Focaal

This article analyzes a particular form of everyday politics through the case of land development in a Chinese village. Commonly referred to as edge ball politics (cabianqiu), it implies the act of transgressing certain rules or laws and testing the limits of what is socially and legally possible. We found that the state, the village leadership, private developers, and villagers all vie to influence the outcomes of land development in the village by engaging in this practice. We suggest that edge ball politics plays into the Chinese state's governing strategies, which allow for a manageable space of negotiation to ward off a collective sense of injustice in the face of rampant dispossession of the weak and accumulation by the powerful.

Migration politics in Finland are centered around “social integration” and “multiculturalism.” While the stated aims of such politics are equality and social mobility, the results are often contradictory, perpetuating the hierarchies and inequalities they propose to overcome. Utilizing Guy Debord's notion of the “society of the spectacle,” I argue that there is a neoliberal Integration Spectacle that projects the appearance of societal change but is, in reality, an immobilizing force that works to obscure a particular racialized social order. I draw on my fieldwork in and around Varissuo, an international working-class suburb on the edge of Turku, western Finland, to analyze how both migrant residents of the area and the professionals within the so-called integration economy engage with, reproduce, and deal with this discrepancy.

Formal work is essential to gain legal residence in Chile and the reason why Latin American and Caribbean migrants purchase fake contracts on the black market. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with migrant Haitian women applying for work visas in Santiago, this article explores the effects of desired formality and its promises of a good life on contemporary statehood in Chile. The analysis shows how Haitian women's efforts to become formal workers transform their experiences as racialized and gendered migrants in Chile, and impact how state institutions manage and control migration. Desired formality reveals the paradoxical character of state policies that help create a racialized and precarious labor force within its legal frameworks and explain why migrants attach themselves to fragile good-life projects in new countries.

 Public goods have been neglected, if not outright rejected, by the anti-capitalist literature, which favors “commons.” This article argues that equal attention should be given to commons and to public goods—both are essential to social reproduction. Their difference is not one of nature, but of status; it results from the way they are managed and distributed. I offer some conceptual clarifications in the literature on commons, public goods, club goods and private goods, and argue for an approach that looks at the status of goods. This opens up room for examining two ways struggles for social goods are and may be waged: commoning and publicizing. While commoning practices require organization at the community level, publicizing practices make claims on the state as a provider of public goods.

 This article examines challenges to the privatization of public goods in social housing in urban Vietnam, where versatile modes of commoning have been essential to sustaining life and livelihoods. Informed by theories of feminist commoning, it highlights the collective efforts of elderly women, in particular, to appropriate state property and maintain the commons to support everyday social and economic activity in ambiguous spaces undergoing urban change. Female-led strategies of subsistence and sociality have been directed toward the maintenance of common resources across shifts in political economy from state to market socialisms. Rather than organize outside formal institutions only, collective action manifested through a politics of housing that made claims to public goods in ways that pushed the state to accept existing commons and commoning practices.

 Despite the professed break from apartheid, a dual logic continues to reproduce the segregated city structure in Windhoek, Namibia's capital. On the one hand, the formal regulation of access to urban land, housing, and basic services privileges property ownership and ratepaying. On the other hand, for the informal residents, access is provisional and incremental, and depends on cultivating relations with peers and authorities. However, the latter logic of access also contributes to a moral imagination that challenges entitlement based on market participation. The article argues that everyday urban governance and urban citizenship in Windhoek arise out of the coexistence, clashes, and collusions between these logics in policies and planning, the residents’ claims of entitlement, and the communication between residents and authorities. The article is based on fieldwork conducted in 2016 and 2019.

 This article explores practices of community-based energy justice activists in Johannesburg. Against the background of municipal corporatization of electricity delivery in the wake of the postapartheid state's neoliberal policy turn, residents of the urban periphery organize to ward off cost-recovery measures and illegally (re)connect to the grid. Informed by theories of critical urban studies on the South, this article situates activists’ practices historically and discusses the limits of their strategic claims with a view to their inextricable relation to the state.

 The funeral reforms in China condemn widespread burial practices considered “backward” and “uncivilized” while contradicting core grassroots values. Examining collective tomb land expropriation in a former rural township of Fuzhou hosting important military infrastructures, this article highlights issues of accessibility to ancestral land in the context of rapid urbanization and the resulting transition from village commons to state provisioned public goods. How do the original inhabitants of new urban communities make claims on their ancestors’ tomb land? What tactics are deployed to comply with state policies as well as to safeguard a certain sense of collective identity? This article shows how former villagers’ publicizing strategies of militarizing their ancestors allow for some concessions to be made, despite little room for negotiations left by sweeping urbanization.