[PHOTO] Harbourfront ducks, Toronto

[LINK] Two social science links on how ideas can exert their power

Two posts came up on the social scienes section of my blogroll that I wanted to share.

Writing at A (Budding) Sociologist's Commonplace Book, Dan Hirschman posted about the power of ideas, drawing from Stephen Lukes' 1970s formation. As Hirschman writes, it's noteworthy that of the four approaches to ideas as powerful that he identifies, only the last two are easily challenged. The first two are much more subtle.

1. Ideas as arguments. Type 1 power is all about winning observed, rational fights. I think some of the policy paradigms literature (following Hall) has this flavor. The ideas that matter here are the ideas held by powerful people – politicians, bureaucrats, etc.

2. Ideas as frames. Type 2 power is all about agenda-setting. The framing literature fits neatly into this mode: the way a topic is discussed alters the politics of it. If you can convince everyone that something is a privacy issue, not a security issue, maybe you win without even having to fight, or at least you change the rules of the game to make it easier to win.

3. Ideas as ideologies. Ideas are almost easiest to talk about in terms of type 3 power, as ideology and hegemony have ideas “built in.” For example, “development” arguably became a governing ideology in the mid-20th century, and nations and powerful international NGOs worked very hard to produce development, independent of whether or not development (as defined and understood within the ideology, i.e. increased GDP/capita) was in the interests of the individuals working for it.

4. Ideas as actors. Ok, I’m cheating here, but I can’t think of a clever term to fit aside from the intentionally provocative and obscure language of ANT. Type 4 power is most associated with Foucault (e.g. governmentality, the formation of subjectivities), but I think ANT, and especially Callon’s recent stuff on “economicization” fits nicely here – by making a particular topic or thing economic when it had not been in the first place, it changes the set of actors who have relevant things to say about it and struggle over it, along with the stakes of that struggle. From a different direction, Elizabeth Popp Berman’s work on innovation economics and economic policy could fit in here. You could read her story in two ways: did various policies get enacted because of ideas-as-arguments (e.g. there was a pro camp and an anti camp and the arguments of the pro camp converted the antis) or because economic ideas reshaped our understanding of academic science to make it into an economic activity, one which drives economic growth, and that this entirely changed the rules of the game by moving the playing field onto one in which those arguments were then determinative (in other words reading her case as one of both type 4 and type 1 power).

Meanwhile, at Understanding Society Daniel Little draws from Odoric Wou's 1994 Mobilizing the Masses: Building Revolution in Henan to examine just how the Chinese Communist Party managed to successfully mobilize the masses behind its revolutionary causes despite the costs associated with such moblization.

Two strands of mobilization ideologies have been emphasized by historians of the revolution. The first is class mobilization -- a deliberate attempt to emphasize the exploitativeness of rural land relations, and the conflicts that exist between landlords, rich peasants, and poor peasants. Here the idea is that poor peasants can be energized by a clear recognition of the ways in which their livelihoods are harmed by the social privilege of rich peasants and landlords, and they can be motivated to take on the risky business of revolution. The second is a nationalist appeal in the context of the Japanese occupation of China, and the claim that the Red Army was more effective than the Guomindang military in fighting the Japanese. Here the idea is that peasants of all strata can be motivated to defend their families, their villages, and their region against the imperialistic (and harsh) Japanese invaders. Wou documents both strategies in Henan.

[. . .]

Finally, Wou emphasizes throughout the necessity for political skill and compromise on the part of party leaders. It was necessary to form coalitions with other non-revolutionary organizations in order to carry forward the objectives of the party, and the CCP leadership in Henan was fully prepared to enter into such coalitions.

[URBAN NOTE] Notes on two pedestrianization projects in Toronto

CBC's coverage of the decision to narrow a stretch of Yonge Street to make more room for pedestrians is positive.

Shops and restaurants along a stretch of Yonge Street in downtown Toronto are gearing up for a pilot project that will open up two additional traffic lanes to pedestrians starting Friday.

Vehicular traffic on Yonge Street from Gerrard Street to Queen Street has already been reduced to one lane in each direction in portions for the Celebrate Yonge festival.

As a result of the changes, there will be approximately five metres of additional pedestrian space along Yonge Street in addition to the sidewalk. Those areas will be separated from vehicular traffic with planters, and organizers plan to feature increased patio space, games and buskers.

"We're hoping to get more people coming into the city," said Andreas Mavridis, the manager of the Three Brewers Pub just south of Dundas Street on Yonge Street.

"Our patio is going to be like 60 feet. It's going to be closed off here where the lane is," he said, gesturing towards the roadway.

"It's going to be barricaded all around."

Andreas Mavridis, the manager of the Three Brewers Pub, is looking forward to increased customer traffic when Celebrate Yonge kicks off on Friday. (CBC)"It's one of the busiest intersections in the country and we need space for people to enjoy the summer," said Abigail Gamble, a spokeswoman for the Downtown Yonge Business Improvement Area as she stood at the corner of Yonge and Dundas streets.

She said there will 11 different theme areas throughout the street, but didn't reveal too much more because "we want to keep some of it a surprise."

Elsewhere, Torontoist's Jess Davidson offers more mixed reports about the benefits of Kensington Market's new vehicle-free Market Sundays for local businesses.

Kensington Market’s new Market Sundays are the neighbourhood’s fledgling attempt at closing its streets to auto traffic every Sunday throughout August and September, but organizers and attendees alike are still getting used to the change. At a Kensington community centre Monday night, business owners, residents, and members of the Market’s Business Improvement Area met to discuss the new initiative, now entering its third week.

The jury is still out on whether or not the more-frequent street closures are a good thing, as Kensington Market BIA coordinator Yvonne Bambrick readily admits.

“If there are things we should be doing differently we want to apply those that can be applied moving forward for the rest of the events,” she says.

[. . .]

The aim of Market Sundays is to help bring people to the area by giving them more room to spill off the sidewalks, while avoiding the Pedestrian-Sunday-style noise and overcrowding that have been a perennial source of complaints from area residents and businesspeople.

While business owners and residents generally agree that there is a benefit to Market Sundays, attendees at the meeting wondered what the change will ultimately mean for Kensington Market as a whole.

Some of the questions that arose were fundamental: Is Kensington Market an entertainment district, a shopping district, or a residential neighbourhood? Should events then take the tone of a party, a celebration, a way to make money, or, as a few residents suggested, should they be scraped entirely?

[LINK] Two links on Pakistani persection of Ahmadis

The Ahmadis are adherents of the Ahmadiyya, an Islamic sect founded in British India in the late 19th century and currently numbering in the millions. For a variety of theological reasons, not least of which is controversy over the exact status of the movement's founder Mirza Ghulam Ahmad, despite Ahmadis' self-identification as Muslim they are often not viewed as Muslims by their nominal co-religionists. (It mightn't be inaccurate to compare the Ahmadis' position relative to mainstream Islam to that of Mormons relative to mainstream Christianity.)

Of late, anti-Ahmadi sentiments have hardened into outright persecution in Pakistan, with growing levels of state-sanctioned violence against Ahmadi communities and even their physical institutions. In the Punjabi city of Kharian, an Ahmadi mosque was vandalized by the police. Zofeen Ebrahim's Inter Press Service article "Ahmadis Lose Hope This Ramadan" takes a look at the plight of these people.

As millions around the world enter the third week of the Ramadan fast, the fraternity that typically unites Muslims during the holy month does not extend to Pakistan’s Ahmadi community, which is facing worse persecution than ever before.

[. . .]

“What space for Ahmadis are you talking about? They don’t have any,” Faisal Neqvi, a Lahore-based lawyer, told IPS.

Declared non-Muslims in 1974, the legal and social exclusion of Ahmadis was further enshrined in a 1984 law that prohibits them from proclaiming themselves Muslims or making pilgrimages to Saudi Arabia.

While non-Muslim missionaries are permitted to proselytise as long as they do not preach against Islam, Ahamdis cannot even hold a public congregation or sing hymns in praise of the prophet.

Last month, hostility towards the community of four million bubbled over in Kharian, a city in the Punjab province, when a police contingent demolished six minarets of an Ahmadi mosque, Baitul Hamd, and effaced the calligraphy on its walls.

Raja Zahid, the police officer who supervised the demolition squad, told the Express Tribune, an English daily, that the act of destruction was carried out following a formal complaint from a religious organisation called Tehreek-e-Tahaffuz-e-Islam .

According to Zahid, there was a mutual understanding that the demolition would take place.

“We made sure that we were respectful, but the law 298-B clearly states that Qadianis (Ahmadis) cannot call their worship place a ‘mosque’, and if it cannot be called that, then it cannot resemble the mosque either,” said Zahid.

An incensed Ahmadiyya Jamaat spokesperson, Saleemuddin, told IPS, “There is no patented design for a mosque or a law that states that a minaret of a certain design can only be used by a mosque.”

Meanwhile, a Reuters article by Myra MacDonald, "When minarets fall in Pakistani town, UK diaspora feels shock
", highlights the transfer of violent anti-Ahmadi sentiments from Pakistan to the Pakistani diaspora in the United Kingdom. Shouldn't calls for the murder of religious minorities lead to criminal prosecutions?

Perhaps the text messages foreshadowed what was about to happen in Pakistan. One in June telling him his services as a London taxi driver would not be needed. A second in July: "u r qadiani and qadianis are not muslims. They r kaafirs".

And then a phone call from an anguished relative back home. Police had come to their mosque, the pride of the local Ahmadi community, in the town of Kharian in Pakistan's Punjab province and torn down its minarets.

"It was a very beautiful mosque," recalled Munawar Ahmed Khurshid, the imam who laid the first stone when the mosque was built, and who like many Ahmadis has since moved to Britain after Pakistan's laws turned increasingly hostile to the sect - often known by the derogatory term Qadiani in Pakistan and dismissed as kafir, or infidels.

[. . . S]uch is the intimacy between Pakistan and its 1.2 million-strong diaspora in Britain that not only did the Ahmadi community in London learn the details from their families before it was reported in the media, they have seen the echoes of the same persecution here.

Or more strangely, a foreshadowing.

Hence the texts to the taxi driver - whose name has been withheld for security reasons - who broke off from a conversation about events in Pakistan to bring out his phone to show the messages he received in London.

[. . .]

In Pakistan, the Ahmadis have become particularly vulnerable since 1984. In May 2010, at least 86 people were killed in militant attacks on two Ahmadi mosques in Punjab's capital Lahore. Every month or so in Pakistan, Ahmadis are killed in ones or twos - sometimes stabbed, sometimes shot.

In Britain, which the spiritual leader of the sect has made his home, there have been, as yet, no deaths.

Yet the threat is there in the text messages. It is there in the boycott of a butcher because people are told his meat is not halal even though it comes from the same slaughterhouse as that sold by non-Ahmadi butchers. It is there in leaflets distributed quietly in London declaring that Ahmadis are "wajib ul qatl" - worthy of death.

[LINK] Two Far Outliers excerpts on media and dissidence in Vietnam

Far Outliers has been posting multiple excerpts from Bill Hayton's 2010 Vietnam: Rising Dragon. Two excerpts caught my attention. The first, itself excerpted below, deals with the success of the privately-owned VNExpress online news service.

The hugely popular online site, vnexpress.net, started life as a project of FPT, the Corporation for Financing and Promoting Technology, wholly owned by the Ministry of Science and Technology. Under its highly entrepreneurial management (led by Dr Truong Gia Binh, former son-in-law of General Giap: see Chapter 1) FPT has grown from its original 13 employees into an employer of several thousand, with a series of IT outsourcing contracts for companies in Japan and Europe. It is also one of Vietnam's largest internet service providers and telecoms companies. In 2001 it set up its own online news site – and just like VietNamNet-TV it did so without a government licence. Initially vnexpress.net was classified as an ‘internet content provider’, meaning that it could only publish material that had already been published elsewhere. By selecting the stories which the site's editors thought would most interest readers and by focusing on information rather than ideological comment it rapidly reached a huge audience. Its business plan required it to reach 200,000 users within a year and a half. It achieved this within four months. But by the end of its first year in business it had already made profits from advertising of $70,000. It was the only unsubsidised website in the country. After more than a year of lobbying, vnexpress.net eventually received its licence from the Ministry of Culture. It was surprisingly easy. At the time it seemed to the leadership of vnexpress.net that the Ministry didn't really see the point of an online newspaper or understand its potential significance.

As it has evolved, the parent company of vnexpress.net, FPT, has grown far away from its roots. Just 8 per cent of its stock is still owned by the state, around 80 per cent by its employees and foreign investors (including the venture capital arm of the US chip-maker Intel), with the remainder held by investment houses based in Vietnam. Thus one of the most important Vietnamese news outlets is almost wholly owned by private interests in contradiction of government policy. Its survival rests less on the law than on the balance of relationships between the company's patrons and potentially hostile forces in other parts of the Party and government. FPT has become one of Vietnam's biggest companies and its connections run deep into the Party leadership and into the boardrooms of some of the biggest global corporations. It has no shortage of allies to call upon if it's ever put in a difficult position. For the time being vnexpress.net, its most controversial subsidiary, exists in a curious legal limbo.

The second comments on how, after 2006, widespread penetration of broadband internet and mobile computing/telephone at low costs allowed dissidents to connect with one another and with outside supporters. (This, it should be noted, apparently didn't allow dissidents to make converts outside of their circles efficiently, if at all.)

By 2006, broadband had fully penetrated Vietnam; internet shops were available on most city streets. Through the net, dissidents managed to surmount the physical barriers the state had erected around them and bridge the gaps of physical distance, of ideology and – at least as important – of ego, which, until then, had kept them divided. Services originally intended to allow teenagers to flirt with each other provided invigorating links with Vietnamese exiles in the United States and elsewhere. Websites such as PalTalk host chat rooms in which hundreds of people can type messages to each other and simultaneously listen to an audiostream or watch video. In effect, each chat room is an interactive radio ‘narrowcast’. Narrowcasters can give out information, make speeches, discuss developments and take questions and comment from the other participants. Suddenly dissidents in Vietnam had access to a new world of ideas and to a reservoir of supporters. Until then many people had been reluctant to trust each other, never knowing who was an informer; but a few overseas activists acted as ‘brokers’ – in effect vetting the dissidents who contacted them and putting them in touch with one another. They also began to provide cash.

With the cost of living so cheap in Vietnam, relatively small amounts of money raised abroad could go a long way. Supporters groups sprang up in Australia (Bloc 1–7–06), the US (Bloc 1–9–06) and the UK (Bloc 10–12–06) and sent in money for dissidents' living expenses and equipment. With hundreds of thousands of overseas Vietnamese remitting money to relatives each month it was easy to disguise the transfers. They weren't particularly clandestine; most went via Western Union. Once inside Vietnam, the money was moved by couriers to where it was needed. When police stopped the car of one dissident, Nguyen Phuong Anh, on 15 December 2006, they confiscated 4.5 million Vietnamese dong, the equivalent of about $300, about six months' wages for the average worker. He told them he had planned to buy clothes for needy paper boys. The money was crucial. It paid for computers, dozens of mobile phones, and hundreds of SIM cards to enable the dissidents to stay in touch even as the security services tried to disconnect them.