency of administrative agencies to deal with Indigenous interests at the local level only has also inhibited the assertion of rights in a unified fashion. Ross and Pickering (2002) contend that, by recognizing hundreds of separate individual communities and governments, there has been less structural space for one powerful Indigenous voice to emerge and demand access and input into natural resource agencies (p. 208). Another major obstacle facing Indigenous activists is that agencies with authority over Aboriginal affairs are predominantly staffed by nonIndigenous people who fail to advocate effectively for Aboriginal Peoples needs. The same can generally be said for native title judges and the experts who testify to the presence or absence of unbroken Indigenous authority over particular resources. In light of these demographics, it is perhaps unsurprising that management regimes and regulatory frameworks tend to favour Western scientific definitions of conservation over more holistic Indigenous notions regarding sustainability. The privileging of Western scientific paradigms in natural resource management and in the legal frameworks used to determine Aboriginal fishing rights is exhibited in several crucial ways. First, mainstream legal systems separate land and sea rights, applying different standards to each. While the native title system specifically recognizes the potential for exclusive Aboriginal title over land, the same does not hold true for Aboriginal rights to sea territory. The government has not minced any words in relation to native title in the sea: native title is not recognized in the sea. This of course is a presumption of epic proportions that flies in the face of aboriginal assertions now and forever (Roberts and Tanna 1998:3). The disparate treatment of sea rights is based on the European legal fiction that the sea is part of the commons and cannot be owned or exclusively possessed (Glaskin 2002). Sharp (1998) describes this philosophical tension in Aboriginal and European definitions of sea country as follows:
In Aboriginal terms, northern coastal marine space is a series of common property areas owned by identifiable Indigenous groups with restricted memberships, each with its own geographical locale; and these are handed down as part of land-sea inalienable tenures in regimes based on local law and custom. In Anglo-Australian law state territorial marine space is an area of open access based on the public rights of all Australian citizens conceived as isolated individuals (p.3). 79

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The Yolnu people of the Northern Territory clarify their integrated view of their land and sea countries straightforwardly, stating that all Yolnu lands are connected to the sea and we make no distinction between sea and land estates when we exercise our customary rights and responsibilities (Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation 2006). Second, non-Indigenous natural resource managers tend to take a divided approach to ecosystem management that is based on bureaucratic jurisdictions, rather than ecosystems, which is the norm within Aboriginal societies. Where Indigenous Peoples are able to acquire governmental funding for the management of marine resources, they are commonly expected to participate in established co-management protocols that require adherence to Western scientific expectations. Thus, even where Indigenous Peoples take the lead in resource management efforts, they are often unable to exert meaningful substantive control over the process. An Indigenous resource manager echoed this sentiment when he explained that, the word governance is a tricky one some might even call it a weasel word. In Natural Resource Management when people talk of Indigenous governance more often than not they use blackfella names to refer to whitefella ways (NAILSMA 2008:49). Further inhibiting broad-based mobilization is the fact that Aboriginal activists confront a general population that is, at best, indifferent and, at worst, hostile to their plight. General hostility toward Indigenous claims is emanating with increased vigour from the growing environmental and conservation movements. As conservation of the marine environment becomes a paramount concern for Australians, many are quick to target Aboriginal consumptive practices as in need of reform, rather than considering the far more destructive activities of commercial and recreational fishermen. A primary focus has been on the traditional hunting of dugongs for subsistence and ceremonial purposes. While experts historically recognized dugong population decline as incidental to nonIndigenous recreational boating and commercial fishing endeavours, many have now shifted their stance to suggest that Aboriginal hunting is principally responsible for the decline (National Native Title Tribunal 2004). This is despite findings by the National Recreational and Indigenous Fishing Survey that recreational fishers harvested approximately 136 million aquatic animals during 2000 and 2001, while Indigenous fishers harvested only 3 million aquatic animals (Durette 2007). Notwithstanding the conflicting evidence, Australian policymakers have responded with greater regulation of Indigenous dugong hunting, while placing few meaningful restrictions on incidental kills by commercial and recreational fisherman (National Native Title Tribunal 2004; Ross and Pickering 2002). The baseless accusations of non-Indigenous conservationists and the over-regulation of Indigenous dugong hunting provide glaring examples of latent forms of racism that persist in Australia at the public and institutional levels. Within this context of intolerance, Aboriginal activities alone are constructed as a social problem (Petray 2010). Finally, Aboriginal activists must contend with non-Indigenous Australians static views of Aboriginal culture, which constructs authentic Indigenous
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culture as attached only to stereotypical Indigenous ways of life that are rooted firmly in the past. While these attitudes are slowly changing, some nonIndigenous policymakers cling to the belief that traditional Indigenous culture essentially stopped at the time of contact with European settlers (Ross and Pickering 2002). According to this logic, commercial fishing is considered an inherently modern economic endeavour that is incompatible with nonIndigenous perceptions of pre-contact Aboriginal ways of life. Although anthropological and historical evidence suggests that as early as the 1700s Aboriginal fishermen from Northern Australia traded fish with Macassan fishermen from the Indonesian archipelago, such evidence has not been accepted by the courts or by policymakers as proof of the existence of traditional commercial fishing by Aboriginal Peoples (Durette 2007). Indeed, no native title rights to engage in commercial fishing have been recognized in Australia and, at present, Aboriginal and non-Indigenous commercial fishermen are regulated identically. As a result, Indigenous customary fishing rights have been relegated to a subsistence level only and viable opportunities for economic independence have been closed to Aboriginal Peoples. While these formidable structural obstacles that stand in the way of the states recognition of broadbased Aboriginal fishing rights may appear insurmountable, Aboriginal Peoples have not abandoned their claims to these vital traditional resources. Instead, as the following sections reveal, Aboriginal activists have responded by innovating within existing bureaucratic channels and focusing on local initiatives, such as the negotiation of co-management and resource access plans with state and regional agencies, rather than utilizing their limited resources to mobilize for sweeping national-level changes.

Indigenous Australian response and mobilization In light of, or in spite of, the structural limitations confronting them, Indigenous Peoples in Australia have pursued an array of strategies to secure greater recognition of their traditional fishing rights. This section highlights the goals asserted by Indigenous fishermen, the institutional and extra-institutional arenas through which they assert these goals, and the tactical innovations that Indigenous Peoples employ to maximize their opportunities for achieving their political and economic objectives, while also ensuring that their cultural needs are met. This final point is perhaps the most compelling since the cultural concerns of Indigenous fishermen, including their ability to engage in traditionally significant hunting and fishing of aquatic resources, their management of these resources according to culturally-prescribed, sacred obligations, and the passing of traditional knowledge down to future generations, are of paramount concern and provide the moral framework for the breadth of their claims.

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Goals asserted Indigenous Australians emphasize three primary objectives regarding their traditional sea countries. First, they assert rights to access and take aquatic resources according to traditional laws and customs. These rights include the ability to hunt endangered and threatened species of dugong, sea turtles and, sometimes, saltwater crocodiles. Given the sensitive condition of dugong and turtle populations, and the general belief by non-Indigenous Australians that traditional methods of hunting these creatures are outmoded and barbaric, Indigenous Peoples face ongoing opposition to their basic rights to access and harvest these traditional species. This is the case despite Traditional Owners customary obligations to protect dugongs and turtles and despite the more devastating threat posed to these species by non-Indigenous recreational and commercial activities. Indigenous claimants also demand access to traditionally harvested finfish, such as barramundi, and shellfish, including abalone and oysters. Access to finfish and shellfish remains important to meeting the subsistence needs of coastal Indigenous Peoples, who comprise approximately half of Australias Indigenous population, and Torres Strait Islanders, whose seafood consumption is among the highest in the world (Smyth 2001). Opposition to these claims generally comes from members of the commercial fishing sector who view Indigenous fishing without a license as an unfair incursion into their economic interests. Second, Indigenous fishers demand meaningful participation in the management of fisheries and aquatic resources. While Traditional Owners prefer to be primarily responsible for managing traditional resources, when this is not possible, joint management arrangements with other stakeholders and management agencies are seen as workable, secondary options (Nursey-Bray 2001). At minimum, Indigenous Peoples seek active participation in management regimes where they are able to assert influence within policymaking bodies and engage in management practices that are in line with their traditional laws and customs. The Yolnu people, who reside on their traditional lands in north-eastern Arnhem Land in the Northern Territory, explain why the sustainable management of their sea country is so vital to their cultural continuity:
We continue our care and guardianship as our ancestors have done. We have an intimate knowledge of the environment and ecology in the places for which we have rights and responsibilities. We want our children and grandchildren to receive this knowledge so they can look after sea country. We do not come and go like most non-Indigenous people do. We want to continue to stay here permanently. However it is becoming increasingly difficult to undertake this work because our interests are often ignored or seen as secondary to nonIndigenous issues of open access, economic exploitation and the welfare of the well known and loved marine animals like turtles, dolphins, dugong and whales (Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation 2006).

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Indigenous Peoples desire to meaningfully participate in marine resource management is driven by their appreciation of the link that exists between the relative health of their traditional resources and the health of the local communities that rely upon them for their subsistence, economic and spiritual needs. When talking about sea turtles, the Yolnu people of Northern Australia note that, We believe our wellbeing and turtle (miyapunu) wellbeing are inseparable. To put it another way, we belong to turtles and turtles to us; we sustain them and they us (Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation 2006:25). A Traditional Owner from the Northern Territory expressed similar concerns: Country needs[s] laughter. If we dont look after country, well shrivel up (North Australia Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance 2005:6). A project officer from the North Australia Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance went further to emphasize the importance of culture and traditional knowledge in sustaining healthy resources and healthy Indigenous communities: [F]or many countrymen caring for country includes a whole cultural dimension ceremony, ritual, hunting, harvest, family, fire, and knowledge where all things are connected and make an essential contribution to the maintenance of healthy people and healthy country (North Australia Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance 2005:6). A third goal of Indigenous stakeholders is to make a reasonable living from the traditional aquatic resources that they have harvested for thousands of years. Indigenous Australians do not separate their economic aspirations from their social, cultural, and political interests in sea country. Such divisions are seen as purely artificial categorizations imposed by White Australians according to Western cultural and legal norms that favour the interests of non-Indigenous stakeholders. The economic development of aquatic resources is viewed as natural for Indigenous Peoples, who have historically cultivated, harvested, and managed these resources to provide for their material needs, both through consumption and trade. According to the Yolnu people, the historical cultivation of traditional marine resources should form the foundation of legal recognition of their contemporary economic rights as well: We argue that our prior ownership should give us an economic stake in the regional industries that rely on our sea country (Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation 2006: 52). Moreover, commercialization of traditional fisheries offers opportunities for Indigenous Australians to achieve economic independence and reduce their reliance on public assistance. While Indigenous Peoples dependence on the Australian welfare system remains a source of contempt for many nonIndigenous Australians, few are willing to concede to Indigenous Peoples a meaningful place in the commercial fisheries market, arguing that commercial activities are not traditional enough to justify exempting Indigenous fishermen from commercial licensing regulations. This is particularly frustrating for Indigenous Peoples who feel that non-Indigenous Australians are benefitting exclusively from traditional Indigenous resources. Peter Yu, an Indigenous leader from the Yawuru community in Western Australia, contends
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that northern Australia is currently experiencing a resources boom and that Indigenous Australians, as major land owners and resource custodians, should benefit from this with innovative and culturally appropriate planning for commercial development (North Australia Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance 2005:5). According to Yu, now is the time to build on and move to the next phase of claiming and defending our rights to country, to a time when our people can get relief, enjoyment and benefits out of exercising these rights (North Australia Indigenous Land and Sea Management Alliance 2005:5). In light of these general attitudes and the legal barriers that preclude Indigenous commercial fishing based on native title rights, Indigenous economic pursuits often remain secondary to their efforts to achieve greater access and management authority over their aquatic resources. Jon Altman, from the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research, believes that greater advocacy by Indigenous Australians for commercial opportunities based on customary marine native title rights might bear fruit, and that Indigenous Australians have yet to put their full legal might behind the notion that traditional economic pursuits should have a place in contemporary markets (Altman Interview, Feb. 28, 2008). Perhaps most striking about these three objectives the right to access, manage, and economically develop their traditional marine resources -- is that, running through each of them, is an over-arching concern with sustaining and preserving Indigenous cultural and normative systems. This is revealed through the emphasis Indigenous activists place on passing down traditional knowledge regarding ceremony and stewardship to future generations, restoring Indigenous communities through the fortification of Indigenous belief systems, empowering Indigenous youth as future leaders, promoting economic selfsufficiency, and conserving the traditionally-significant resources that comprise their ancestral country. The Yolnu people acknowledge the pre-eminence of their cultural interests in their sea country while highlighting how these are inseparable from their political and economic aspirations:
The interests of most other users are in preserving and conserving bio-diversity, in making an economic return or enjoying the sea and shores for recreation and pleasure. All of these reasons for valuing sea country are important to us, but for Yolnu and other Indigenous salt water people, our cultural survival and wellbeing is at stake. We are not just another stakeholder; we are the first Australians whose identity and essence is created in, through and with the sea and its creatures. We wish to contribute to regional and national economic development, in keeping with our time honoured responsibilities to care for the land and sea (Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation 2006: 17).

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Settings and strategies for claims-making Decisions regarding where to assert claims of rights to access, manage and economically develop marine resources are strategic in nature and demonstrate Indigenous challengers keen understanding of the political opportunities and obstacles that they confront. With their three primary objectives in mind, Indigenous actors choose to assert their claims in a variety of institutional and extra-institutional settings. The choice of where and how to pursue their claims depends on the nature of the institutional processes available to them, the opportunities for negotiated agreements, the likelihood of success for selfdirected, independent ventures and, above all, the suitability of each strategy to meet the political, economic and cultural needs of Indigenous communities. The following section highlights the five primary strategies that Indigenous fishers in Australia have pursued: litigation, negotiated settlements and local comanagement agreements, local management of federally-funded programs, commercialization of aquatic resources, and civil disobedience. Litigation The principal institutional settings available to adjudicate Indigenous Australians rights to land and sea resources are native title tribunals. While initially established to reconcile claims to lands and resources in a manner that privileged Indigenous knowledge and traditional law, it has become increasingly evident that the native title process favours non-Indigenous economic interests over the competing claims of Traditional Owners (Foley 1997; Horrigan 2002). In light of this major limitation, many Indigenous stakeholders utilize native title tribunals for the narrow purpose of determining only the presence or absence of native title rights. Traditional Owners reserve the work of fleshing out the content of those rights for smaller-scale negotiated settlements where they have more persuasive power, or through bureaucratic channels that can be more easily influenced by Indigenous stakeholders. Because the native title system is relatively new, many non-Indigenous Australians remain somewhat anxious about the potential for native title determinations to usurp broad swaths of conflicting non-Indigenous interests to land and sea resources. While such an outcome is unlikely, Indigenous stakeholders are able to capitalize on this fear of the unknown in order to secure favourable outcomes through negotiation. Despite the limitations of native title tribunals, Indigenous Australians have remained willing to test the boundaries of native title laws application to traditionally harvested marine mammals and fisheries. Indeed, decisions in several early test cases came down on the side of Traditional Owners, although these rulings were limited in scope to specific animals that could be harvested and the appropriate methods for doing so. Even so, they effectively handed Indigenous activists a legitimate tool by which they could negotiate access to traditionally harvested marine resources (See e.g. Yanner v. Eaton (1999); Stephenson v. Yasso (2006)). Beyond focusing on individual species, a few
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Indigenous Peoples have utilized the native title system to assert more general claims to large areas of their traditional sea country. The foundational case which addressed this matter was Yarmirr v. Northern Territory (2001), in which the Australian High Court affirmed the existence of Aboriginal native title over sea country. This apparent victory for Traditional Owners was severely curtailed, however, by the way these rights were interpreted by the courts. Despite the existence of native marine title, common law rights of navigation and fishing could not be interfered with, meaning that Aboriginal marine title is considered non-exclusive. While native title rights were held to co-exist with the rights of licensed commercial and recreational fishermen, in the event of a conflict between them, non-Indigenous fishing rights would trump (Smyth 2001; See also Akiba on behalf of the Torres Strait Islanders of the Regional Sea Claim Group v State of Queensland (No 2) (2010) FCA 643; Northern Territory of Australia v Arnhem Land Aboriginal Land Trust (2008)). The Yolnu people of the Northern Territory recognize the ramifications of this problematic distinction by the courts:
Our cultural rights including the rights to hunt, fish, gather and use resources allowed by and under our customary laws and customs are confirmed and recognised. However the court ruling [in Yarmirr] defines our rights as nonexclusive. The court found that our rights sit alongside those of others who currently use our sea country. Yet without exclusive control over our country we are still faced with the problems of unlawful intrusion, overfishing, habitat damage and disruption to our coastal communities. We still have difficulty seeing how the rights to fish - only recently exercised by non-Indigenous people in our sea country - can sit equally with our requirements of cultural survival and wellbeing. There are inconsistencies between our rights and responsibilities under our customary law and those recognised under contemporary Australian law. We are struggling to have our sea rights recognised in the same way as our rights on the land are recognised (Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation 2006: 14).

The courts have also been extremely clear that native title rights to marine resources are non-commercial in nature. Although marine native title rights remain subordinate to non-Indigenous commercial and recreational fishing rights, they provide Traditional Owners with the right to access sea country and utilize traditional resources for customary and subsistence purposes. Such rights also generally include the ability to access, manage and protect sacred sites located within traditional marine territories. The positive value of recognized native title through litigation, while limited, was summed up by Jon Altman while explaining the impact of the favourable ruling in Northern Territory of Australia v Arnhem Land Aboriginal Land Trust in 2008:
There is no doubt that this is a very positive outcome for those coastal Traditional Owners who have argued for decades that commercial and

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recreational fishing in the inter-tidal zone impacts negatively on their social, cultural and economic interests. This decision has fundamentally altered the leverage that these Traditional Owners will be able to exercise in negotiations with either commercial or recreational fishers who want access to Aboriginalowned waters (Altman Interview, Feb. 27, 2008).

Negotiated settlements and local co-management agreements Notwithstanding the limitations of the native title system for more sweeping fisheries reform, the recognition of basic marine native title has provided Indigenous Australians with a useful lever with which to negotiate greater access to culturally and economically significant aquatic resources. Negotiation has become a viable option for Indigenous native title holders for several reasons. First, the procedural structure of the native title system itself promotes negotiation over protracted litigation. Determinations of native title are generally quite broad, simply finding that native title either does or does not attach to particular territories or resources. Once determinations are made by the courts, it is then up to the legitimate stakeholders to work out for themselves what those rights entail, with the courts providing a final forum for dispute resolution. Second, outside the native title system it has become more common for management agencies and other stakeholders to proactively negotiate access and co-management arrangements with Traditional Owners rather than waiting for official determinations by the courts. This is due to both increased pressure from Indigenous groups who have become emboldened by the promise of native title recognition, as well as a general concern by non-Indigenous stakeholders who remain uncertain about the scope of native title law and are hoping to avoid protracted litigation. According to one attorney who specializes in native title law, No one really expected Mabo. And ever since then, I think that native title makes governments a bit nervous, because they arent quite sure how its going to go, and what its going to mean when you put it across the whole country (Interview, Feb. 14, 2008). So while on paper marine native title rights appear to give very little to Traditional Owners, they have provided opportunities for Indigenous stakeholders to sit at the table where decisions are being made. According to another expert, because [Australia] is a small country, just being at the table with legitimacy provides an opportunity for good things to happen (Feb. 13, 2008). Historically, Indigenous representation within influential agencies, such as State Departments of Primary Industries or the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority, has been inconsistent, lacking any real policy making authority. While formal shared governance arrangements remain elusive, there is some evidence that agencies are increasingly willing to include Indigenous stakeholders on advisory boards and to consider their unique interests when making policies that impact native title rights to the sea. Within the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park, where management is shared between the Commonwealths Park Authority and the State of Queenslands Environmental
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Protection Agency, Traditional Use of Marine Resources Agreements (TUMRAs) have been utilized to include Aboriginal interests in the operation of the park. Through TUMRAs, Traditional Owners have secured recognition of their rights to hunt marine turtles and dugongs, engage in traditional fishing, and protect culturally significant sites within the park. It is far less common for multi-stakeholder agreements involving Indigenous marine rights to be initiated at the Federal level in Australia. Perhaps this is due to the inconsistent jurisdictional patchwork governing marine resources and Indigenous affairs nationally. Or perhaps there is a lack of motivation to resolve these matters in a national forum as most of the stakeholders interests are more localized. It is also likely that the lack of any clear and consistent statement from the Federal government or the courts regarding the nature and scope of Indigenous marine rights has tempered any sense of urgency among industry stakeholders to concede anything to Traditional Owners that would be codified into national policy. In all likelihood, the absence of a national fisheries settlement or even a working framework for cooperation between Indigenous stakeholders, non-Indigenous recreational and commercial fishers, and marine resource managers, is due to a combination of these factors, as well as a strong states rights movement in Australia that consistently presents obstacles to broad-scale consensus building. Local management of federally-funded programs The willingness to enter into negotiated agreements represents a major shift in thinking by non-Indigenous stakeholders and resource managers about the legitimacy of Indigenous Peoples rights to utilize marine resources and reflects the Australian governments general change in policy toward accommodation and reconciliation with Indigenous Peoples (SinghaRoy 2012). These agreements provide Traditional Owners with a viable mechanism for ensuring that their basic customary rights to access and manage traditional marine resources are protected. That being said, except in the Northern Territory where Indigenous Peoples hold significant bargaining power due to their exclusive control over inter-tidal fisheries, the negotiated rights of Indigenous parties generally remain inferior to the interests of non-Indigenous stakeholders. Another approach that provides Indigenous challengers with a bit more leverage in defining and meeting their own aspirations for sea country is their participation in federally-funded regulatory programs. By developing their own projects, or simply constructing their own agendas within existing management protocols, Indigenous Peoples have more flexibility in meeting their needs as they define them. Maximizing these opportunities often requires Indigenous stakeholders to innovate within bureaucratic funding structures in ways not envisioned by the governmental agencies who are pulling the purse strings. Various governmental programs have been useful to Aboriginal communities seeking greater recognition of their rights to fish, hunt and manage culturallysensitive aquatic resources. A notable example is the National Heritage Trust
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(NHT), which was established in 1997 to help restore and conserve Australia's environment and natural resources. The NHT, which later became the Caring for our Country program, requires viable community involvement in natural resource management and has funded thousands of community-driven initiatives. To facilitate Indigenous Australians country-based management agendas the NHT funded sixteen regional Indigenous Land Management Facilitators and various locally-based Aboriginal Land Management Facilitators whose activities focus on building a structure of representation that meaningfully integrates Indigenous Peoples into decision-making regimes over essential natural resources. Facilitators also work with Traditional Owners to ensure that their own, culturally-relevant management aspirations are included in local programs and that these programs continue to receive funding. These important offices are staffed by young, educated Aboriginal activist-leaders motivated to bolster Indigenous authority on a national level by empowering Indigenous Peoples locally. Through their masterful negotiation of bureaucratic processes and funding sources, these young leaders have become integral to the formulation of creative tactical solutions for Indigenous challengers who seek greater autonomy over their traditional resources. Sea Ranger and Dugong and Turtle Management Programs, in particular, have become valuable avenues for ensuring that Indigenous marine resources are protected on terms that are culturally meaningful to Traditional Owners. These programs were originally established with the acquiescence and funding of the Australian government for the limited purpose of including Traditional Owners in the regulation of Indigenous dugong and turtle hunting in accordance with Western scientific paradigms of environmental protection. Since their inception, however, Indigenous communities have utilized these programs to meet a host of additional cultural prerogatives, including involving youth and elders in the preservation of traditional knowledge, revitalizing community economies by creating jobs for young Indigenous Australians, educating and training a new generation of Indigenous leaders, and protecting spiritually-significant cultural and natural resources, to name a few (NAILSMA 2004; NAILSMA 2007). Notwithstanding the intent that these programs adhere to Western scientific paradigms, the lack of immediate oversight by funding agencies provides Indigenous managers with a great deal of latitude to implement best management practices, which often include the incorporation of traditional knowledge into resource management protocols. Through these programs, Indigenous groups are able to direct the management of culturally-significant resources in ways that accommodate the revitalization of local communities and the development of pan-Indigenous networks across Australia. One Indigenous Ranger recognized the link between inter-tribal cooperation, cultural revitalization and political power noting,
Id like to see a start for the ranger business, for myself and other young local fellasgo out and see different communities, different areas to see how they work so we can get ideas off them to help us with our goals and our aims for the 89

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future. We got to come together and share ideas as Aboriginal people. If we come together and share our ideas than well be more recognised (NAILSMA 2004:14).

Perhaps the most compelling example of Indigenous innovation within an existing regulatory framework has been the development of Sea Plans modeled after Indigenous Protected Area (IPA) designations. IPAs are tracts of Indigenous lands set aside under Australias National Reserve System and managed by Traditional Owners for conservation purposes (Australian Department of Environment and Water Resources 2007). These innovative resource management initiatives are philosophically well-suited to Indigenous self-governance and community revitalization efforts. Through the designation of IPAs, the Australian government acknowledges and legitimates Indigenous Peoples capacity to manage their traditional resources and promotes Indigenous cultural revitalization as a valid policy objective. Indeed, the IPA program operates under the assumptions that: 1) Indigenous Peoples, as the original managers of Australias fragile ecosystems for tens of thousands of years, are ideally suited to be contemporary resource managers; and 2) the integration of Traditional Owners into contemporary resource management regimes will strengthen systems of traditional Aboriginal knowledge, which in turn will have significant social and economic benefits (Australia Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts website 2010). While the original blueprint for IPAs did not apply to sea country, with federal support, a few innovative Aboriginal communities have constructed Sea Country IPAs. The Dhimurru Sea Plan provides a particularly successful example. Dhimurru is an incorporated Aboriginal organization established in 1992 by Yolnu land owners in the Northeast Arnhem Land of the Northern Territory. After registering the Dhimurru IPA over a portion of their lands and successfully demonstrating the existence of native title to culturally significant islands and offshore sacred sites, the Yolnu developed and launched a comprehensive Sea Country Plan in 2006 with funding from the now defunct National Oceans Office (Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation 2006). The Plan represents an innovative and community-driven initiative that puts Indigenous marine interests into the hands of Indigenous Peoples. Through the plan, the Yolnu people outlined their cultural and material interests and obligations to their traditional sea country, the historical, social and ceremonial sources of those interests, and ideas for engaging other stakeholders to ensure that the Yolnu peoples needs are met while also respecting the interests of nonIndigenous resource users and managers:
We believe Marine Protected Areas (MPAs) may be a way to promote the sustainable and equitable management of our sea country, particularly if they are a formal mechanism to recognise our rights, responsibilities and management efforts in a similar way to the recently declared Indigenous Protected Areas. We look forward to discussing with government a model for 90

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MPAs that is workable for Yolnu people and enhances our position as primary protectors and managers of our marine estates. Such a model should be constructed on a solid scientific basis and our traditional knowledge, skills and understandings. It would need to consider cultural, social and economic factors (Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation 2006).

Instead of sitting back and waiting for government and industry representatives to dictate the terms of the Yolnu peoples rights, the Yolnu took their clear plan and set of aspirations to the government agencies. For its part, the government recognized the Yolnus request as consistent with its official stance favouring reconciliation with Indigenous Australians and helped the community identify funding resources and other logistical mechanisms for implementing the plan. Commercialization of traditional resources Indigenous Australians participate in the labour force at rates far below that of non-Indigenous citizens (Gray, Hunter and Lohoar 2012). While many Australians bemoan Aboriginal Peoples reliance on government welfare, few are open to meaningful Indigenous participation in the primary industries if that participation might interfere with the economic pursuits of non-Indigenous Australians (National Native Title Tribunal 2004). For their part, Indigenous Australians are legitimately aggrieved that they have been denied any economic benefit from the commercialization of what were once their exclusive resources (Smyth 2001). They maintain an inherent connection between their cultural and economic interests in traditional resources that cannot be artificially separated (Yu 2007). The Australian High Courts limitation of marine native title rights to non-exclusive, customary and subsistence practices has signaled the futility of native title tribunals as prospective settings for pursuing economic independence. That being said, the entire native title process has emboldened Indigenous challengers to utilize existing native title rights to leverage opportunities and to pursue more innovative pathways to economically develop marine resources. Most Indigenous communities do not have the infrastructure or capital necessary to pursue commercialization of their sea country and they require governmental assistance through funding, licensing or, better still, policies that prioritize and facilitate Indigenous economic development of traditional resources. To help alleviate the devastation of centuries of economic marginalization, many Indigenous Australians believe that the government should assist them on their journey to economic self-sufficiency as an essential step in the process of reconciliation. According to Peter Yu,
Despite the substantial Indigenous land holding interests, we are cash and asset poor and with little opportunity to attract investment. Governments, both State and Commonwealth, have been irresponsibly inept at providing a statutory land

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regime that links our common law rights with our potential for economic and social development (Yu 2007:11-12).

While it would be preferable to Indigenous Australians to have the legal recognition of their commercial rights so that they can assert greater autonomy in their pursuit of economic independence, at the very least, they require substantial and consistent funding and support. To some extent, government funding of Indigenous commercial activities has been forthcoming. Since native title jurisprudence re-awakened concerns about Indigenous Peoples economic, educational and health disparities, Federal and State agencies have started to develop programs to alleviate inequalities. As a strategy for overcoming economic disadvantage, fishing and aquaculture have been identified as natural industries for Indigenous development that can enable them to make a living from traditional resources, and, most importantly, to remain on country and keep their communities intact. These new programs have spawned a handful of Indigenous-owned fishing and aquaculture businesses across Australia (See e.g. National Native Title Tribunal 2006). A few examples include commercial mud-crabbing in King Sound in Western Australia by the Emama Gnuda Aboriginal corporation, lobster fishing by a Cape York community of Lockhart River in far northern Queensland, and more general commercial trochus shell fishing in Western Australia. Other Indigenous groups are entering into innovative partnerships with the private fishing sector to cultivate commercial industries within their sea countries. A compelling example is an agreement to construct the worlds first sea sponge farm within the Indigenous community on Palm Island. This project represents a unique collaboration between Traditional Owners, a private business group, the Australian Institute of Marine Science, and the State Development and Innovation Centre Townsville. If successful, the project will provide employment and capacity building opportunities for Indigenous Palm Islanders and will be conducted in a way that respects the cultural heritage and values of the Traditional Owners (National Native Title Tribunal 2005b). To Walter Palm Island, one of the senior elders who negotiated the agreement, the opportunities that the project would provide to the Islands youth are the most important reasons to pursue it: A lot of young people here have talents and this is a way of nurturing them, giving them self esteem and making them feel important (National Native Title Tribunal 2005b:3).

Civil disobedience Given the limitations of formal institutional channels for formidable assertions of Indigenous rights to access, manage and utilize their traditional marine resources, it is somewhat surprising that widespread civil disobedience is not more prevalent. While certainly not an alien tactic to Indigenous activists, as the massive protests during the land rights movement of the 1970s-1980s are
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testament, acts of civil disobedience over Indigenous aquatic rights have been relatively lacking. There are, however, a few notable exceptions. The first involves the open defiance of State laws prohibiting the poaching of abalone without a license by Indigenous fishers in New South Wales and Tasmania. Despite arrests, significant fines, and court rulings rejecting their native title rights to the shellfish, Traditional Owners vow to continue to exercise their cultural rights to harvest abalone as they have been doing for generations without obtaining State licenses. Joe Carriage, a Traditional Owner who has been prosecuted for poaching abalone in New South Wales, claims that the sea provides the strongest cultural link to Aboriginal Peoples in southern Australia and he fears that, without political action, this link will be lost to future generations. He contends that, If us older fellas don't take a stand were going to lose everything [and] we're going to have no culture, we're going to have nothing (Murphy 2004). A second example of direct activism comes from far northern Queensland where Indigenous Torres Strait Islanders have made claims to exclusive ownership of their sea country (Scott and Mulrennan 2010). Notwithstanding the Australian High Courts rejection of exclusive native title rights to the sea, Indigenous Islanders have demanded that commercial operators stay away from their traditional fishing grounds. In one case, approximately seventy Islanders staged a peaceful protest against the presence of non-Indigenous commercial operators in the region, although rumours of armed conflict motivated the State of Queensland to send a boatload of police reinforcements to defuse the situation (National Native Title Tribunal 2005a). While many non-Indigenous commercial fishermen vowed to stand and fight for their rights against the Indigenous pirates, others stated that they would rather leave the region than continue to clash with the Torres Strait Islanders (National Native Title Tribunal 2005a). It is noteworthy that both these instances of protest are local in nature and that they focus on immediate threats to Indigenous Peoples culturally-derived rights to access, harvest and consume marine resources without undue interference from non-Indigenous actors. These examples, along with the numerous local and regional agreements discussed above, suggest that for Indigenous Australians the customary practices of fishing and harvesting marine resources are inherently local matters. Accordingly, their first choice is to resolve disputes between stakeholders at the scale where such practices occur. The relative absence of pan-Indigenous protest also reflects the broader political and institutional structures in Australia, which hinder pan-Indigenous mobilization by treating Indigenous claims-makers individually and failing to provide any meaningful national forums for adjudicating Indigenous sea country claims.

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Indigenous innovation and agency The findings discussed in the previous section reveal that Indigenous Australian advocates of fishing and aquatic rights use a variety of innovative, adaptive strategies to meet their material and cultural objectives. These findings are pertinent not only for demonstrating the constraining influence of political structures on mobilization tactics, but also for highlighting the agency and innovation of Indigenous actors in deploying strategies of action that allow them to assert themselves upon dominant political processes in culturally and materially meaningful ways. This is the case despite formidable political barriers that remain as a result of the long and destructive history of colonization, the marginalized status of Indigenous Peoples, and the persistence of prejudicial attitudes and discriminatory policies in Australia. Despite these barriers, Indigenous fishers utilize multi-level approaches to claims-making, which span local, regional and national initiatives. Aboriginal stakeholders continue to assert their native title rights to sea country through litigation and through established bureaucratic channels. But, because the courts, the States and the Commonwealth remain relatively closed to broadbased assertions of Aboriginal marine rights, Indigenous fishers must deploy other innovative strategies to make their claims. A primary strategy involves wielding potential native title rights as leverage in negotiations with local stakeholders. Another involves the strategic manipulation of small-scale government programs in order to more relevantly meet their cultural, political and economic aspirations. These programs, which include Sea Ranger and Indigenous Protected Areas initiatives, were originally established to provide necessary services to Indigenous Peoples and to involve Indigenous communities in co-management of natural resources. However, the operation of such programs is often removed enough from bureaucratic oversight to enable Indigenous Peoples to direct their implementation. The utilization of a variety of institutional, extra-institutional and innovative strategies for pursuing traditional aquatic rights reflects Indigenous political actors nuanced understanding of existing political opportunities as well as the benefits and drawbacks of pursuing certain tactics over others. The unique combination of strategies employed in each site is designed to maximize the immediate material objectives of Indigenous stakeholders while ensuring that their long-term cultural and political aspirations are foregrounded. Taken together, Indigenous mobilization strategies demonstrate persistence and tactical innovation in the face of daunting political obstacles. According to McAdam (1983), the key challenge facing excluded groups is to devise some way to overcome the basic powerlessness that has confined them to a position of institutionalized political impotence (p.340). They initially do this by using non-institutional tactics to force their opponents to deal with them. Once they succeed at this stage, they must either parlay [their] initial successes into institutionalized power or continue to experiment with noninstitutional forms of protest (p.340). In Australia, Aboriginal activists have thus far been unable to achieve widespread institutionalized authority over aquatic resources through
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the courts or legislative processes. Rather than succumbing to widely shared feelings of pessimism and impotence that are likely to prevail (p. 341) where excluded groups confront a political establishment that is largely opposed to its interests, Indigenous Australians have shifted their strategic focus to more innovative tactics, operating both inside and outside formal institutional settings. The deployment of alternative tactical solutions by Indigenous challengers reflects the significance of human agency in sustaining challenges against the state despite the presence of constraining political structures. Even though recent legal decisions show little movement on the issue of Aboriginal aquatic rights, there is evidence that the attitudes of non-Indigenous policy-makers regarding the legitimacy of Indigenous Peoples claims are starting to change. In particular, there has been increasing recognition of the importance of traditional knowledge and the potential for Aboriginal Australians to take on leadership roles in marine management initiatives, especially with regard to the management of threatened dugong and sea turtle species. Australias former Minister of Environment Protection, Heritage and the Arts, Peter Garrett, echoed this at an awards ceremony honouring leaders of the North Australia Land and Sea Management Alliance when he described Indigenous Peoples as the front-line managers of the north Australian coast where dugong and turtle remain abundant (NAILSMA 2008). My findings also reveal that natural resource managers have been more open to incorporating Indigenous access and management aspirations into aquatic regulatory schemas along the Australian coast. Given the lack of any legal mandate requiring such accommodation, these changes imply a meaningful shift in thinking about the legitimacy of Indigenous marine title in Australia that is consistent with the arguments that Indigenous activists have been making for years. They also confirm the vulnerability of the Australian governments legitimate authority to regulate Indigenous Peoples and their resources and expose important ideological openings for more focused Indigenous mobilization. More significantly, these transformations, even while modest in scope, demonstrate the influence of Indigenous tactical innovations within bureaucratic arenas formerly monopolized by the state. Finally, the achievement of greater autonomy over highly contested natural resources demonstrates modest but clear movement toward the decolonization of national regulatory regimes in Australia and reveals that Indigenous Peoples are the primary agents of such change. To secure greater recognition of their culturallyderived fishing rights, Indigenous actors in Australia have been able to navigate a relatively closed political system by fashioning workable strategies that maximize their potential for greater autonomy over their marine resources.

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Conclusion In-depth analysis of the Australian case reveals that during episodes of political contention, Indigenous stakeholders are particularly masterful at deploying tactical solutions both inside and outside mainstream political structures. The result is a multi-level approach to political claims-making that simultaneously favours litigation, negotiation, civil disobedience, strategic partnerships and independent approaches, depending on which tactic, or combination of tactics, best achieves their material goals while maximizing their cultural objectives. Given the enduring colonial legacies that continue to dominate the lives of Indigenous Australians and marginalize them from meaningful participation in political processes, one might expect assertions of Indigenous fishing rights to be particularly impotent. While, in many ways political structures still constrain the content and impact of their claims, Indigenous actors are capable of strategically innovating in ways that are, ultimately, effective in bringing about modest legal and institutional changes. While Australian Traditional Owners have yet to achieve widespread structural transformations, by infusing the democratic process with political and cultural demands, they have succeeded in altering the discourses within which the relationship between Indigenous Peoples and the Australian state are constructed. In the wise words of Native American scholar, Vine Deloria, Indigenous Australians, like many Indigenous Peoples around the world, are becoming increasingly adept at dismantling the masters house (Morris 2003:9). References Akiba on behalf of the Torres Strait Islanders of the Regional Sea Claim Group v. State of Queensland (No 2) (2010) FCA 643. Alfred, Taiaiake. 1999. Peace, Power, Righteousness: An Indigenous Manifesto. Toronto: Oxford University Press. Alvarez, Sonia E., Evelina Dagnino and Arturo Escobar, eds. 1998. Culture of Politics, Politics of Cultures: Revisioning Latin American Social Movements. Boulder, CO: Westview Press. Australian Department of Environment and Water Resources. 2007. Growing Up Strong: The First 10 Years of Indigenous Protected Areas in Australia. Canberra, ACT: Commonwealth of Australia. Australia Department of Environment, Water, Heritage and the Arts. 2010. Sea Country Indigenous Protected Areas. URL: http://www.environment.gov.au/indigenous/ipa/sea.html (accessed 3.12.2010). Barker, Joanne. 2005. For Whom Sovereignty Matters. Pp. 1-31, in Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, edited by Joanne Barker. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.
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Barker, Joanne. 2005. Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Bergeron, Kristina Maud. 2010. Global Activism and Changing Identities: Interconnecting the Global and the Local The Grand Council of the Crees and Saami Council. Pp. 107-129 in Indigenous Peoples and Autonomy: Insights for a Global Age, edited by Mario Blaser, Ravi de Costa, Deborah McGregor, and William D. Coleman. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Billings, Dwight B. 1990. Religion as Opposition: A Gramscian Analysis. The American Journal of Sociology 96(1): 1-31. Bobo, Lawrence D. and Mia Tuan. 2006. Prejudice in Politics: Group Position, Public Opinion, and the Wisconsin Treaty Rights Dispute. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Brennan, Sean. 2007. Recent Developments in Native Title Law Case Law. Presented at the Human Rights Law Bulletin Seminar, HREOC, Sydney, 4 June 2007. Cornell, Stephen. 1984. Crisis and Response in Indian-White Relations: 19601984. Social Problems 32(1): 44-59. Cornell, Stephen. 1988. The Return of the Native: American Indian Political Resurgence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dhimurru Land Management Aboriginal Corporation. 2006. Dhimurru Yolngu Monuk Gapu Wana Sea Country Plan: A Yolnu Vision and Plan for Sea Country Management in North-east Arnhem Land, Northern Territory. Nhulunbuy, Northern Territory. Durette, Melanie. 2007. Indigenous Property Rights in Commercial Fisheries: Canada, New Zealand and Australia Compared Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research WORKING PAPER No. 37/2007. Falk, Phillip and Gary Martin. 2007. Misconstruing Indigenous Sovereignty: Maintaining the Fabric of Australian Law. Pp. 33-46, in Sovereign Subjects: Indigenous Sovereignty Matters. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin. Fantasia, Rick and Eric L. Hirsch. 1995. Culture in Rebellion: The Appropriation and Transformation of the Veil in the Algerian Revolution. Pp. 144-162 in Social Movements and Culture, edited by Hank Johnston and Bert Klandermans. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. Fenelon, James V. 1998. Culturicide, Resistance and Survival of the Lakotas. New York: Routledge. Foley, Gary. 1997. Native Title is not Land Rights. The Koori History Website. URL: http//www.kooriweb.org/foley/essays/essay_2.html (accessed 2.7.2013).

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Freeman, Milton M.R., Lyudmila Bogoslovskaya, Richard A. Caulfield, Ingmar Egede, Igor I. Krupnik, and Marc G. Stevenson. 1998. Inuit, Whaling, andSustainability. Walnut Creek, CA: AltaMira Press. Gedicks, Al. 1993. The New Resources Wars: Native and Environmental Struggles against Multinational Corporations. Boston, MA: South End Press. Gedicks, Al. 2001. Resource Rebels: Native Challenges to Mining and Oil Companies. Cambridge, MA: South End Press. Glaskin, Katie. June 2002. Limitations to the Recognition and Protection of Native Title Offshore: The Current Accident of History. Land, Rights, Laws: Issues in Native Title, Vol. 2, Issues paper #5. Native Title Research Unit. Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Gramsci, Antonio 1971. Selections from the Prison Notebooks. New York: International Publishers Co. Gray, Matthew, Boyd Hunter and Shaun Lohoar. 2012. Increasing Indigenous Employment Rates. Issues Paper No. 3/2012. Closing the Gap Clearinghouse, Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. Hall, Thomas D. and James V. Fenelon. 2008. Indigenous Movements and Globalization: What is Different? What is the Same? Globalizations 5(1): 1-11. Horrigan, Bryan. 2002. Native Title: Where to Now? Online opinion: http://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=1046. (accessed 15.12.2008). Horrigan, Bryan. 2003. Australian Native Title Law: A Report Card. Economic Society of Australia. Dec. 2003. Johnson, Troy, Joane Nagel and Duane Champagne, eds. 1997. American Indian Activism: Alcatraz to the Longest Walk. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Josephy, Jr., Alvin M., Joane Nagel and Troy Johnson, eds. 1999. Red Power: The American Indians Fight for Freedom. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Loveman, Mara. 2005. The Modern State and the Primitive Accumulation of Symbolic Power American Journal of Sociology 110(6): 1651-83. Maaka, Roger and Augie Fleras. 2005. The Politics of Indigeneity: Challenging the State in Canada and Aotearoa New Zealand. Dunedin, NZ: Otago Press. Maddison, S. 2008. Indigenous Autonomy Matters: Whats Wrong with the Australian Governments Intervention in Aboriginal Communities. Australian Journal of Human Rights 14(1): 41-61. Maddison, S. 2009. Black Politics: Inside the Complexity of Aboriginal Political Culture. Crows Nest, NSW: Allen & Unwin.

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Mabo and Others v The State of Queensland (No2) (1992) 175 CLR 1. McAdam, Doug. 1983. Tactical Innovation and the Pace of Insurgency. American Sociological Review 48: 735-754. McAdam, Doug, Sidney G. Tarrow, and Charles Tilly, eds. 2001. Dynamics of Contention. New York, NY: Cambridge University Press. Merlan, Francesca. 2005. Indigenous Movements in Australia. Annual Review of Anthropology 34: 473-94. Morris, Aldon. 2000. Reflections on Social Movement Theory: Criticisms and Proposals. Contemporary Sociology 29(3): 445-454. Morris, Glenn T. 2003. Vine Deloria, Jr., and the Development of a Decolonizing Critique of Indigenous Peoples and International Relations, Pp. 97-154 in Native Voices: American Indian Identity and Resistance, edited by Richard A. Grounds, George E. Tinker and David E. Wilkins. Lawrence, KS: The University of Kansas Press. Morris, Glenn T. 1992. International Law and Politics: Toward a Right to Self Determination for Indigenous Peoples. Pp. 55-86, in The State of Native America: Genocide, Colonization, and Resistance, edited by M. Annette Jaimes. Boston: South End Press. Murphy, Sean. 2004. Aborigines Test Sea Rights Law. Landline Online URL: http://www.abc.net.au/landline/content/2004/s1148417.htm (accessed 24.6. 2010). Nagel, Joane. 1996. American Indian Ethnic Renewal: Red Power and the Resurgence of Identity and Culture. New York: Oxford University Press. NAILSMA. 2004. Kantri Laif: News for Indigenous Land and Sea Managers Across North Australia 1:Dry/Wet Season 2004. NAILSMA. 2007. Kantri Laif: News for Indigenous Land and Sea Managers Across North Australia 3: 2007. NAILSMA. 2008. Kantri Laif: News for Indigenous Land and Sea Managers Across North Australia 4:2008. National Native Title Tribunal. 2004. National Native Title Tribunals Fisheries Bulletin, November 2004. National Native Title Tribunal. 2005a. National Native Title Tribunals Fisheries Bulletin, July 2005. National Native Title Tribunal. 2005b. Talking Native Title: News from the National Native title Tribunal, 16: Sept. 2005. National Native Title Tribunal. 2006. National Native Title Tribunals Fisheries Bulletin, May 2006. Nesper, Larry. 2002. The Walleye War: The Struggle for Ojibwe Spearfishing and Treaty Rights. Lincoln, NE; University of Nebraska Press.

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Ontai, Kilipaka Kawaihonu Nahili Pae. 2005. A Spiritual Definition of Sovereignty from a Kanaka Maoli Perspective. Pp. 153-168, in Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination, edited by Joanne Barker. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press. Petray, Theresa Lynn. 2000. Actions, Reactions, Interactions: The Townsville Aboriginal Movement and the Australian State. PhD Thesis, James Cook University. Reilly, Alexander. 2006. A Constitutional Framework for Indigenous Governance. Sydney Law Review 28:402-435. Roberts, Chris and Archie Tanna. 1998. Aboriginal Maritime Estates and their Relevance in the Context of Modern Management. Presented at the Coast to Coast Conference, Perth 1998. Ross, Anne, and Kathleen Pickering. 2002. "The Politics of Reintegrating Australian Aboriginal and American Indian Indigenous Knowledge into Resource Management: The Dynamics of Resource Appropriation and Cultural Revival." Human Ecology: An Interdisciplinary Journal 187:28. Scott, Colin and Monica Mulrennan. 2010. Reconfiguring Mare Nullius: Torres Strait Islanders, Indigenous Sea Rights, and the Divergence of Domestic and International Norms. Pp. 148-178, in Indigenous Peoples and Autonomy: Insights for a Global Age, edited by Mario Blaser, Ravi de Costa, Deborah McGregor, and William D. Coleman. Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press. Sharp, Nonie. 1998. Reimagining Sea Space. Presented at the Seventh International Conference for the Study of Common Property, Crossing Boundaries, Vancouver, 10-14 June 1998. SinghaRoy, Debal K. 2012. Development, Environmental and Indigenous Peoples Movements in Australia: Issues of Autonomy and Identity. Cosmopolitan Civil Societies Journal 4(1). Smyth, Dermot. 2001. Management of Sea Country: Indigenous Peoples Use and Management of Australias Marine Environments. In Working on Country: Contemporary Indigenous Management of Australias Lands and Coastal Regions, edited by Richard Baker, Jocelyn Davies and Elsbeth Young. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stephenson v. Yasso (2006) QCA 40 (AUS). Stotik, Jeffrey, Thomas E. Shriver, and Sherry Cable. 1994. "Social Control and Movement Outcome: The Case of AIM." Sociological Focus 27: 53-66. Tilly, Charles and Sidney Tarrow. 2006. Contentious Politics. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers. Wilkinson, Charles F. 2000. Messages from Franks Landing: A Story of Salmon, Treaties, and the Indian Way. Seattle: University of Washington Press.
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Wilmer, Franke and Gerald R. Alfred. 1997. "Indigenous Peoples, States and Ethnicity." In Wars in the Midst of Peace: The International Politics of Ethnic Conflict, edited by David Carment and Patrick James. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press. Yanner v. Eaton (1999) HCA 53. Yarmirr v. Northern Territory (2001) HCA 56. Young, Iris Marion. 2000. Hybrid Democracy: Iroquois Federalism and the Postcolonial Project. Pp.237-258, in Political Theory and the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, edited by Duncan Ivison, Paul Patton and Will Sanders. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Yu, Peter. 2007. Growing the Alliance. Presented at Caring for Country 2nd National Indigenous Land and Sea Management Conference, Cardwell, Queensland, 10 October, 2007. About the author Julia Miller Cantzler is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology at the University of San Diego. She is also an attorney, having specialized in Native American Law and Environmental Law. Her research examines the intersections of culture and politics, with a primary focus on international human rights, law, social movements, environmental justice and the rights of Indigenous peoples. Email: jcantzler AT sandiego.edu

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Starting from the Amazon: communication, knowledge and politics of place in the World Social Forum
Hilde C. Stephansen Abstract This article explores how communication activists in Belm, Brazil, engaged with the 2009 World Social Forum (WSF) when it arrived in their city and sought to take advantage of the opportunity it offered to strengthen and gain visibility for place-based movements in the Amazon. While the WSF has enabled an unprecedented diversity of movements to exchange knowledges and experiences, and to a certain extent succeeded in giving voice to marginalised groups, it also has continued to suffer from its own hierarchies and exclusions. These are evident, inter alia, in the asymmetrical relationship that exists between local grassroots groups and global cosmopolitan elites. Emphasising the centrality of place to the construction of alternative epistemological imaginaries, the article analyses efforts by communication activists to facilitate autonomous processes of knowledge production among movements in the Amazon. At once place-based and transnational in scope, their communication strategies challenge conventional hierarchies of scale and highlight the importance of grassroots movements appropriating communication technologies for their own purposes. At stake here is not simply the inclusion of local subalterns within the global WSF, but the construction of communication networks that can support the proliferation of alternative knowledge projects at different scales, within and beyond the WSF.

Introduction
The Pan-Amazon will be the territory of the 9th edition of the World Social Forum. For six days, Belm, the capital of Par, Brazil, takes the place of the center of the region to shelter the greatest anti-globalization event of today and brings together activists from more than 150 countries in a permanent process of mobilization, articulation and search for alternatives for another possible world, free of neoliberal politics and all forms of imperialism. [] Much more than a territory to shelter the WSF the Amazon, represented by its peoples, social movements and organizations, will be protagonist in the process and will have an opportunity to spread their struggle around the world, and make continental and global alliances (World Social Forum, 2009).

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The decision to hold the 2009 World Social Forum in Belm was motivated by a wish to give voice to the peoples of the Pan-Amazon a vast territory spanning nine countries1 and focus attention on the significance of the region to the world as a whole. Highly symbolic, the choice of the Amazon as a site for the WSF was intended as a way to put ecological issues on the agenda of global civil society and give visibility to the struggles and knowledges of movements in the region. Organisers were eager to ensure that the Amazon and its peoples should not simply form the local backdrop to a global meeting but play a leading role. This line of reasoning is in keeping with the by now widely accepted sentiment that place matters in the social forum process (Conway, 2004; 2008a), and that an important function of the WSF should be to set in motion dynamics and give visibility to movements and issues in the place where it is held. In this article, I explore how two particular groups of place-based actors communication activists in Belm who were involved in (1) community radio and (2) participatory video production engaged with the WSF and sought to take advantage of the unique opportunity it offered to strengthen and gain visibility for movements in the Amazon region. I argue that their communication practices complicate conventional hierarchical understandings of scale and demonstrate the importance of grassroots movements constructing their own communication networks that can facilitate autonomous knowledge production. I begin by outlining the theoretical framework that underpins my analysis, focusing first the WSFs contradictory position in the present geopolitical conjuncture. Though it has been conceived as an important site for the elaboration of alternative knowledge projects that can challenge dominant modes of thought, the WSF is also criss-crossed by various axes of exclusion. Suggesting that one such axis relates to the role and status of place-based movements and their knowledges, I outline analytical perspectives that highlight the political and epistemic significance of place in a globalised world, and consider the difference that sensitivity to place makes to the way in which we might conceptualise the relationship between communication and knowledge production in transnational movement networks. I then provide a detailed analysis of the practices of placed-based communication activists at the Belm WSF. I demonstrate how they sought not just to act as conduits of information between the local and the global, but to construct communication spaces both temporary and longer-term which were at once place-based and formed the basis for engagement with wider networks at different scales. This article is based on ethnographic research carried out in Belm from November 2008 to February 2009. During this time, I worked as a volunteer at the office of the organising committee of the WSF 2009 and participated in the activities of the communication working group, helping to organise a set of
1

Bolivia, Brazil, Colombia, Ecuador, French Guyana, Guyana, Peru, Surinam, and Venezuela.

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shared communication projects (Stephansen, 2011; 2012) for independent media. I attended meetings and workshops with communication activists from Belm and elsewhere, and conducted in-depth interviews with them about their practice. I have carried out this research from a position of political commitment and practical engagement, and conceive of the knowledge that it has produced as a collaborative effort. This does not mean that power hierarchies are irrelevant; my identity as an educated white European clearly places me in a position of privilege vis--vis the activists who are the subjects of this article, most of whom were residents of poor urban communities in Belm and of Afro-Brazilian or mixed European/indigenous descent. During my fieldwork I was acutely aware of being perceived by some of these activists as part of a global WSF elite that arrived in their city. Such power differentials cannot easily be ameliorated through methodological dictates, however carefully applied. At the same time, while these differences clearly matter, I also do not want to over-emphasise them, as this might contribute to their reification. What I have tried to do based on an understanding of all knowledge as necessarily socially situated and partial is to position myself in such a way that I might see together with activists in Belm and consider what the WSF looked like from their particular vantage point (cf. Haraway, 1991). The WSF and knowledges from below Since its inauguration in 2001, the WSF has brought together an impressive diversity of movements, many of which are geographically and politically anchored in the global South, with radically different organisational practices, political imaginaries and worldviews. Much has been made of this diversity and the capacity of the WSF to challenge the pensamientos nicos of neoliberal globalisation. A key reference point for such an understanding is Boaventura de Sousa Santoss (2006) notion of the WSF as expressive of an epistemology of the South: a manifestation of epistemic plurality which forms part of a struggle for cognitive justice for knowledges and practices that have been discredited by Western modernity (cf. Santos, 2007; Santos, Nunes & Meneses, 2007). As epistemology of the South, according to Santos, the WSF seeks to replace the monocultures of hegemonic globalisation with ecologies that allow for a plurality of knowledges and practices to coexist. Thus conceived, it might be situated within the broad historical challenge that anti-colonial movements, along with movements of women, indigenous peoples, and ethnic and sexual minorities (among others) have posed to the hegemony of Eurocentric and masculinist worldviews and their claims to universality and objectivity. Insofar as in brings together and advances the knowledge claims of such movements, the WSF might be conceived as a continuation of this trend. Though suggestive of an aspiration, it is however not at all clear that such a vision of the WSF as a space for multiple knowledges from below is empirically accurate, given the very real hierarchies that characterise it in
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practice. As Janet Conway (2012: 24) makes clear, the movements of the WSF are encountering each other on a historically unequal playing field constituted by the coloniality of power.2 Challenging Santoss somewhat optimistic assessment of the WSFs emancipatory potential, this draws attention to the various axes of exclusion that operate also within the supposedly horizontal open space of the Forum.3
Recognizing the character of the contemporary world order as one of global coloniality, and the current period of transition as a crisis of Euro-modernity, problematizes modernity, including its emancipatory traditions. It puts the decolonization of knowledges on the agenda of movements worldwide, especially in navigating North/South, non-indigenous/indigenous, and modern emancipatory/subaltern other divides. The movements of the first halves of the foregoing couplets have been hegemonic relative to their others, historically and currently, in and beyond the social forum. Those others remain far more excluded and subaltern, including in the WSF (Conway, 2012: 24).

One important axis of exclusion within the WSF, which intersects in important respects with the ones mentioned above, relates to the role and status of placebased actors vis--vis those that operate on a more self-evidently global scale. As the WSF has travelled around the world, it has become a site for claims by various local subalterns. From Dalits in India to urban slum-dwellers in Nairobi to indigenous peoples in the Amazon, such groups have come to the WSF to encounter global civil society, make their voices heard, and assert their right to be present in the space of the Forum (Conway, 2004; 2008a). This has not been unproblematic: at several editions of the WSF the exclusion of the local resident population has been the subject of controversy, raising the question of exactly how local or global any given edition of the WSF should be (Conway, 2008a).

The term coloniality of power is used by nibal Quijano (2000) to refer to the persistence of racialised hierarchies of power imposed by European colonialism. More generally, it is associated with the so-called modernity/coloniality research programme, whose members (apart from Quijano) include Walter Mignolo (2000a, 2000b, 2002) and Enrique Dussel (2000, 2002). See Escobar (2004, 2007b) for an overview of this literature and Conway (2012) for an analysis of the WSF from a modernity/coloniality perspective.
2

Commentators have highlighted a number of ways in which the WSF falls short of its ideals of openness and horizontality. These include the formal exclusion from the WSF of political parties, groups involved in armed struggle, and anyone not opposed to neoliberalism (Biccum, 2005; Conway & Singh, 2009; Yl-Anttila, 2005); structural barriers to participation such as travel costs and visa restrictions (Andretta & Doerr, 2007; Doerr, 2007; Vinthagen, 2009; YlAnttila, 2005); the WSFs failure to reach out to new actors beyond the already converted (Andreotti & Dowling, 2004; Sen, 2004); lack of transparency and existence of informal power structures (Albert, 2008; Pleyers, 2004; 2008); more subtle mechanisms of exclusion arising from cultural norms and conventional notions of political literacy (Doerr, 2007; Wright, 2005); and the persistence of discrimination and even violence against women (Roskos & Willis, 2007).
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The debate about the role and status of place-based activisms overlaps in important respects with the question of the subaltern in the WSF (Conway, 2008a). The spaces and decision-making structures of the Forum have been dominated by a highly mobile cosmopolitan elite of scholar-activists many of whom are members of transnational research and advocacy networks who have the resources and inclination to travel the world to attend social forums and related meetings (Pleyers, 2008; Worth & Buckley, 2009). Such cosmopolitan intellectuals who by virtue of their mobility and transnational connections become constituted as global actors within the WSF process have tended also to be the producers of what come to be seen as authoritative knowledges within and about the WSF, while the knowledges of place-based movements (indigenous peoples, rural populations, the urban poor) who come to be constituted as local tend to be marginalised. Although this hierarchy of scale cannot straightforwardly be mapped onto other hierarchies constituted by the coloniality of power, neither is it entirely distinct from them. Though by no means a homogenous group, the cosmopolitan intellectuals who are positioned as global are mostly educated within the terms of Western academia, and the knowledges that have been hegemonic within the WSF as well as in debates about the WSF and global justice more broadly conceived are those that are rooted in the theoretical and political traditions of Western modernity (Conway, 2012). Such hierarchies of knowledge and scale also overlap with racial hierarchies: white or light-skinned Europeans and Euro-descendants are overrepresented among the intellectual elites that are positioned as global, while indigenous peoples, Afrodescendants and other racialised groups figure more prominently among those designated as local. Consequently, the question of decolonisation of knowledge understood as a project concerned with recognising and decentring the authority of Euromodernist thought needs to incorporate the issue of the role and status placebased knowledges, within and beyond the WSF. This is not to say that placebased, grassroots, or subaltern knowledges necessarily or automatically constitute a challenge to Eurocentrism or coloniality,4 but it is to recognise that politics of place and scale are closely bound up with geopolitical hierarchies of knowledge. Problematising globality Beyond the challenge that any particular form of knowledge from below may pose to dominant modes of thought, place-based activisms also problematise the claim to globality that is arguably at the heart of the social forum project. As its name suggests, the WSF from the outset has had a global ambition: it is defined in the Charter of Principles as a world process and routinely described in such terms by organisers and commentators alike. Debates around the status
4

Thanks to Janet Conway for helping me see this point more clearly.

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of place-based activisms draw attention not only to the Forums far from global reach in empirical terms but also the political character of the categories local and global. As Escobar (2008: 30) points out, debates about globalisation have tended to equate the global with space, capital, and the capacity to transform while the local is associated with place, labor, tradition, and hence with what will inevitably give way to more powerful forces. Within such frameworks, local movements are frequently reduced to, at best, misguided struggles to defend traditional ways of life against modernising forces, or, at worst, anti-modern fundamentalisms. Such a conception is also present within the WSF, among those who adopt what Osterweil (2005: 25) refers to as a universalising globalist perspective, according to which effective resistance to neo-liberal capitalist globalization must come in the form of a united global movement that has moved beyond place-based and local struggles. The place-based character of many contemporary movements challenges this equation of the global with the universal. Though such movements are often concerned with the defence of place against the delocalising effects of global capital, their politics of place cannot be reduced to mere resistance to global forces (Escobar, 2008). Rather, it can be seen as an emergent form of politics, a novel political imaginary in that it asserts a logic of difference and possibility that builds on the multiplicity of actions at the level of everyday life (Escobar, 2008: 67). Such a politics of place does not equal insularity: the struggles of many movements involve both the defence of local models of social life and mobilisations involving the construction of coalitions at different scales (Escobar, 2007a; 2008). What is discernible in such practices is an alternative version of globality and what it means to be engaged in global politics. Osterweil conceptualises this emergent politics as place-based globalism: a political imaginary that sees true or qualitative globality as comprised of many nodes, places, interconnections and relations that at no point are totally consolidated into a singular global entity (2005: 26). In such a perspective, the place-based character of such movements can be conceived in terms of a positive project concerned with the construction of alternative political and epistemological imaginaries; an expanding politics of diversity and recognition that acknowledges the multiplicity of alternative visions, values and world views, and the presence of existing other worlds (Conway, 2008b: 223). The practices of such movements involve the production of knowledge that is embedded in locality and that is responsive and accountable to place-based constituencies as opposed to the detached expert knowledge of modernity (Escobar, 2007a: 286). This can be understood as what Santos (2007: 36) refers to as postmodern knowledge: knowledge about the conditions of possibility of human action projected into the world from local time-spaces. Such a perspective draws attention to the importance of place (understood both as a particular geographical territory and peoples culturally and historically informed experience of, and engagement with, this territory) to the elaboration of alternative knowledge projects and perhaps even new epistemological frameworks.

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Communication and knowledge production What implications does this have for how we understand the relationship between communication and knowledge production in transnational movement networks such as the WSF? Much writing on the relationship of social movements to new communication technologies has focused on the opportunities that the internet offers movements to bypass dominant media and construct their own communication networks. Since Indymedia first pioneered the use of open publishing in the late 1990s, the emergence of web 2.0 technologies has increased exponentially the possibilities for ordinary citizens as well as movement activists to circulate their own media content. Manuel Castells refers to this new form of socialised communication as mass self-communication: mass because it reaches potentially a global audience, self because it is self-generated in content, self-directed in emission, and selfselected in reception by many that communicate with many (2007: 248). Giving social movements the chance to enter the public domain from multiple sources, the emergence of mass self-communication increases their chances of effecting social and political change, as [t]he greater the autonomy of the communicating subject vis--vis the controllers of societal communication nodes, the higher the chances for the introduction of messages challenging dominant values and interests in communication networks (2009: 413). In such an account, there is a clear privileging of the global: the ability of movements to create or influence global communication networks is, according to Castells, crucial to their success. Observing that in the network society, networks of power are usually global while resistance is usually local, he contends that [h]ow to reach the global from the local, through networking with other localities how to grassroot the space of flows becomes the key strategic question for the social movements of our age (2009: 52). Like networks of power, alternative projects must also go through global communication networks to transform consciousness if they wish to effect social change: it is only by acting on global discourses through the global communication networks that they can affect power relationships in the global networks that structure all societies (Castells, 2009: 53). Attention to the epistemic and political significance of place, however, complicates this imperative for movements to go global, raising questions about how media and communication can contribute to the production of placebased knowledges. Research on alternative and citizens media shows that communication activists around the world also operate at very local scales (Atton, 2002; Downing, 2001; Rodrguez, 2001; 2011; Rodrguez, Kidd & Stein, 2009). Citizens media are often driven by a concern to enable members of local communities to express identities, negotiate differences, and enact forms of sociality that strengthen solidarity (Rodrguez, 2001; 2011). Such media can play a vital role in constructing and reinforcing a sense of place and place-based collective imaginaries (Rodrguez, 2009; 2011). In the context of the WSF, this highlights the need to not simply bypass the local in favour of the global but

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examine the multiple scales at which activists operate and the complex intersections between them (cf. Sassen, 2006; 2007). By looking at how communication activists in Belm whose commitment to place was central to their political practice engaged with the WSF, this article explores some of the complexities of the relationship between local actors and the global WSF process. Though they initially understood their relationship to the WSF in fairly conventional hierarchical terms, conceiving of the WSF as global civil society arriving in Belm and themselves as local actors wanting to speak to the world, these activists also made innovative use of the WSF to facilitate place-based processes of knowledge production and give impetus to a longer-term project to strengthen movement-based communication networks in the Amazon. Their strategies and practices underline the importance of placebased movements appropriating communication tools for their own purposes, in order to create conditions for the elaboration of knowledges grounded in their own realities and lived experience. For the activists discussed in this article, this is a project that is inextricably bound up with place-making: the production of knowledges starting from the Amazon a vast region that comprises a huge diversity of peoples and cultures also involves considerable work to define what the Amazon is. Their emergent project of place-making grounded in the production of knowledges within, about and for the Amazon offers a glimpse of what the construction of alternative epistemological imaginaries founded on a politics of place may look like in practice.5 Encountering the WSF
Since they started hearing talk about the WSF, people had this yearning, this will, the social movements were anxious to participate, to be able to give their cry for freedom. So from then on, everybody created this atmosphere around the WSF, that atmosphere of power, that atmosphere of dynamism, of people being able to scream. So, are we going to be able to divulge? Are we going to be able to scream? Are we going to be able to realise our desire? (Community radio activist, interview, December 2008).6

Many accounts of the Belm WSF focus (rightly) on the historic presence in the forum of indigenous peoples, from the Amazon and elsewhere, who advanced alternative cosmo-visions based on concepts of civilisational crisis and buen vivir along with a strong attachment to territory. Their particular knowledge projects and practices are central to any broader consideration of decolonisation of knowledge and politics of place in the Amazon. This article, however, tells a different (though related) story: that of communication activists from poor urban communities in Belm who sought to articulate their own struggles and realities to those of other actors in the Amazon including indigenous movements. Indigenous peoples and their knowledge claims are not, in other words, the specific focus of this article, which is necessarily a partial account, and should be read as such.
5
6

All interview quotes have been translated from Portuguese by the author.

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The first group of activists discussed in this article belonged to a network of community radio stations from the metropolitan region of Belm and elsewhere in the Brazilian state of Par. These were connected through the Forum in Defence of Community Radios (Frum em Defesa das Rdios Comunitrias, or Frum de Rdios, as it commonly was referred to) a body set up in October 2007 in collaboration with the Par Society for the Defence of Human Rights (Sociedade Paraense de Defesa dos Direitos Humanos) to provide juridical support to community radio activists facing prosecution for unauthorised broadcasting. In addition to fulfilling this legal function, the Frum de Rdios also constituted a reference point for an emerging movement for the democratisation of communication in Par. In the period leading up to the event, the Frum de Rdios held weekly meetings, in which a diversity of communication activists, including journalists, students, magazine editors, and video producers, participated on various occasions. These meetings functioned alternately as occasions for information exchange about events organised by social movements in the city, political discussions about the communication movement and its aims, and preparations for participation in the WSF.7 When I began my fieldwork in Belm in November 2008, two and a half months before the start of the WSF, the atmosphere among activists was one of excitement and anticipation, combined with a slight feeling of uncertainty. There was a clear sense of the historical significance of the WSF coming to Belm, of it representing a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. But for what? What exactly was the World Social Forum? What was going to happen? Among the communication activists I worked with, there was a flurry of activity, with meetings of one sort or another constantly taking place to discuss how to participate in the forum, how best to take advantage of it, and what it would mean for local and regional movements and their struggles. For most, the WSF 2009 was going to be their first social forum and expectations were high. At this stage, community radio activists conceived of their task vis--vis the WSF as twofold. One set of strategies focused on the need to inform local residents about the Forum. There was a widespread sense that the general population of Belm and surrounding areas either lacked information about the WSF or was misinformed about its character and purpose, as the local mainstream media tended to frame the WSF as a tourist event or conference organised by the Workers Party led state government of Par. Community radio activists therefore saw it as a key priority to inform their listeners about the character of the WSF and the issues being discussed there, in this way providing

The majority of regular participants in the Frum de Rdios were residents of poor urban communities within the metropolitan region of Belm, of Afro-Brazilian or mixed (mostly indigenous-European) descent, and in their 30s and 40s (with some younger and older members). Though some participated occasionally in meetings of the communication working group of the local WSF organising committee, most of these community radio activists occupied a relatively peripheral position vis--vis the official forum organising process, prevented by various factors (such as sporadic internet access, lack of resources, and weak connections to more established sectors of local civil society) from being more fully integrated.
7

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a much-needed counterpoint to the mainstream media. As one member of the Frum de Rdios explained:
The main objective is this, that all this information reaches this long-suffering population here, so that they can understand this process []. Because their minds are so alienated, from other media, from television, that they dont know, they dont know what a World Social Forum is []. So our principal objective is this, to bring information about the things that will be happening at the forum to the peripheries (Eduardo, interview, December 2008).8

The second set of strategies revolved around using the WSF to make visible local and regional realities and struggles. As the interview extract quoted at the beginning of this section suggests, there was a widespread sense that the WSF provided a unique opportunity for communities and movements in Belm and the Amazon as a whole to speak to the world. Consequently, community radio activists understood their role as being to give voice to these communities and movements. For one woman, this was a matter of showing the culture and ways of life of the local population:
[I want to] divulge our culture, our music, to talk about our city, to show, because there are going to be a lot of people from elsewhere participating show what Belm is like, how it is that the people of Belm live, talk about the sights of Belm, talk about our customs, show our community, how it lives. This is very important (Gabriela, interview, December 2008).

Others, meanwhile, stressed the need to show the realities of the hardship suffered by the local population. This was often placed in the context of what many activists saw as attempts by the local media and government authorities to present an overly positive image of the city to WSF participants. One activist, who belonged to a community radio in Terra Firme, one of the poorest bairros in Belm, explained it in these terms:
I think it wont do to sugar coat things. You have to show the reality of the country, that there is misery, poverty, hunger, prejudice, violence, and this we have to show. And so the Forum, hosted here in Belm, is a good moment to be denouncing the indifference of our appointed authorities (Jos, interview, December 2008).

Similarly, the WSF was also greeted as an opportunity to highlight the consequences of state-supported exploitation of the Amazon for the regions indigenous peoples:
8

Names have been changed to protect anonymity unless otherwise stated.

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We will be able to tell everyone that the indigenous, that the peoples of the Amazon are being massacred by the advance of national capital within the Brazilian territory (Roberto, interview, December 2008).

How might we understand this desire to speak to the world? Left at this, it would seem that community radio activists in Belm conceived of their task primarily in terms of acting as conductors for vertical flows of information between the local and the global: on the one hand, to distribute knowledge about the WSF downwards to the local population, and, on the other, to disseminate knowledge about local or regional conditions upwards to the WSF, conceptualised here as a manifestation of global civil society. But is this all there is to their motivations and practices? The problem with such an analysis is that it makes it difficult to understand the strategies of community radio activists as anything more than a cry for help from disempowered local actors. It leads to a conceptualisation of their practices simply in terms of resistance to dominant meanings, and denies them the possibility of positive agency, of being able to construct alternatives. Moreover, a conception of these communication practices simply in terms of transmission from the local to the global and vice versa relies on a hierarchical conception of scale which privileges the global and fails to account for the variety of scales on which activists operate (cf. Escobar, 2007a; Sassen, 2006; 2007). Though to a certain extent hierarchical conceptions of scale were discernible in community radio activists understanding of the WSF and their relation to it, especially before they had worked out fully the nature and extent of their participation, their practices went beyond local appeals to global civil society. In the next section, I discuss how members of the Frum de Rdios made use of the WSF to create a temporary communication space through an FM radio station that broadcast from the forum site which enabled them to elaborate place-based knowledges while simultaneously facilitating transnational connections and exchange. Temporary openings: the Rdio dos Povos
The radio served as an exchange between the people who were there [at the WSF] from other countries with our population here in Belm. Why? Because [] from the moment they were using our microphones, they were passing on to other people what they were thinking, not just about the WSF, but also about the capital Belm. And the people who were there [listening] ended up sharing what the person was transmitting [] through the interactivity that the public had with the interviewee (Fernando, co-organiser of the Rdio dos Povos, interview, February 2009).

During the 2009 WSF, activists involved in the Frum de Rdios set up an FM radio station dubbed Rdio dos Povos [the Peoples Radio] which broadcast
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live for the duration of the event. Coordinated by representatives from four local community radios who were responsible for technical infrastructure and management of the programme schedule, the Rdio dos Povos was live on air from early morning until late evening every day, and around ten community radios (mainly from Par but also from elsewhere in Brazil) participated, dividing available air time between them. According to organisers, the radio reached most of the metropolitan region of Belm as well as some neighbouring areas. At a basic level, the Rdio dos Povos functioned to raise awareness of the WSF among the local population. As one of the organisers, a woman from a community radio in a poor neighbourhood on the periphery of Belm, explained:
Our concern was to be passing information about the forum to people who were not here in Belm following the forum, so that they could have a sense, the listener could have a sense of the programme, of what was happening, of the debates that were taking place at the forum (Brenda, interview, February 2009).

Seeking to bring the WSF to their local communities, community radio activists went to workshops and seminars, listened to speeches and debates to learn about the themes being discussed, and got hold of representatives from various movements who they then brought back to the studio to be interviewed. As well as acting as the eyes and ears of their listeners, the organisers of the Rdio dos Povos also conceived of their role in terms of giving voice to WSF participants. What they wanted to achieve through the radio was, in Brendas words,
to be able give voice to all the segments present at the forum. Whoever wanted to go there to talk about or debate any subject, that we could put issues on the agenda and debate them, without discriminating against anyone [], that delegates from whatever country, whatever state, could have access to the means of communication. Because of this we named it Rdio dos Povos, because this was what best identified the identity of the radio was of this amplitude, of this democratic opening, that any segment could arrive there, could have their space and speak, give their interview, give their testimony, pass on their experience (interview, February 2009).

In bringing the voices of the WSF to its listeners, an important function of the Rdio dos Povos was to provide a counterpoint to the distorted image of the forum that activists found in the local mainstream media, thereby helping the local population better understand its objectives and significance. However, the radio was not only about one-way dissemination from the WSF to the listeners. Emphasising the interactive character of their programmes, activists also conceived of the radio as a means for listeners to participate in the forum. As
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was everyday practice in their own radios, they opened up telephone lines for listeners to interact with presenters and interviewees in the studio. Describing the target audience of the radio as those who were excluded from the forum because of the R$30 (around 11) entrance fee, one organiser saw the Rdio dos Povos as
the entrance ticket that enabled these people to participate. People who were on the outside, when they had some issue they were interested in, they called and spoke live on air, via telephone, directly on air, on the radio, and debated the issue with us (Fernando, interview, February 2009).

As well as bringing the WSF to the local population, then, the radio also brought the local population, most of who would otherwise have been excluded, to the WSF. By enabling this kind of two-way communication, it provided opportunities not just for information dissemination but for debate about the issues being discussed at the forum. In this way, the radio might be conceived as having provided a link between the local and the global, enabling listeners who could not be physically present to share in the intercultural learning and exchange of experience for which the WSF is celebrated. However, if we consider in more detail the activities facilitated by the Rdio dos Povos, it becomes clear that its function went beyond inclusion. More than just a means to include the local population within the global civil society gathered at the WSF, the communication space opened up by the radio functioned as a node for transnational connections while being firmly grounded in a commitment to the Amazon as a place. According to organisers, the common denominator for the diverse range of themes debated on the Rdio dos Povos was a connection to the Amazon. From urban reform to hydroelectric dam projects, climate change to the struggles of indigenous and Afrodescendent populations, topics were either directly related to the Amazon or discussed with reference to their relevance for, and impact on, people living in the region. As one organiser affirmed, the criteria that we chose [for what to cover] were like this: verify the most visible themes within the forum that had to do with the Amazon region (Brenda, interview, February 2009). This production of knowledge about the Amazon as a region also involved placemaking. As Brenda explained,
I think [the radio] contributed to disseminating the significance of the WSF, what it represents for society. What the importance of this movement is, principally here in the Amazon region. Say to the population what it means to be Amazonian. People are in Belm and didnt know that they were from the Amazon region. Belm is inside the Amazon region and we have a responsibility to debate the problems that are inherent in the Amazon region (interview, February 2009).

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Raising awareness among Belms urban population about the problems that the Amazon faces and the struggles of movements in the region enabling them to see the reality of the Amazon region, in depth, in Brendas words also had as an aim to make this population identify as part of the Amazon. As hinted at in the interview extract quoted above, a sense of belonging to the Amazon a region that is perhaps most commonly understood as a vast and sparsely populated rainforest is not necessarily obvious to residents of Belm, a metropolis of around 1.4 million inhabitants (Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics, 2010). Generating a sense of connection to the Amazon among this urban population, by linking the struggles of poor communities in Belm to those of indigenous peoples, ribeirinhos and other rural populations elsewhere in the region, was therefore a key task for the Rdio dos Povos. As one community radio activist explained in the run-up to the forum, this was not only about producing media coverage; it was also, crucially, about constructing regional alliances:
We are going to take advantage of the coverage to engage in dialogue with other movements []. It is not just about coverage in itself. We will show the situation, for example, of the indigenous, how they live. But our idea is to support their struggle and for them to support ours. So its about political dialogue, beyond coverage, beyond saying lets go to the indigenous camp, [and show that] they live like this, their difficulties are these but [also asking] how can we unite our struggles? (Henrique, interview, December 2008).

The kind of identity construction at play here can be understood as based on the production of discourses that define the Amazon as a place. This place-making might be described, on the one hand, as based on linking the local urban population to the region as a whole; on the other, it was concerned with facilitating a better understanding of the geopolitical location of the Amazon vis--vis the world, particularly in relation to its implication in the projects of global capital. Community radio activists concern to facilitate the production of knowledge in, about, and for the Amazon and involve their local listeners in this process provided the occasion for connections to be made with other actors and their knowledges. WSF participants from elsewhere in the Amazon and other parts of the world were brought into the studio in order to bring their experience to bear on issues pertaining to the Amazon, and local activists in turn shared their own experiences. In this way, while grounded in a particular locality and focused on place-based issues, the Rdio dos Povos functioned simultaneously as a convergence point for actors from different localities and as a space for translation between different knowledges. The experience of the Rdio dos Povos shows how the WSF provided not simply an opportunity for local subalterns to speak to the world but an occasion for a collective project of knowledge production involving participants from different places. Although activists were motivated by a concern to better understand a particular place, their participation in the radio also enabled them
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to arrive at a better understanding of their place in transnational networks. While they might initially have conceived of themselves as the local counterpart to global civil society arriving in their city, the experience of the Rdio dos Povos facilitated a conceptualisation among community radio activists of themselves and the Amazon as connected to other actors and places through transnational networks. Having considered the way in which the WSF prompted the opening up, for a delimited period of time, of a place-based communication space for transnational connections in the form of the Rdio dos Povos, the following section examines longer-term efforts to strengthen movement-based communication networks in the Amazon region, and the difference that the WSF made to this project. Longer-term strategies: strengthening communication networks in the Amazon
[The forum] served for us to show the work of the organisation and strengthen the groups that work with us, that always worked with us, which are young people, social movements, women, university students []. For us, the event served to further strengthen this will to continue a process of participatory communication here in the Amazon (Ilma Bittencourt, interview, February 2009).9

The second group of activists discussed in this article were connected to CEPEPO, a small NGO based in Belm that worked with communication as a tool for popular education.10 Inspired by the pedagogy of Paulo Freire, CEPEPO was founded in 1980 to support urban movements in Belm, using photography and film as pedagogical tools to help poor communities reflect on and better understand their realities and struggles. The organisation had since continued working with communities and movements on a range of issues, and described itself as an NGO that works with and for social movements, to strengthen and document their struggles, using audio-visual tools, giving workshops in this area, producing documentaries and institutional films (CEPEPO, n.d., my translation). Founded on a vision of the transformative effects of participatory communication, CEPEPO had a long history of working with urban communities in Belm, running projects with the aim of contributing to individual and collective empowerment.

Ilma Bittencourt (real name) was at the time of my fieldwork the director of CEPEPO.

The organisations full name was originally Centre for the Study and Practice of Popular Education (Centro de Estudos e Prticas de Educao Popular); this was changed after the WSF 2009 to Centre for Communication and Popular Education (Centro de Comunicao e Educao Popular).
10

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At the time of my fieldwork, the organisations premises which provided meeting rooms, film equipment, editing facilities, and a small library were located in the barrio of Guam. Home to the Federal University of Par, which hosted the WSF, Guam is one of most deprived areas of Belm, but also has a diverse cultural and political life, and CEPEPO was strongly embedded in the local community.11 In addition to this local orientation, the organisation also conceived of its ambit as including the rest of the state of Par as well as the Amazon region as a whole. Activists involved in the organisation had a strong conception of their city and neighbourhoods as part of the Amazon, and this regional identification seemed more pertinent to their work than a sense of national identity. Much of CEPEPOs work was focused on thematic areas relating to the Amazon, including deforestation, agriculture, and development projects, and the organisation had been involved in various projects with rural communities in the region. Its work could be characterised as having a dual focus: on the one hand, to document and make visible the realities and struggles of people living in Belm and the Amazon, and on the other, through capacitybuilding, to enable movements and communities to appropriate communication technologies for their own purposes. Having started as an organisation concerned with the use of communication as a tool for education, CEPEPO increasingly had come to see communication as a theme in its own right, and its own role as being to promote the issue of communication among organisations and social movements, in Belm and in the Amazon as a whole. This was motivated by a strong sense of communication being a major challenge for movements and organisations in the region, partly due to problems of geographical distance and poorly developed communication infrastructures, partly due to a lack of resources and capacity. A key aim for CEPEPO was therefore to strengthen movement-based communication networks in the Amazon, through capacity building, awareness-raising, and developing bonds of solidarity. The arrival in Belm of the WSF was greeted as an important opportunity to give impetus to this project. This was conceived partly in terms of learning from the experiences of communication activists from elsewhere in Brazil and other countries:

Very much a low-budget operation, the work of CEPEPO was co-ordinated by one full-time member of staff (a white woman in her late 30s) supported at the time of the WSF by a small core of young volunteers from Guam and nearby Terra Firme. In their late teens and early twenties, these volunteers (one woman and three men, of Afro-Brazilian and mixed heritage) had come into contact with CEPEPO through participating in the organisations communication projects for young people, and had aspirations to continue studying or working with communication. Though similarly situated to the Frum de Rdios in terms of its connection to poor urban communities, CEPEPO was somewhat better equipped (in terms of resources, time and cultural capital) to participate in the forum organising process, and the organisations director, Ilma Bittencourt, was one of the co-ordinators of the Communication Working Group for the WSF 2009. Though they did not work closely together, members of CEPEPO and the Frum de Rdios attended each others meetings and workshops in the run-up to the forum.
11

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The forum is going to be this great moment, where there will be other organisations which already have managed to work a bit with [communication], where we can be seeing, participating in this laboratory, learning, and trying to implement this afterwards here in our region, in the Amazon (Ilma Bittencourt, interview, December 2008).

In preparation for the forum, CEPEPO hosted what was dubbed the Shared Communication Laboratory (Laboratrio da Comunicao Compartilhada), which was in operation for a few weeks prior to the event.12 The Laboratory organised a series of workshops bringing together communication activists, members of various social movements, university students, and local residents. During these workshops, participants gained practical skills in journalism, radio, and audio-visual production, began to produce media content relating to the WSF, and made plans for their coverage of the event itself. As a result, activists connected to CEPEPO were well prepared for the forum, having learnt practical skills, established links with various other groups, and perhaps most importantly gained confidence in their abilities as communicators. As well as offering the possibility to learn new skills and practices, the WSF a rare occasion for organisations and movements in the Amazon that normally are separated by vast distances to come together was seen as an important opportunity for CEPEPO to develop relationships with regional actors and demonstrate the importance of communication to them. In the period leading up to the WSF, CEPEPO invited representatives from a range of movements to the Shared Communication Laboratory to discuss how they could collaborate. This was conceived in terms of putting issues relating to the Amazon on the agenda:
What we wanted was to [] construct this space where we could congregate all these organisations that are related to the big themes to do with the Amazon. So what we did first was [] call the social organisations from here in the Amazon, which represent the movements, in the widest sense possible, at the level of the Amazon. So we called the MST, we called Via Campesina, the womens movement, the indigenous movement, the black peoples movement, to sit down and discuss how we could do this laboratory and incorporate these themes into each [communication] project13 (Ilma Bittencourt, interview, February 2009).

Insofar as it brought together activists from different movements and enabled them to share their knowledge of issues relating to the Amazon, the Shared Communication Laboratory can be conceived as an attempt to create a space for
For a brief discussion of the politics and practice of shared communication in the WSF, see Stephansen (2012).
12

The independent media coverage of the WSF 2009 was organised in a set of projects: the TV Forum for audio-visual coverage, the Radio Forum for independent and community radios, and Ciranda for text- and image-based journalism.
13

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translation and collective knowledge production which was oriented specifically towards the Amazon. Drawing on its history of working with regional actors and issues, CEPEPO put the Amazon, and its peoples and their struggles, at the centre of its engagement with the WSF. This commitment to the Amazon was also prominent in the way the organisation approached the task of reporting on the WSF:
We decided here at CEPEPO that we were going to put this on the agenda, the Amazon, themes related to the Amazon, and where there were activities at the forum that had to do with the Amazon, we had to be there, covering, getting interviews, collecting material (Vanessa Silva, interview, February 2009).14

The WSF, in brief, was seen as an opportunity to give voice to movements in the Amazon and make their struggles and alternatives visible. Of particular significance to CEPEPO was the discovery of various online platforms for independent media coverage of the WSF, such as www.ciranda.net (for text- and image-based journalism) and www.wsftv.net (for audio-visual content). Previously, CEPEPO activists only had circulated their material by distributing DVDs, mainly within Belm; however, from the experience of the Shared Communication Laboratory, they discovered how to share their content with people in other parts of Brazil and the world. This sense of being able to connect to the global the idea that their work could be disseminated via online platforms that in principle are accessible to anyone anywhere in the world was a great source of motivation and confidence:
We went to the forum with a much higher self-esteem, in the sense that [we knew] we could produce good quality material and disseminate this material to various places in the world, in Brazil, and in the Amazon (Ilma Bittencourt, interview, February 2009).

However, as hinted at in this extract, acting on or through global communication networks was not necessarily their only or even primary concern. Given the difficulties that social movements and organisations in the Amazon have in communicating, circulating media coverage within the region was considered just as, or even more, important:
First, I think [our audience is] Belm and the Amazon []. Its a very big complaint among the social movements that we dont see ourselves; we dont communicate what we are doing, neither to ourselves nor to civil society []. I think first here, because sometimes it is much easier to have information about the Amazon there in [your] country, there in So Paulo, but we dont have this
14

Vanessa Silva (real name) was a volunteer at CEPEPO from Guam.

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information here for society to know (Ilma Bittencourt, interview, February 2009).

Conscious of how movements and communities in the Amazon tend to be excluded from global communication networks and the knowledge that circulates in such networks, CEPEPO sought not simply to enable place-based movements to get a message across to a somehow external global public. The organisations work to strengthen communication networks in the Amazon was also, crucially, about creating a space in which these movements could elaborate what that message might be. A key aim, in other words, was to create conditions for production of knowledge in, about, and for the Amazon, starting from the realities of people living in the region. This project went hand-in-hand with place-making: as in the case of the Rdio dos Povos, the production of knowledges starting from the Amazon necessarily also involves work to define what the Amazon is. The complaint among movements that we dont see ourselves is telling in this respect: strengthening communication networks in the Amazon is not just about rectifying a lack of factual information; it is also about constructing shared understandings of the Amazon as a place and of what it means to be from that place. During an interview in which we discussed the significance of knowledge produced by social movements, Bittencourt offered the following thoughts on the issue of knowledge production in the Amazon:
Here in the Amazon, it is a struggle which I think is very related to identity [] in the sense of constructing a knowledge for the communities, for the originary peoples from here, which is ours, constructed through our own relationships here []. We perceive that today, the movements, they understand better this process of constructing knowledge from here, from our roots, from our identity and not from what comes from above [], which causes problems [in the sense that] you dont manage to develop, you dont construct identity (interview, December 2008).

Recognising the obstacles to identity construction posed by detached knowledge from above, Bittencourt sensed strongly the need for people in the Amazon to become subjects of knowledge and engage in a collective process of identity construction grounded in place. But what exactly was the character of the Amazon that CEPEPO wanted to help construct? What stands out in the accounts of CEPEPO members, as well as those of the community radio activists discussed earlier, is a sense of the Amazon as a place of difference, a place that is home to a multiplicity of peoples and movements. When they spoke about the Amazon, they typically did so in terms of the struggles of a diversity of movements and groups in the region: women, young people, poor urban communities, Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples often with emphasis on the latter two. This particular association of the Amazon
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with difference was also discernible in CEPEPOs coverage of the WSF 2009: in the videos that the organisation produced and posted on wsftv.net during the event, the diversity of movements in the region was an important theme in its own right, and indigenous groups as well as Afro-descendants (particularly local youth) featured prominently. While the notion of difference provided a common thread, what sometimes was less clear in these accounts were the exact boundaries of the Amazon under construction. Though the term Pan-Amazon featured occasionally, activists tended to speak of the Amazon in general terms, more often than not referring implicitly to the Brazilian Amazon. This mostly Brazilian orientation was also evident in CEPEPOs coverage of the WSF 2009, which was almost exclusively in Portuguese. However, the forum contributed to bringing the trans-boundary character of the Amazon into clearer view, and provided an entry point for CEPEPO into the Pan-Amazon Social Forum (Frum Social Pan-Amaznico, or FSPA) a process modelled on the WSF which has had as an aim to bring together movements from across the nine countries that share the PanAmazon.15 Having previously only followed this process at a distance, CEPEPO activists decided after the WSF 2009 to join the FSPA communication working group and participate in the organisation of the 2010 FSPA. In July 2009, a planning meeting of the FSPA Council was held in Belm, and CEPEPOs coverage from this event shows a much clearer Pan-Amazon orientation: of seven videos uploaded on wsftv.net during this meeting, three were in Spanish (two of which featured indigenous people from Ecuador and Peru respectively), three featured Afro-descendants talking about racism (one highlighting the importance of unity between Afro-descendants and indigenous peoples in the Pan-Amazon), while two examined the social and environmental impacts of large development projects in the Amazon. Like the Rdio dos Povos, the case of CEPEPO shows that the WSF should not be thought of as simply an occasion for local movements to act on global discourses through the global communication networks, to use Castells (2009: 35) terms. For activists connected to CEPEPO, the WSF provided the opportunity to strengthen autonomous processes of knowledge production and place-making in the Amazon. Although they welcomed the opportunities that the WSF appeared to open up for disseminating material at a global scale, there was also a strong sense of the need for people in the Amazon to appropriate communication technologies in order to be able to take ownership of the knowledges they produce and share these among themselves. The importance of such a project was summed up by Ilma Bittencourt in the following terms:

At the time of the WSF in Belm, there had been four previous editions of the FSPA (in 2002, 2003, 2004 and 2005). The WSF 2009 gave renewed impetus to this process, leading to the organisation of the fifth FSPA in Santarm, Brazil, in 2010 and later the sixth FSPA in Cojiba, Bolivia, in 2012.
15

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The social movements have a lot of information about how another world is possible [] in the form of family agriculture, alternative forms of fishing, of food production, social movements construction in their communities, how they are constructing more egalitarian relations. So I think this creation of another possible world is in our hands. If we manage to appropriate the tools, and understand communication as a human right, and put this forward through the opportunities that are being given to us today, we will manage to change the world (interview, February 2009).

Conclusion This article has explored the complex ways in which communication activists in Belm engaged with the WSF 2009 and sought to make use of it for their own purposes. In the case of the Rdio dos Povos, community radio activists constructed a temporary communication space that facilitated exchange of knowledge and experience between WSF participants and the local resident population. In the case of CEPEPOs longer-term project of strengthening movement-based communication networks in the Amazon, the WSF provided a unique opportunity to learn from activists from other places, develop links with movements from across the region, and put themes relating to the Amazon on the agenda. What these examples highlight is the centrality of place and politics of place to the practices and imaginaries of communication activists in Belm. Emerging as a central theme is the need for place-based movements to appropriate communication technologies for their own purposes. What comes across clearly both in the case of the Rdio dos Povos and CEPEPO is a strong commitment to facilitating autonomous processes of knowledge production that start from the Amazon and are grounded in local and regional realities. This commitment to place does not equal insularity; rather, the production of knowledge in, about and for the Amazon becomes a prerequisite and starting point for engaging with wider movement networks at different scales. In the case of the Rdio dos Povos, activists concern to facilitate a deeper understanding of issues pertaining to the Amazon among the local resident population provided the occasion for drawing in activists from elsewhere to share their experiences of similar struggles. In the case of CEPEPOs longer-term project, strengthening movement-based communication networks in the Amazon was conceived as a starting point for the elaboration and proliferation of alternatives grounded in the knowledges and practices of the regions movements. The politics of place that these activists engaged in challenges conventional hierarchical understandings of scale, demonstrating the complex ways in which different scales of action may overlap, intersect or even be mutually constitutive. The Rdio dos Povos, while aimed at the local population of Belm and geared towards the elaboration of knowledges related to the Amazon region, simultaneously and by virtue of its place-based character provided a site for transnational connections. For CEPEPO, the ostensibly global WSF process gave

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impetus to a project concerned with strengthening regional communication networks that could articulate a diversity of actors and struggles. In both examples, the production and circulation of place-based knowledges are closely bound up with processes of place-making: the construction of shared understandings of what the Amazon is like as a place and what it means to be from that place. This is far from straightforward, given the vastness, diversity and trans-boundary character of the Amazon combined with the lack of adequate communication networks among movements in the region. Discernible in the discourses of communication activists in Belm is a conception of the Amazon as a place of difference and possibility, as a place that is home not only to a diversity of struggles against domination but to a diversity of alternatives. In this respect, their emergent project of place-making offers a glimpse of an alternative epistemological imaginary based on a logic of difference. What this article has not done is analyse in depth the specific content of the knowledges being produced and circulated through these communication practices. In this respect, the extent to which such practices might contribute to a broader project of decolonisation of knowledge remains an open question. What can be said is that the efforts of communication activists to facilitate autonomous processes of knowledge production among movements of Afrodescendants, indigenous peoples and other marginalised groups in the Amazon a region that for centuries has suffered the effects of colonialism constitutes a necessary starting point for such a project. This article began by highlighting the asymmetrical relationship between global cosmopolitan elites and local grassroots groups within the WSF process. What has become clear is that strengthening the capacity of placebased movements to communicate on their own terms is about much more than inclusion within the global space of the WSF: it is about enabling the proliferation of alternative knowledge projects at different scales, within and beyond the social forum process.

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Rodrguez, C., Kidd, D. and Stein, L. (eds.). 2009. Making our media: global initiatives toward a democratic public sphere. Volume 1: Creating new communication spaces. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press. Roskos, L. and Willis, P. 2007. Introduction to women's bodies, gender analysis, and feminist politics at the Frum Social Mundial. Journal of International Women's Studies 8(3): 1-9. Santos, B.d.S. 2006. The rise of the global left: the World Social Forum and beyond. London/New York: Zed Books. Santos, B.d.S. (ed.) 2007. Cognitive justice in a global World: prudent knowledges for a decent life. Lanham: Lexington Books. Santos, B.d.S., Nunes, J.A. and Meneses, M.P. 2007. Opening up the canon of knowledge and recognition of difference pp. xvix-lxii in Santos, B.d.S. (ed.) Another knowledge is possible: beyond Northern epistemologies. London/New York: Verso. Sassen, S. 2006. Territory, authority, rights: from medieval to global assemblages. Princeton/Oxford: Princeton University Press. Sassen, S. (ed.) (2007). Deciphering the global: its scales, spaces and subjects. New York/London: Routledge. Sen, J. 2004. How open? The Forum as logo, the Forum as religion: scepticism of the intellect, optimism of the will pp. 210-227 in Sen, J., Anand, A., Escobar, A. and Waterman, P. (eds.) World Social Forum: challenging empires. New Dehli: The Viveka Foundation. Stephansen, H. C. 2011. Making global publics? Communication and knowledge production in the World Social Forum process. Doctoral thesis. Goldsmiths, University of London. eprints.gold.ac.uk/6570 (accessed 03.04.13). Stephansen, H.C. 2012. Media activism in the World Social Forum, OpenDemocracy.net. 3 October 2012. http://www.opendemocracy.net/hilde-cstephansen/media-activism-in-world-social-forum (accessed 03.04.13). Vinthagen, S. 2009. Is the World Social Forum a democratic global civil society? pp. 131-148 in Blau, J. and Karides, M. (eds.) The World and US Social Forums: a better world is possible and necessary. Plymouth: Lexington Books. World Social Forum. 2009. Amazon is the territory and the protagonist of the World Social Forum 2009. http://www.fsm2009amazonia.org.br/wsf2009amazon (accessed 24.09.11). Worth, O. and Buckley, K. 2009. The World Social Forum: postmodern prince or court jester? Third World Quarterly 30(4): 649-661. Wright, C. 2005. Opening spaces: power, participation and plural democracy at the World Social Forum. ephemera: theory and politics in organization 5(2): 409-422.

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Yl-Anttila, T. 2005. The World Social Forum and the globalization of social movements and public spheres. ephemera: theory and politics in organization 5(2): 423-442.

About the author Hilde C. Stephansen is a researcher in the Department of Media & Communications at Goldsmiths, University of London, and a Research Associate in the Department of Politics & International Studies at The Open University. Her research focuses on how communication practices of various kinds are implicated in social processes of knowledge production. She received a PhD in Sociology in 2012 for a thesis which explored the character and significance of media and communication in the World Social Forum, focusing on their relationship to knowledge production and to politics of place and scale. Hilde is also a member of Ciranda, a network of independent journalists and social movement communicators connected to the WSF. She can be contacted at h.c.stephansen AT gmail.com.

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Reflections on Fanons legacy

David Austin, Aziz Choudry, Radha DSouza, Sunera Thobani Many people consider Martinique-born Frantz Fanon to be one of the most important anti-colonial thinkers of the twentieth century. Aziz Choudry, one of the co-editors of this issue of Interface, initiated a discussion with three colleagues David Austin, Radha DSouza, and Sunera Thobani - after many conversations about the legacy of Fanon in the course of collaborations in both academic and activist milieus. These four short pieces discuss the relevance of Fanons writings for thought and action in struggles today. In doing so, they draw upon the writers personal, political, activist and academic engagements with Fanons writings and the questions which he grappled with, in a life cut short by leukemia at the age of 35 in December 1961.

David Austin When did you first encounter Fanon, in what context, and how did it impact you? I first encountered Fanon as a high school student in Toronto. As a youth I spent a lot of time at Third World Bookstore in Toronto. Many of us as young women and men would go there on the weekends or whenever we had free time to buy books, but more importantly to discuss, debate, and exchange ideas on a range of subjects, local and international, and especially on issues related to people of African descent. I must admit that I did not understand everything that I read in Fanons Black Skin, White Masks, but what I did understand really shaped my consciousness. The idea of being Black, but wearing a white mask spoke to me. It explained how we had been shaped by the dominant culture, dominant ideologies, and the deep-seated psychological impact of colonization and racism on the Black psyche. Fanons writing was a revelation in that sense and provided a language that helped me to understand how race operated, how it is etched in the consciousness of both the colonized and the colonizer. Violence The Wretched of the Earth was another matter. When Fanon spoke about violence in the colonial setting, it resonated with me because it helped to explain the fratricidal violence that I saw around me among Black youth. It explained that oppression and colonization was crucial in terms of understanding the

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social, economic, and political circumstances that produced violent phenomenon. The popular assumption was, and remains, that Blacks are somehow predisposed to violence, almost as if it is embedded in DNA. Fanons analysis of violence provided a context, a sociological explanation as to why violence occurs; how forms of oppression create pent-up anger and frustration resulting in internalized oppression as the oppressed or colonized feel incapable of challenging colonialism or oppression:
While the settler or the policeman has the right the livelong day to strike the native, to insult him and to make him crawl to them, you will see the native reaching for his knife at the slightest hostile or aggressive glance cast on him by another native; for the last resort of the native is to defend his personality vis-vis his brother. By throwing himself with all his force into the vendetta, the native tries to persuade himself that colonialism does not exist, that everything is going on as before, that history continues. Here on the level of communal organizations we clearly discern the well-known behavior patterns of avoidance. It is as if plunging into a fraternal bloodbath allowed them to ignore obstacle, and to put off till later the choice, nevertheless inevitable, which opens up the question of armed resistance to colonialism. Thus collective autodestruction in a very concrete way is one of the ways in which the natives muscular tension is set free. All these patterns of conduct are those of the death reflex when faced with danger, a suicidal behaviour which proves to the settler (whose existence and domination is by them all the more justified) that these men are not reasonable human beings. (Fanon 1967: 54)

His writing about violent phenomenon, fratricide, pent-up anger and the ritualistic dances and rites associated with it in colonial Africa are some of most vivid and imaginative passages in his writing and, for me, spoke to the dancehall culture that emanated from Jamaica and how it was in part shaped by its colonial/post-colonial social and economic context and how dance, as ritual, was a way form of exorcism of the psychological and muscular tension that results from colonial and alienating environments; how we unleash our demons through dance often as enactments of violence and symbolic killings which, in the reggae dancehall and hip hop context, often result in actual acts of fratricide:
The natives relaxation takes precisely the form of muscular orgy in which the most acute aggressivity and the most impelling violence are canalized, transformed and conjured away. The circle of the dance is a permissive circle: it protects and permits. At certain times on certain days, men and women come together at a given place, and there, under the solemn eye of the tribe, fling themselves into a seemingly unorganized pantomime, which is in reality extremely systematic in which by various meansshakes of the head, bending of the spinal column, throwing of the whole body backwards may be deciphered as 129

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in an open book the huge effort of a community to exorcise itself, to liberate itself, to explain itself. There are not limits for in reality your purpose in coming together is to allow the accumulated libido, the hampered aggressivity, to dissolve as in a volcanic eruption. Symbolic killings, fantastic rites, imaginary mass murders all must be brought out. The evil humors are undamned, and flow away with a din as of molten lavas. (Fanon 1967: 57)

In this sense, it helped to marry the context of the Global South with my experiences in the Global North. Later I discovered how poet Linton Kwesi Johnson (LKJ) drew on these passages in some of his early poetry as a way of discussing violent phenomena in Britain in the 1970s:
night number one was in brixton soprano B sound system was a beating out a rhythm with a fire coming doun his reggae-reggae wire it was a soun shaking doun your spinal column a bad music tearing up your flesh and the rebels them start fighting the yout them jus turn wild its war amongst the rebels madness...madness...war. (Johnson 2002: 6)

But as both Fanon and LKJ point out, this internalized violence often eventually becomes externalized in the form of canalized anti-colonial liberation struggles, an organized movement against colonialism and oppression. This is Fanons dialectic, a situation in which the conditions become so unbearable that the colonized believe they have no choice but to confront those circumstances through struggle:
During the struggle for freedom, a marked alienation from these practices is observed. The natives back is to the wall, the knife is at his throat (or, more precisely, the electrode at his genitals): he will have no more call for his fancies. After centuries of unreality, after having wallowed in the most outlandish phantoms, at long last the native, gun in hand, stands face to face with the only forces which contend for his life the forces of colonialism. (Fanon 1967: 58)

Nationalism Fanons writing on nationalism is also important. He unambiguously wrote about the betrayal of nationalist leaders, some of whom, having come to power

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by riding the wave of popular nationalist sentiment and struggle, eventually betray the interests of their followers.

The people who at the beginning of the struggle had adopted the primitive Manicheism of the settler Blacks and Whites, Arabs and Christians realize as they go along that it sometimes happens that you get Blacks who are whiter than the Whitesthe fact of having a national flag and the hope of an independent nation does not always tempt certain strata of the population to give up their interests or privileges. The people come to understand that natives like themselves do not lose sight of the main chance, but quite on the contrary seem to make use of the war in order to strengthen their material situation and their growing power. Certain natives continue to profiteer and exploit the war, making their gains at the expense of the people, who as usual are prepared to sacrifice everything, and water their native soil with their blood. This discovery is unpleasant, bitter, sickening: and yet everything seemed to be so simple before: the bad people were on one side, and the good on the other. The clear, unreal, idyllic light of the beginning is followed by a semi-darkness that bewilders the senses. (Fanon 1967: 144-5)

But betray is perhaps not the best word as it implies that their interests were always in sync with the majority of the population. In actual fact, it is often the case that, despite the consensus that the colonial power had to go, these leaders quietly harboured aspirations of leadership that would simply mean the replacing the colonial power while maintaining the much of the colonial economic and political structure. In essence, their interests were very much in sync with the former colonial power. This, I would later discover, also applied to community leaders who often represented themselves and their interests at the expense of members of their communities, and often in the service of what Richard Iton refers to as the prophylactic state. Conjoined with what Iton refers to as the duppy or shadowy states in the Global South (2008: 135, 202), we are left via Fanon with a portrait of the interconnectedness of the south to the north that illustrates certain characteristics of colonialism and domination. Fanon and modernity One of the merits and challenges in reading Fanon is that he is a modernist. There is a dialectic that threads through his work, the notion that as bad as circumstances can be or as a result of dire circumstances and when the situation appears to be at its worse change is possible. Change comes as a result of contradiction out of which a new stage in society or the new society itself comes into being. For Fanon, this means moving beyond the phantoms, rites, rituals, and customs of pre-modern society. To me, this is one of weaknesses in Fanons writing insofar as he privileges a form of progress or development that overshadows or even dismisses the more communal ways of people, the place of the spirit world, and the complexity of African societies:
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And the youth of a colonized country, growing up in an atmosphere of shot and fire, may well make a mock of, and does not hesitate to pour scorn upon the zombies of his ancestors, the horses with two heads, the dead who rise again, and the djins who rush into your body while you yawn. The native discovers reality and transforms it into the pattern of this customs, into the practice of violence and into his plan for freedom.

Here, in contrasting reality with the spirit world, Fanon betrays certain biases which, despite some of the parallels between them, distinguishes Amilcar Cabral from Fanon. Cabral, for example, discussed how horizontal or less hierarchal and more communal societies were more resistant to colonization than those societies that were more vertically structured and therefore assumed to be more complex. In other words, the stratified, vertical societies were more inclined to collaborate with the colonial regime. This is an important consideration that perhaps only a keen observer of African history and culture as opposed to solely politics could see. Teaching Fanon and his legacy This said, teaching Fanon is always a pleasure as his ideas speak to particular experiences which can ultimately be universalized to a range of experiences. His analysis of violence speaks to any context where oppression, poverty and misery exist, whether it is in Glasgow or Johannesburg. When he writes about nationalist leaders, he is speaking about class aspirations and leaders across the globe in ways that both speak to race and look beyond it. His psycho-social analysis of ritual and dance speak to dancehall and rave subculture and our need for cathartic release, all of which is to be found wherever we find humans. Fanon attempts to speak to the best of our humanity and the challenges of creating the future in the present and envisioning a new society in which to be human is a work in progress, an unfinished movement:
Come, then, comrades; it would be as well to decide at once to change our ways. We must shake off the heavy darkness in which we were plunged, and leave it behind. The new day which is already at hand must find us firm, prudent, and resolute. We must leave our dreams and abandon our old beliefs and friendships from the time it all began. Let us waste no time in sterile litanies and nauseating mimicry. Leave this to Europe where they are never done talking of Man, yet murder men everywhere they find them, at the corner of every one of their streets, in all corners of the globe. For centuries they have stifled almost the whole humanity in the name of a so-called spiritual experience. Look at them today swaying between atomic and spiritual degradation. (Fanon 1967: 311) Come, then comrades, the European game has finally ended; we must find something different. We today can do everything, so long as we do not imitate 132

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Europe, so long as we are not obsessed by the desire to catch up with Europe. (Fanon 1967: 312) For Europe, for ourselves, and for humanity, comrades, we must turn over a new leaf, we must work out new concepts, and try to set afoot a new man. (Fanon 1967: 316)

About the author David Austin is the author of Fear of a Black Nation: Race, Sex, and Security and Sixties Montreal (Toronto: Between the Lines, 2013) and the forthcoming The Unfinished Revolution: Linton Kwesi Johnson, Poetry, and the New Society (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014). He is also the editor of You Dont Play with Revolution: The Montreal Lectures of C.L.R. James (Oakland: AK Press, 2009). In 2007 he produced Frantz Fanon: The Wretched of the Earth for CBC. He currently teaches in the Humanities, Philosophy, and Religion Department at John Abbott College in Montreal.

Aziz Choudry When did you first encounter Fanon, in what context, and how did it impact you? I first read The Wretched of the Earth, (along with Aim Csaires Discourse on Colonialism) when I was 17 or 18. I came across it by following some reference to it somewhere, in a public library in South London. Back then, I was struggling for a vocabulary, a language to understand and deal with the racism and racist violence of the early 1980s. From the far-right fascism of the National Front and British Movement, to the endemic police brutalization and harassment of Black and Asian communities, things felt brutal, oppressive and sometimes explosive. It was Thatchers Britain, and around the time that Free Nelson Mandela and Racist Friend by The Specials were in the charts. The British Army occupation of the North of Ireland, the Cold War, the threat of nuclear annihilation, and the apartheid regime in South Africa ground on. Fanons trenchant critique of the dehumanization and alienation wrought by racism and colonialism and assertion that the colonial world is a world cut in two, divided by barracks and police stations seemed as eerily and equally relevant in Brixton, Belfast and Derry, as it later did in explaining divisions within the environment and peace movement in Aotearoa/New Zealand between those predominantly Pakeha/white activists - unable or unwilling to see the violence inherent in colonization and those especially Indigenous Peoples and Pacific Island people-who opposed militarization and nuclearization of the Pacific through an understanding of colonialism. My first
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reading of Fanon was a pretty personal, private encounter in hindsight, a study circle or having at least someone to talk about the ideas would have been great. While I have come across much of his other work translated into English since then, its still The Wretched of the Earth that draws me back again and again. What I remember most was the impact of the passion, poetry, drama and clarity of thought. While Ive certainly never seen Wretched as some sort of a manifesto, it is difficult not to use the words prescient and prophetic about Fanon. Perhaps it is a false exercise to accurately assess the extent to which Fanons ideas shaped my analysis first as an organizer, as an activist, and later in life as someone who currently works in the university as a professor in a faculty of education. Yet Fanon has always been there in some form, and in terms of impact, for me, ranks as possibly the most influential thinker. I was not really around academia much until recent years, so my introduction to him was more in the context of my own growing anti-colonial activism and analysis and was not particularly linked to formal education. Universal and particular I re-encountered Fanon in the course of activism in Aotearoa/New Zealand, after ending up there in the mid-1980s, and was struck by how his work and ideas had been discussed, debated, and taken up in different contexts. Apart from a year in a university undergraduate program, before dropping out, mine were, for the most part, not academic engagements with Fanon. In the context of Indigenous struggles for self-determination in the Pacific, in settler colonial states like Aotearoa/New Zealand and Australia, and perhaps most obviously in regard to Frances remaining Pacific colonies Kanaky (New Caledonia) and French Polynesia, Fanons ideas were present in many conversations around struggles for decolonization and self-determination. In particular I recall conversations in the early 1990s with Kanak independence activist Susanna Ounei, (from French-occupied Kanaky/New Caledonia), about the lessons from Fanon in the context of the Kanak independence struggle and, more broadly, in the Nuclear Free and Independent Pacific movement/network of struggles. Just as the Caribbean and the Pacific islands share some commonalities in their histories of colonialism, there are obvious parallels between French nuclear testing, brutal colonial/military occupation and war in Algeria and French colonialism in the Pacific. Ive often thought of how France was conducting its nuclear tests in Algeria at the start of the 1960s, in the last two years of Fanons life, and the way that testing moved to Mururoa in 1962 (with tests again in the mid-90s). Then there was the Ouva massacre of 19 Kanak activists by French security forces in 1988, alongside ongoing militarized occupation of the territory. In the South Pacific, it did not seem to me that one had to look too far or too hard to appreciate Fanons notion that colonialism is violence in its natural state.

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And in so many contexts, it seems that the questions which he highlighted about the perils of bourgeois nationalist leadership replicating colonial rule after the colonizers had allegedly left, (and of the potential of post-independence nationalism turning to xenophobia), were in the minds and conversations about leaders and elites who emerged from liberation movements. These were the very same tensions, possibilities, caveats and warnings that Fanon shared on the pitfalls of national consciousness. He offered warnings/analysis that instead of true decolonization, elites involved in national liberation struggles can end up becoming collaborators in replicating the structures of the colonizer, and actors of neocolonialism at a time of formal freedom, betraying any transformative potential of the liberation struggle. The changing of the flag but simply replacing it with neocolonial elites. Unfortunately we have seen that in too many contexts. Conversations with Maori friends about the decolonization of the mind and relating this to the meaning of decolonization in other context of struggles for self-determination in the Pacific referenced Fanon. His work certainly had an influence on a number of important Indigenous mental health, community and social work initiatives, grappling with the psychological effects of colonization. Long before the word globalization became so ubiquitous, and before the technology of the Internet, Fanons ideas had travelled widely in liberation movements --especially those for whom the concept of self-determination had not been jettisoned or supplanted by some other concept like sustainable development, as Radha has discussed elsewhere. For I think its sometimes easy to overlook the ways in which, through diasporas and international links between movements and struggles, those ideas and debates of which Fanon was such a major part travelled far and wide. I thought and still think that Fanon spoke to peoples lives and struggles not as some abstracted disembodied, objectifying, academic voice, decontextualized from the conditions in which he lived, struggled and wrote. That was also the context in which I first met Radha and Sunera through struggles in the 1990s against the free market reforms in Aotearoa/New Zealand and their relations with historical and contemporary forms of colonialism and capitalist globalization, free trade and investment agreements like GATT/WTO (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade/World Trade Organization, forums like APEC (Asia Pacific Economic Cooperation), etc. For me, the anti-colonial, anti-racist politics came first. My anti-globalization, or global justice organizing was informed by, and framed within that. In turn, alongside questions about whether the anti-globalization movement was inherently anticapitalist, a few of us pointed out that it was not inherently anti colonial. On that note, writing while ill and ultimately dying from myeloid leukemia in 1960-1961 Fanons visionary analysis of imperialism in post-independence Third World nations predicts a scenario where nominally decolonized societies contend with attendant capital flight, and direct colonial rule is replaced by the intensification of foreign investment imperialism which locks newly independent peoples into new forms of exploitation, facilitated by nationalist
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elites. I was re-reading the chapter The pitfalls of national consciousness (from Wretched of the Earth) the other day and thinking about how well it spoke to the last three decades or more of structural adjustment policies, trade and investment liberalization, examples of post-independence leadership which collaborates with former colonial powers, capital and which uses military repression against the masses and thinking, yes, he got that right! Years later, I remember a conversation David and I had on the street outside of Concordia University in Montreal, when we talked about how Fanon had been taken up at the same time in black struggle in Canada, North America, the Caribbean, by Red Power (Indigenous activists) and sections of the white Qubecois(e) nationalist left. Talking again recently about his new book, Fear of a Black Nation, David made an interesting point about the politics and history of language/translation, about how and when exactly Fanon and Csaire were being seriously taken up in Qubecois(e) communities in the original French - before English translations of his work started circulating in oppositional movements, and what that meant in terms of the influence of his thought on respective movements. Alongside that, I think that Suneras work, more than most in Canada, has consistently invoked and built upon the insights that Fanon has made which connect colonization, racialization and violence in both domestic and global contexts. Teaching Fanon A key aspect of Fanons contribution is his recognition of the intellectual work, the dialectic of learning, in the struggle with all of its tensions and contradictions. He is clear not to set up some kind of dualistic notion about the brain and the brawn of movements, viewing that both reason and force have great importance in popular mobilization, and are dialectically related. In the context of struggles for liberation, Fanon noted how ordinary people have the potential to take control over their lives, that their consciousness emerges through struggle. Staughton Lynd reminds us that without exception the most significant contributions to Marxist thought have come from men and women who were not academics, who passed through the university but did not remain there (2010: 144). In my view, Fanon has to be included in that list. With a few exceptions, I was surprised and sometimes dismayed at some of the ways that Fanons work is read in academe. Randall Williams has written perceptively about the selectivity and wariness with which the revolutionary theorists of decolonization Csaire, Fanon, Cabral, Rodney, etc. are received or ignored today (2010: 105). I have had some pretty surreal conversations with some academics about Fanon in which they seem to have rendered invisible the person, his struggles, his politics and the context in which he wrote. On the one hand, these responses sometimes remind me of a crude, and I think, rather anti-intellectual claim that he somehow glorified or fetishized violence. This is redolent of one time when I had the misfortune to be watching some US TV crime drama where police raid some homegrown terrorists house and the
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camera zooms in on the suspects bookcase with the Wretched of the Earth prominently displayed. On the other, there are some very strange abstractions of Fanons work that seem so far removed as to be unrecognizable. In teaching Fanon, I use Cheikh Djemais film Frantz Fanon: une vie, un combat, une oeuvre. In teaching Fanons writings, life, struggle, and work, whats encouraging is the interest among some students many, but not exclusively, racialized studentsin looking at Fanons ideas to think through contemporary/recent issues, struggles and dilemmas. Perhaps its interesting to think about why it is, and with whom one can say, that Fanons work does and doesnt resonate. I tend to use Concerning Violence from Wretched regularly in courses on international development and education. It remains hard to move past a reading of the chapter which does not fixate on, and decontextualize, his discussion of violence. A student in one of my classes recently said hes too black and white. But Ive always read it as a powerful critique of the inherent violence in colonialism. On the other hand I recently did a reading course on anti-colonial literature with one of my graduate students, which traversed Csaire, Fanon, Amilcar Cabral, Walter Rodney and Steve Biko among others. Reading them together was a fabulous way for both of us to think through their contributions for today. Fanons legacy Lately Ive been in many conversations, inside and outside of the university context, about how we as educators, organizers, activists--can learn from conceptual resources from earlier struggles, rather than reinventing the wheel. There is much to be said for reading Fanon against the contemporary times that we live in. The materiality and intensity of Fanons writing still leaps off every page. Of course, we cannot and should not overlook the geohistorical aspects of the moment(s) in which he wrote, the time and place, the political and social contexts, how these were shaped by his experiences in Martinique, France, Algeria, Tunisia, and informed by his political commitments and engagements. But obviously his legacy is terribly important-- as evidenced by the fact that there were so many commemorations of his life, work and struggles in so many places in late 2011/early 2012, marking 50 years after his death in December 1961. Sitting with friends and comrades recently in South Africa, affirmed to me how his ideas are clearly relevant for many of those who struggled against apartheid only to find the old regime replaced by governments which, in the name of liberation, seem to have prioritized the interests of capital over the masses. Whats exciting is to see a new generation of organizers, and students encountering, rediscovering, or in a sense unearthing, Fanon. Some Fanon reading/study circles wouldnt be a bad thing in both movement and more academic contexts, indeed perhaps encompassing both. In my mind, Ive long bracketed Fanons The Wretched of the Earth with that powerful poem by Pakistani revolutionary poet Faiz Ahmad Faiz, Subh-eAzadi, The Dawn of Freedom. Its not just that they both warn of betrayal by
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nationalist elites at the moment of supposed liberation or independence. Its also their profound sense of, and faith in, humanity, alongside their condemnation of the dehumanizing effects of imperialism and colonialism. While perhaps it might be easy to be cynical and dismissive of popular struggles for change, and peoples efforts to emancipate themselves from oppression, Fanon was deeply committed to thinking through the difficulties and complexities of the process of decolonization in a way which offered hope. As his former colleague and biographer, Alice Cherki suggests, The Wretched of the Earth cannot be dismissed as an outmoded text if we choose to read [it] as an appeal to the future and what it can hold (2000: 221). About the author Aziz Choudry is a longtime activist who is currently Assistant Professor in the Department of Integrated Studies in Education at McGill University, Canada. He is co-author of Fight Back: Workplace Justice for Immigrants (Fernwood, 2009), and co-editor of Learning from the Ground Up: Global Perspectives on Social Movements and Knowledge Production (Palgrave Macmillan, 2010), Organize! Building from the Local for Global Justice, (PM Press/Between the Lines, 2012), and NGOization: Complicity, Contradictions and Prospects (Zed Books, 2013). He is on the global spokescouncil, and a regional editor, for Interface.

Radha DSouza When did you first encounter Fanon, in what context, and how did it impact you? I first heard about Frantz Fanon as an undergraduate student studying in the University of Bombay. The post-Independence euphoria had ebbed away in India by then. India, one of the first colonies to become independent, the home to Gandhi, was also the first to be disillusioned by it on a national scale. By the mid-sixties the economy had all the trappings of a dependent colony. Poverty and famines were everywhere, the World Bank for all practical purposes wrote the nations five year plans, and the IMF forced devaluation of the rupee. The Naxalbari uprising, a small peasant revolt in the remote Terai regions on the foothills of the Himalayas, was a spark that fell on the tinderbox of a disillusioned nation. Naxalbari led to widespread state repression. Thousands of young people were disappeared by the state or killed in encounters(extrajudicial killings). Naxalbari added to Indian-English words that are part of the vernacular vocabulary of state violence to this day. Naxalbari was followed by the national railway strike and the national Emergency when the Bill of Rights provisions in the constitution were suspended and the pretence of democracy
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ended. To be young was a big security risk, and to be a young man with an attitude an enhanced security risk. During the Emergency many of us suddenly found ourselves with more time on hand. Without strikes, protests, and demonstrations to organise, a time when even hanging out in cafes came with safety risks, we decided to use our time productively by reading. A university professor who was and still is very supportive of students suggested we read Fanon. I remember clearly our reaction on discovering Fanon for the first time. We felt vindicated, our views about the events around us were validated by someone who was not from our country or context. We were not mindless or misguided as the state and the media portrayed us. We were saying national independence was not supposed to become what it had. State violence was the cause of social violence. Two and a half decades later I rediscovered Fanon in New Zealand as an academic. Ironically Bombay had been renamed Mumbai, after a campaign spearheaded by the militant Hindu organisation Shiv Sena in 1995 after the demolition of the ancient Babri Masjid mosque in 1992 in Uttar Pradesh. The events leading up to the Babri Masjid were filled with anti-Muslim hysteria and followed by widespread violence against Muslims throughout India. Ironic because the rioters and the victims were both the wretched of the earth, drawn from the slums and ghettoes of Bombay, a city marked by what Fanon described as the geography of hunger. Ironic because way back in the sixties Fanon grasped the anatomy of aggression by the oppressed. The colonised man dreams of physical prowess because aggression is deposited in his bones. Niggers, Fanon wrote, beat each other up, and there is collective auto-destruction. Poverty and police powers, the two faces of oppression, dehumanises. The Fanon I rediscovered in New Zealand academia, in Spanish and postcolonial studies, had gone from being a serious champion of the Third World oppressed to becoming a kind of cool guy, laundered and pressed by the socalled cultural turn in social theory. Critical theory had transformed Fanon almost beyond recognition. A black mans desire to wear a white mask was no longer about colonisation, oppression and state violence. It became a matter of black identity, a particular way of engaging racial discrimination that reduced colonialism to a racial question and lead the way smoothly to the politics of multiculturalism. State violence, economic violence, cultural violence, and violence of history, at the forefront of Fanons critique of colonisation became quiet and invisible, and if mentioned at all, it was only through the lens of identity, as sources for identity formation. Identity was a consequence of violence not the thing itself. I was astonished to read that Fanon was seen as the prophet of violence by many academics. Surrounded by daily state violence it had never crossed our minds that Fanon could be read in that way. I had learnt that Machiavelli and Hobbes were the prophets of violence. Machiavelli advised the wise prince to use violence judiciously as a technique of statecraft and Hobbes said the power of the body politic rested on the sword. In academia, people around me cited both scholars of Western Enlightenment but rarely if ever associated their thesis
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on violence with the modern state which institutionalises and monopolises violence. In 2011, in the UK by then, I searched to see if there were people who might want to celebrate the life of Fanon in the year of his fiftieth death anniversary. By then, even the cultural and postcolonial theorists had nearly forgotten Fanon in British universities. Neoliberal reform of universities, the successive decimation of trade unions and austerity measures had switched intellectual ethos in academia to TINA mode there is no alternative but to succumb to restructuring and reforms and put ones head down to survive. These are tough times. Fanon was no longer the cool guy of the eighties and nineties. Fanon was remembered instead in the Afro-Caribbean communities in London, many of whom were still reeling in the aftermath of the Tottenham riots in August 2011 when young black men and women once again demonstrated, very tragically, Fanons understanding of the anatomy of state violence on the wretched of the earth in the heartland of global finance capital. The British Afro-Caribbean community organised a public event to celebrate Fanons life. One speaker, a Ghanaian recalled how as a young man and early career journalist he had interviewed Fanon, and reported on his tour of Africa, his visit to Ghana and meetings with Nkrumah in the early days of Ghanas independence. Fanon came to life at the meeting. Women wept as they spoke of police mistreatment of their sons and grandsons. Our children are not bad; they are good kids, one of them said. The simplicity of her words moved the audience to tears. I remembered Fanons quote from his teacher and black poet Csaire in The Wretched of the Earth. There is an exchange between a rebel and his mother there that echoed the words of the mother on the stage in London. Fanon belongs to the AfroCaribbean communities and I am glad he was celebrated by them. It did not matter to me anymore that the multiculturalists in the Universities had forgotten him. Violence Fanon was a psychiatrist, a trained medical practitioner. He was also a black man from the French colony of Martinique whose ancestors were slaves. He fought in World War 2 and experienced the most extreme form of state violence: war. Practicing as a psychiatrist in Algeria, he saw from close quarters what colonisation did to the human in human beings. He became interested in the Algerian revolution because of the torture victims who came to him for treatment in the aftermath of the bloody repression of the nationalist movement in France. He moved to Algeria because he saw that as a black man, even a brilliant one, in France in the fifties his practice could not flourish. By then he had experienced French racism firsthand and written Black Skin, White Masks. Why do people endure so much suffering and pain for the sake of freedom and national independence? This question led him to interrogate colonialism and imperial domination.

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The edifice of modern capitalism was founded on colonialism, the slave trade, the land confiscations, the appropriation of natural wealth and labour. In turn colonialism was a system organised and maintained by naked violence. The violence of colonialism was physical, social, economic, cultural and emotional. Colonial societies were founded by violence and maintained through it. What does a society founded on violence do to its members? On the one hand it could destroy their sense of self so completely that they became benumbed and dehumanised, a pathetic shadow of the human spirit. However, on the other, the human spirit being indestructible invariably found an outlet through spontaneous violence- which could be either individual violence against others equally wretched or collective violence of the poor that came out in outbursts like riots. Either way this violence was intuitive. The violence of a freedom fighter is qualitatively different in contrast. The freedom fighter begins by saying I am not putting up with this s... anymore. The moment s/he resists, the colonial state unleashes extraordinary violence upon him/her. The resistance fighter targets the perpetrator of violence with the hope of ending it forever. Revolutionary violence restores humanity in the abused, tortured individual. The act of resisting returns dignity and sense of self which the oppressors violence had destroyed. When a person says I am not putting up with this s... , s/he ceases to be the animal s/he has been reduced to by the coloniser. The restoration of their humanity is crucial if there is to be freedom at all. The freedom fighter is able to endure extreme trauma because s/he hopes by doing so s/he can keep her/his humanity which s/he has briefly tasted in the act of resistance. I want to step back from Fanon for a moment in order to locate the wider significance of his contributions on understanding violence of the oppressed in the post World War 2 era. There are three wider points I wish to make. First, it is important to remember that the critique of Fanon by critical theorists like Hannah Arendt turns on philosophical arguments that reflect postHolocaust angst among European intellectuals. The philosophical response to European intellectual angst provided the moral justification for seeking reparations from Germany which in turn was used to colonise Palestine and establish the newest colonial-military state of Israel. If violence begets violence which is true as a philosophical argument - who should bear the responsibility for ending the cycles of violence? The solution for European intellectuals was reparations from Germany (repentance), the use of that money to establish the state of Israel (compensation), and political solution as opposed to armed struggle for a Palestinian homeland and self-determination (non-violence). In this context it is interesting to recall another philosopher of non-violence from the East who took a completely different view on the responsibility for ending cycles of violence. The Buddha in his sermon to Pranjit and Ajatasatru in sixth century BC also argued that violence begets violence. But he concluded that cycles of violence must and can only be ended by the victors. In this school of thought in the European context the onus would fall on the Allies to dismantle the institutions of violence. Predictably the Allies went on to build formidable
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military-industrial-commercial - media complexes after winning the World Wars. Fanons arguments in contrast were based on clinical observations and conclusions he came to from healing real people in a repressed colonised society. The starting point for him was not ethical or political philosophy but a real human being who had come to him to be healed. What should that human being do until the victors dismantle their military-industrial-media complexes? Violence is not about using particular tools it is not about a knife, or a gun, or a machine gun, which can be picked up or dropped down depending on political choices. Lenin argued that wars mobilise entire societies and that wars reorganise all of society. Before him Engels argued in Anti-Duhring that wars were not about weapons alone but the political economy of production, distribution and consumption of weapons. The military-industrial-commercialmedia complexes of the post WW2 era reorganised the societies that were victorious in the World Wars, the Allies, as gigantic warfare states by unifying institutions of state and defence establishments, monopoly corporations and institutions of commerce and civil society and institutions of knowledge. When unmanned drone missiles rain bombs on mistaken targets and families of peasants and shopkeepers on the ground become collateral damage what should those people do while they wait for the philosophers of non-violence to convince their warfare states to dissolve themselves? My second point is about agency and subjectivity. At least since the so-called cultural turn critical theory on the Left has systematically undermined structural analysis in favour of subjectivity and agency. On the Right neoliberalism has elevated individual choice to new levels. Individuals, in the neoliberal conception, are motivated by self-interest and seek to maximise gains by making the right choices. Too bad if their choices are not in sync with market fluctuations. There is no such thing as society as Margaret Thatcher famously said and there will be winners and losers. The conceptualisations of agency in the post-World War 2 era marked by the so-called cultural turn in theory, objectifies agency and transforms subjectivity into an object for philosophical contemplation. It obscures the fact that agency is an attribute of the psyche, the emotional, psychological and moral dimensions of life. Cultural theories integrate the emotional, psychological and moral aspects of life into structures of state and oppression. Foucauldian disciplinary power, and the Gramscian hegemony includes agency in the structures of governance and thereby subsume the autonomy of agency in the real life of real people. It forecloses possibilities of transformative structural change. This is the paradox of agency and subjectivity in critical theory. Fanons question never presented itself to the critical theorists: what should the torture victim mauled by French intelligence service officers, or the peasants systematically dehumanised by the colonial state do? What of their agency? Fanons position as a psychiatrist put the question squarely before him, and his practice in Algeria during the revolution and its repression meant the question could not be answered without considering colonialism. The option of
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developing a more sophisticated panopticon was not available to him. What makes Fanon a revolutionary thinker is that he did not shy away from answering the question that the context presented him with. Colonisation and state violence dehumanises people. Period. Resistance restores the psychological, emotional and moral dimensions of a dehumanised person by restoring agency to him/her in real life. He was always clear that violence must end but equally clear that it could end only when the architecture for violence was dismantled colonial appropriation and expropriation must end for state violence to end, and when institutional violence ended, individual violence will become a minor, local and community based problem, as opposed to being a systemic foundation of society as it is at present. That brings me to the third point about violence which is a far more insidious development since Fanons times. There are two strands of early Enlightenment and modernisation and their coming together in the post-World War era that is significant. First, the Age of Enlightenment introduced a rupture between the material world and the mental world. This rupture created the body-mind or mind-matter dichotomy that is the hallmark of nearly all schools of Enlightenment thought. However, with the rise of monopoly finance capitalism in the early twentieth century, we find the emergence of psychology as a distinct science subject to scientific methods of empirical verification and experimentation that could be treated by combinations of medical and social sciences. Psychology is a quintessentially American-led science of the twentieth century. Its expansion into social psychology and behavioural psychology expanded methods of this science of psychology to collective minds as opposed to individual responses to situations. Psychology transformed the old body-mind problem in qualitative ways by taking it beyond the realm of ethical philosophy to interventions through clinical and social treatments. The engines driving the expansion of the scope and character of psychology were twofold. The Age of Enlightenment produced an extraordinary innovation the corporation. Conceived initially by merchants as a risk management strategy the corporation was endowed with juristic personality i.e. it was a person analogous to the natural person. The transformation of corporations from being small risk management societies to monopolies in the early twentieth century created the need for command-communication-control systems within organisations. If monopolies were to be counted as a single a juristic person, then they needed to operate with a single mind. Behavioural psychology and social psychology provided the knowledge base for large organisations to functions with a single mind. Fields like social psychology, organisational behaviour, organisational psychology, corporate social responsibility held out the possibility that the juristic person could have a mind similar to the natural person. Behavioural psychology endowed juristic persons with a mind. Secondly, the rise of new forms of militarism in the early twentieth century, in particular, the invention of airplanes and the emergence of aerial warfare
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created the demand for what is called 3C technologies CommandCommunication-Control technologies. 3C technologies in turn involved communication between machines and humans and machines and broke down the most important barrier between men and machines: the psyche. Cybernetics was born during that period, and developments in artificial intelligence, robotics and such brought together a number of social and natural sciences including linguistics, sociology, anthropology and psychology besides biology, chemistry and physics. 3C technologies provided the technological underpinnings for corporate communications and corporations provided the manufacturing facilities for 3C technologies. The juristic person became endowed with a psyche. The natural person became a pale, emaciated and powerless shadow in competition with the juristic person. Postmodernism, cultural and critical theories, as Zygmunt Bauman argues in his book Legislators and Interpreters succumbed to the emaciation of the individual. They succumbed to it however by accepting the juristic person as a psyche-bearing person. Fanon never succumbed to this possibility. The juristic person with a psyche was an embodiment of violence, it was colonialism itself, it was the integration of economy, state and civil society in the architecture of societies founded on violence. The psyche was for Fanon an attribute of being human and human beings alone were capable of transformative social action. Healing the social and individual psyche destroyed by the monstrosities of military-industrialcommercial-media complexes was possible not by theorising about subjectivity but by transformative social action. Resistance was therapy and resistance brought social change. This revolutionary insight calls for restoring the unity of the body, the mind and the body politic through transformative action. Fanon was a revolutionary far ahead of his times. Nationalism Fanon never saw formal national independence as an end in itself. Equally he saw the Third World elite clearly for who they were and what their success entailed for the wretched of the earth. Fanon never fell into the capitalismsocialism dichotomy of the Cold War. Socialism unleashed the enthusiasm of people whereby they subjected themselves voluntarily to forced labour. Independence forced Third World societies to the same forms of production as under colonialism. Yet socialism and nationalism opened the way for new and creative social reconstruction. The new society he argued cannot emulate the old, or be founded on the value systems of the old society. And, we cannot afford to forget that the grandeur of Europe rests on the wealth appropriated from the rest of the world Europe was a creation of the Third World, he argued. The Third World cannot reclaim itself by emulating Europe. They must find their own values and methods particular to them, and when doing so, they cannot afford to forget the extraordinary violence that will inevitably befall them. The Third World must choose its own path. Fanon leaves the National Liberation project wide open even after formal independence. In this, Fanon was clearly far

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ahead of his times and foresaw the trajectory and limitations of national liberation struggles even when supporting them. Teaching Fanon Fanon is outside the bounds of legal education. The day Law Schools include Fanon in their curriculum will signal the beginnings of a world that takes a violence-free world seriously. About the author Radha DSouza teaches law in the University of Westminster, London. Her research interests include global and social justice, social movements, Law and Development, colonialism and imperialism, socio-legal studies, law and technology, and resource conflicts in the Third World, in particular, water conflicts. Radha loves literature and people.

Sunera Thobani When did you first encounter Fanon, in what context, and how did it impact you? I first read Fanon when I went to college as a mature student in the UK to study for an undergraduate degree in the Social Sciences. My family had migrated from Tanzania to England as part of the early 1970s wave of Asian migration in response to the Africanization policies that followed independence from British rule. I grew up in the highly charged racial politics of Tanzania, where Asians had been brought in from India during the late 19th and early 20th century under colonial (German and British) rule to serve as the buffer between the European settlers/colonial administrators and the larger African population. I was thus acutely aware of the violence underpinning this society on an experiential level, but little in my schooling or community life actually acknowledged this reality. My family was working class, but part of a conservative Asian community that had played a key role in furthering the socio-economic policies of the colonial state. And although my family would have had little to lose from the nationalization of property initiated by the postcolonial state after the Arusha Declaration, they decided to migrate to the UK as our community began to leave and rumours abounded about young Asian women and girls being forced into marriage with older African men. The racism of the 1970s UK especially in the streets against working class Asian families was intense, yet we had no language, no tools in my family to even name this, let alone try and confront it in any fashion. There were no community organizations that provided any support, and religious institutions
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in the community tended to be very conservative. The grind of daily survival wore my family down, the trauma of migration remained fresh year after year, and the alienation we felt from the larger society left deep scars in all our lives. After spending some years working, I decided to go to college. This possibility had never been on the horizon for any of the women in my family. When my sister and I went to college, we were breaking new ground. It was there that I read Fanons Black Skin, White Masks, and the book utterly transformed my life. The power of each sentence in the book, the clarity of thought and the controlled fury of Fanons politics were deeply liberating to read. Suddenly I had a language and a framework in which to understand my own experiences as well as those of my family. The sophistication of Black Skin, White Masks analysis of intra- as well as inter- group racial violence also gave me a way to make sense of the racism of Asians against Africans in the context of the global hierarchy of races instituted by white supremacy. Fanons explication on the role of violence in the daily reproduction of the racial/colonial order was certainly profoundly unsettling, as was his description of the psychic and spatial ordering of such violence. Yet at the same time, his analysis was deeply reassuring; I had seen and experienced the anger he described erupting in the world around me, anger that until then had seemed inexplicable. Reading Fanon helped me acquire a historical understanding of the colonial order with its global system of racial hierarchy, and of the psychic as well as the material effects of racism and white supremacy. It is difficult even now to put into words the powerful impact Fanons ideas had on my thinking. I joined anti-racist organizations while in college, started going on protest marches, and began to understand more fully the meaning of the Brixton and Southall riots as they had erupted in the streets of London. My politicization had begun and there was no turning back after reading Fanon. In many ways, reading Fanon at that point in my life saved me. Violence Fanons famous contention that it is primarily violence that sustains the racial and colonial order highlighted the inextricability of physical conquest and material deprivation from the psycho-sexual aggression that sought to destroy the natives languages, customs, sexual and gender norms, as well as their historical consciousness, and indeed, their very status as human. The resulting forms of alienation transformed the colonized wo/man into a thing existing in an intense state of politico-cultural and psycho-sexual depersonalization. Only a radical decolonization that replaced a particular species of wo/man with another could enable colonized peoples to reclaim their stolen humanity, argued Fanon in his defence of the Algerian revolution against French occupation. The depth of Fanons analysis of the forms violence assumes in the organization of the global order remains unparalleled even now. I was very interested in these ideas on violence when I first read Fanon, and find them even more relevant now in the era of the global War on Terror. Soon after
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reading Wretched of the Earth, I went to Palestine to work as a volunteer with the Palestinian Womens Union in Gaza. Although this was before the first Intifada, I came to recognize the inevitability of revolutionary violence in the context of the colonial occupation of Palestine by the Zionist state. Israeli troops were to be found on every street corner, checkpoints shaped the experience of everyday life, controlling the mobility of Palestinian friends at every turn. As terrible as the living conditions were in Gaza at that time, the situation is now, of course, much, much worse. In Palestine, I also came to understand, for the first time in my life, what it meant emotionally and psychically to be connected to a particular land; I also began to understand the lasting impact - through generations - of the violence of dispossession from the land. Coming from a migrant community, I had never really had any experience of this psycho-political phenomenon. But in the time I spent with Palestinian activists, I came to see the deep meaning this relationship to land had in their political vision and in the cultural expressions of their resistance to the violence of the Israeli state. After I migrated to Canada, I saw the same deep rootedness of Indigenous peoples in their relationship to the land, and came to understand that as a member of an immigrant community, my relationship to Canada is of a very different nature. Fanons ideas thus indelibly shaped my understanding of settler colonialism, and of the urgent necessity for immigrant communities in Canada to build solidarity with Indigenous peoples struggles for sovereignty. Citizenship has been the mechanism through which immigrant communities have become complicit in the ongoing colonization of First Nations, and any social justice movement that elides the necessity for a fundamental transformation of this institution cannot possibly bring about any meaningful social change. After the attacks of 9/11, Fanons analysis of the role of violence in geopolitics and his understanding of the role of revolutionary violence in the anti-colonial politics of the Algerian revolution became relevant once again in my own analysis of the War on Terror. Fanons ideas had been central to the politics of resistance of third world revolutionary movements, and the relevance of his analysis to the violence instantiated in the new invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq in the early 21st century was undeniable. But as Islamophobia moved to the centre of geopolitics with the invasion of Afghanistan, I was surprised at how quickly left, feminist and anti-war movements capitulated to the demonization of Muslims and Islam that was to become the ideological pillar of this new imperialism. Although many of these activists voiced their opposition to the imperialist policies of the US Administration, they were unable to see past the Western fear-mongering about the dangers of Islam, accepting the US invasion of Afghanistan as the lesser danger. And this included activists who had read and understood Fanon. The man living under occupation is no such entity, Fanon had claimed in his studies of the 19th and 20th century colonial order, finding instead in his psychiatric practice, political activism and personal experience that this order was reliant upon the transformation of the soul of the Black man into the
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artefact of the white man. The torture and waging of state terror against Muslim populations around the world in the US-led global war was accomplishing the same thingification as the Muslim wo/man was being yet again stripped of their status as human, namely, the rights-bearing citizensubject of modernity. The gains of previously colonized Muslim populations in the postcolonial era, including their access to citizenship rights, were being destroyed in the racial profiling, rendition, targeted assassination and collective punishment being meted out by the nation-state system, yet Islamophobia quickly became as widespread in social justice movements as it was in mainstream society. The Muslim men hunted, tortured and murdered by US forces and their allies were being defined in social justice movements as hypermisogynist woman-haters, and the Muslim women being killed by US bombs were being defined as in need only of unveiling. Race and religious identity merged in the construction of the believing Muslim as the most potent threat to global security, and Fanons insightful analysis of the veil in the Algerian womens lives he had studied fell by the wayside. The Islamophobia rife in social justice movements to