Deep Democracy: Urban Governmentality and the Horizon of Politics
Globalization from Below
Post-1989, the world seems marked by the global victory of some version of neoliberalism, backed by the ubiquitous presence of the United States and sustained by the common openness to market processes of regimes otherwise varied in their political, religious, and historical traditions. At the same time, more than a decade after the fall of the Soviet order, it is clearer than ever that global inequality has widened, intranational warfare has vastly outpaced international warfare (thus leading some observers to suggest the image of a Cold Peace), and various forms of violent ethnicization seem to erode the possibilities of sustainable pluralism. All this in a period that has also witnessed increased flows of financial capital across national boundaries and innovations in electronic communications and information storage technologies—the paradoxes abound, and have led to the proliferation of new theories of civilizational clash and of global gaps between safe and unsafe physical zones and geographical spheres. Fears of cyberapartheid mix with hopes for new opportunities for inclusion and participation.
In this confusion, now exacerbated by the knowledge that neither the most recent innovations in communications nor the defeat of the Soviet Union has created the conditions for global peace or equity, two great paradigms for enlightenment and equity seem to have become exhausted. One is the Marxist vision, in all its global variants, which promised some sort of politics of class-based internationalism premised on class struggle and the transformation of bourgeois politics by proletarian will. This is an internationalist vision that nevertheless requires the architecture of the nation-state as the site of effective struggle against capital and its agents. In this sense Marxism was, politically speaking, realist. The other grand vision, salient after 1945, was that of modernization and development, with its associated machinery of Western lending, technical expertise, and universalist discourses of education and technology transfer, and its target polity of the nationally based electoral democracy. This vision, born in such experiments as the Marshall Plan, has been subjected to intense criticism on numerous scores, but the starkest challenge to it is presented by the fact that today, over half a century after the Bretton Woods accords, more than half of the world’s population lives in severe poverty.
In this context, a variety of other visions of emancipation and equity now circulate globally, often at odds with the nationalist imagination. Some are culturalist and religious, some diasporic and nonterritorial, some bureaucratic and managerial. Almost all of these recognize that nongovernmental actors are here to stay and somehow need to be made part of new models of global governance and local democracy.
The alliances and divisions in this new global political economy are not always easy to predict or understand. But among the many varieties of grassroots political movements, at least one broad distinction can be made. On the one hand are groups that have opted for armed, militarized solutions to their problems of inclusion, recognition, and participation. On the other are those that have opted for a politics of partnership—partnership, that is, between traditionally opposed groups, such as states, corporations, and workers. The alliance of housing activists whose story occupies the bulk of this essay belongs to the latter group and is part of the emergent process through which the physics of globalization is being creatively redeployed.
The Story
What follows is a preliminary analysis of an urban activist movement with global links. The setting is the city of Mumbai, in the state of Maharashtra, in western India. The movement consists of three partners and its history as an alliance goes back to 1987. The three partners have different histories. The Society for the Protection of Area Resource Centres, or SPARC, is an NGO formed by social work professionals in 1984 to work with problems of urban poverty in Mumbai. NSDF, the National Slum Dwellers’ Federation, is a powerful grassroots organization established in 1974 and is a CBO, or community-based organization, that also has its historical base in Mumbai. Finally, Mahila Milan is an organization of poor women, set up in 1986, with its base in Mumbai and a network throughout India, which is focused on women’s issues in relation to urban poverty and concerned especially with local and self-organized savings schemes among the very poor. All three organizations, which refer to themselves collectively as the Alliance, are united in their concern with gaining secure tenure of land, adequate and durable housing, and access to elements of urban infrastructure, notably to electricity, transport, sanitation, and allied services. The Alliance also has strong links to Mumbai’s pavement dwellers and to its street children, whom it has organized into an organization called Sadak Chaap (Street Imprint), which has its own social and political agenda. Of the six or seven nonstate organizations working directly with the urban poor in Mumbai, the Alliance has by far the largest constituency, the highest visibility in the eyes of the state, and the most extensive networks in India and elsewhere in the world.
This essay is an effort to understand how this came to be by looking at the horizon of politics created by the Alliance and by seeing how it has articulated new relations to urban governmentality. It is part of a larger ongoing study of how grassroots movements are finding new ways to combine local activism with horizontal, global networking. It is also, methodologically speaking, a partial effort to show how the anthropological study of globalization can move from an ethnography of locations to one of circulations. In my conclusion, I use the story of this particular network to discuss why it is useful to speak of “deep democracy” as a concept of wider potential use in the study of globalization.
End of Excerpt | Access Full Version
Notes
This essay is based on research funded by the Ford Foundation. I owe special thanks to Carol A. Breckenridge, who first suggested to me that the work of the Mumbai Alliance could be characterized in the image of “deep democracy.” The first draft of this essay was written in June 2000 at the University of Amsterdam’s School of Social Science Research, where I was honored to serve as a Distinguished Visiting Professor. Since then, it has been debated by audiences in Chicago, Buenos Aires, Montevideo, and Paris. For their useful criticism and help in organizing these discussions, I must thank Marc Abélès, Hugo Achugar, Irene Belier, Partha Chatterjee, Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, Christophe Jaffrelot, Elizabeth Jelin, Benjamin Lee, Achille Mbembe, Mariella Pandolfi, Charles Taylor, and Peter van der Veer. In a separate vein, I owe thanks to various members and supporters of the Alliance in India and the Shack/Slum Dwellers International network for their critical support and encouragement of the research process and the direction of the first draft: to Arputham Jockin, Srilatha Batliwala, Somsook Boonyabancha, William Cobbett, Celine D’Cruz, Ellen Schaengold, Marjolijn Wilmink, and Patrick Wakely, in addition to Joel Bolnick, Sundar Burra, Diana Mitlin, Ruth McLeod, and Sheela Patel, whose own draft papers have helped me to get a more balanced picture of the Alliance’s activities. This essay also appears in Environment and Urbanization 13 (2002).