Suchergebnisse

This article analyses communities that the blue-collar, backward caste, local-level workers of the party Left and the Hindu Right have forged amongst themselves in the Kannur district of Kerala. Its particular focus is on members of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPI (M)). For more than four decades, members of the CPI (M) and the Hindu Right have been involved in an intermittent but occasionally intense conflict. Their conflict highlights how modern practices of political mobilisation and competition condition the formation of close-knit antagonistic masculine unities regardless of the ideological affiliations in question; its violent context foregrounds affects and emotions that characterise life in such fraternal communities. While such unities have become central to the enactment of collective agency in many contexts, strong limits mark these communities. Not just those outside a community, but also those within it apprehend these limits. Violent experiences emerge as idealised modes of imagining communion with members of one's community, as well as forces that individuate them. Biographies and narratives of Left- and Right-wing workers who once sought close integration with their respective communities but now live apart from them, illuminate the already present limits of commonality and unity possible in modern political communities.

In popular, academic and official discourses of climate change, the Circumpolar Arctic—marked by retreating ice, opening sea routes and intense resource geopolitics—has come to embody the greatest challenge humanity has ever faced. Both China and India, appropriately termed as 'planetary powers' by some, in view of the global ecological impact and fallout of their fast-growing economies, look able and inclined to be involved in the matters of Arctic governance, but not without inviting wideranging speculations about their motives and agendas. Asia's 'rise' (especially of China and India) is likely to impact the discourse and practices of Arctic governance in a profound manner. The geopolitical rhetoric of Arctic 'exceptionalism' appears rather untenable in the face of transformational multiscalar change, growing number of stakeholders, uncertainty and risks. The Circumpolar Arctic with its new access, new opportunities as well as new vulnerabilities demands and deserves a firm commitment to a dialogic politics and enlightened multilateral diplomacy to which both India and China can and should make a meaningful contribution through bilateral and multilateral cooperation.