CAPTURE, CONSCRIPTION, AND THE ECONOMY OF PROTECTION Safety comes at a price. The relative vulnerability to violence, illness, toxins, and other conditions of threat is both a signifier and a source of inequality. The costs of safety are both social—contingent on the groups and networks one belongs to, which may offer shelter and sanctuary—and monetary. Jatin Dua's analysis of maritime piracy off the coast of Somalia sheds light on the monetizing of risk. He shows that hijacking and ransom link two systems of exchange into a shared economy. Pirates’ efforts are funded by financiers and suppliers of local payment groups, diya. Oil and other transport vessels are insured by companies like Lloyd's of London. Diya claims and multinational insurers’ claims, negotiations, and payment systems together build an alternative economy, nested between legality and illegality, outside of the recognized global economic order. Hans Steinmüller's contribution on conscription into state armies via capture and family debt illuminates the social and family costs. Steinmüller investigates the personal politics of capture in the Wa State of Myanmar, China. Building and maintaining an army is always a problem for states. In Wa State, the challenge is answered through forced conscription and, at the same time, selective guarantees against conscription extended to friends, relatives, or clients. The constant threat of conscription instantiates a social system built out of relations of possible capture that depend on networks of acquaintance, patronage, kinship, and anonymity. Steinmüller shows how the non-recognition or refusal of mutuality makes one vulnerable to capture. State violence is made manifest in relations of mutuality or its absence.
GOVERNING THE GRASSROOTS How are state officials connected to the masses, and centers to peripheries, such that a state “works”? While states may build bureaucracies to that end, essays under this rubric show that the state-society connection often relies on extra-bureaucratic social mechanisms. Elizabeth J. Perry's article, “Making Communism Work: Sinicizing a Soviet Governance Practice,” explores how the Chinese Communist Party instituted a new form, work teams, to carry central state programs to the periphery. These included programs of ideological conformity but also specific projects like Land Reform, Collectivization, the “Four Cleans,” the One-Child Rule, and, today, the enforcement of environmental regulations. Mao Zedong was influenced by the Soviet notion of “mobile units,” but adapted them to China's very different situation. Whereas Lenin's October Revolution was a fast-moving, urban transformation, China's revolution was agrarian and unfolded over thirty years. In China, “making Communism work” required building a network of organic intellectuals and loyal peasants through the work teams. Malgorzata Kurjanska compares the organization of civil society and “associational life” in two regions of the former Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. Kurjanska argues that elites played a key role in organizing the public sphere, one more consequential than either state bureaucracies or markets. She shows that the relative exclusion of elites in Congress Poland's political life, due to the influence of the Russian state, led to their expanded role of leading civic organizations like rural associations and associations for the technical education of peasants. In Galicia, by contrast, Polish elites were included in regional and state political institutions and thus played a lesser role in civil society. Under these conditions, non-elites found opportunities to take leading roles in public life.
POLITICS OF PIETY This rubric is drawn from the late Saba Mahmood's celebrated book. Whereas Mahmood was interested in the forms of piety cultivated among contemporary Muslim women in Cairo, the two articles joined here shed light on formations of piety in the early modern period, in the Ottoman Empire and in competing Christian missions to India. Like Mahmood, they are suspicious of attempts to neatly separate religion and “the political.” Both turn to little-studied sources to offer new insight. Nir Shafir's contribution, “Moral Revolutions: The Politics of Piety in the Ottoman Empire Reimagined,” explores the role of advice books, naṣīḥat, to show how “secularism” emerged from movements and sources internal to Islam, not only from without via liberalism or colonial modernity. For example, the most popular of the advice books, by the poet Nābī, explicated a moral code that called individuals to self-conscious efforts at piety even in private home life. This pietistic turn made domestic space into a new site of debate and dispute and helped to create a new vision of individualized political subjectivity. Will Sweetman and Ines G. Županov lead us to Tamil country, India. There, in the early 1700s, “Hinduism” had not yet been invented as a colonial category, nor had British colonialism yet set down its rule, and multiple Christian communities shared space with other religious groups without clear hierarchic boundaries. Among them were Jesuits and Protestant Pietists; their members competed with, borrowed from, and imitated each other. Too often studied as fully separate movements, in fact Jesuit and Pietist efforts were thoroughly entwined. And though they imagined their projects as distinct, they were strikingly similar in their on-the-ground practice, competing for linguistic, philological, and medico-pharmacological knowledge that made these “religious” missions very much also scientific and geopolitical ones. If Shafir's essay makes new methodological use of advice books, Sweetman and Županov pave new ground in their close attention to technical texts drafted and circulated by missionaries.
DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM AND NEO-SOCIALISM: SANTIAGO, PARIS, CHICAGO Simplistic versions of left and right, state-planning versus open markets, reduce actual complexity to mere slogans. Democratic socialism on the left, like neo-socialism on the right, was and is contested, contingent, and far messier than most histories of political movements suggest. The essays joined here show two political movements’ development, and how they could have unfolded in ways very different than how they did. “Democratic Socialism in Chile and Peru: Revisiting the ‘Chicago Boys’ as the Origin of Neoliberalism,” pushes against the argument that neoliberal policy in Latin America emerged solely out of the Economics Department at the University of Chicago, 1956–1964, and then from its Latin American satellite, the Catholic University in Santiago. Johanna Bockman shows that there were longstanding forces of neoliberalism within Chile itself. There were, moreover, powerful alternatives in play into the 1980s, during and long after the supposed hegemony of the “Chicago Boys.” Political leaders in both Chile and Peru were engaged with experiments in Yugoslavia-style socialism, including market economies, non-state social property, and worker self-management. This was a kind of anti-authoritarian socialism that was only eclipsed in the 1988–1994 assertion of a narrow version of (neo)liberal democracy that coopted socialist language toward its own ends. Mathieu Hikaru Desan unpacks a similar complexity in the emergence of French neo-socialism. In “The Invention of Neo-Socialism: The Dynamics of Schism and Doctrinal Distinction in the French Socialist Party,” he attends to the internal politics of the socialist party and its divisions. French neo-socialism emerged from factionalism within the French Socialist Party itself. In 1933, the matter of dispute was the question of ministerial participation, that is, the degree to which party leaders should accommodate their positions to the ruling party in order to work within existing political structures, versus maintaining a purity of doctrine that precluded participation. The dispute pivoted in part on the theoretical matter of differentiating “doctrine,” that which must not change, from “tactics,” those strategies that could change and were subject to interpretation. In this twentieth-century riff on Aristotle's juxtaposition of “essence” and “accident,” positions on the issue were not entrenched, but rather unfolded processually in real time. Neo-socialism was never a well-formed political theory, first articulated in rational terms and then put into practice. It was forged in the heat of intra-party debates and schisms of 1933.
DIRT Micah S. Muscolino's essay, “Woodlands, Warlords, and Wasteful Nations: Transnational Networks and Conservation Science in 1920s China,” shows the two-way interactions between Chinese and U.S. scientists working on soil conservation. Collaborating in the study of deforestation, streamflows, and erosion in Shanxi province in the 1920s, Walter Lowdermilk and his student Ren Chentong helped generate a transnational network of soil conservation science. In part this transpired through the translation and selective appropriation of Lowdermilk's work in China, but it also depended on the innovations of Ren Chentong himself. Yet while their interests and work converged, their fame-trajectories and spheres of influence radically diverged. Lowdermilk's work gained worldwide recognition, circulation, and traction. Ren Chentong's, contrariwise, was applied to regional and state programs within China itself. Through his work, soil and its conservation were for the first time shaped into national resources and values.
