The chapter continues the examination of central texts on sovereignty into the twentieth century, including the work of Georg Jellinek and Raymond Carré de Malberg. It illustrates how the concept of sovereignty was connected to the conditions of an increasing sociological reality of social classes and inequality, particularly through the successful formula of political representation and parliamentarianism, and the dramatic expansion of the modern apparatus of order, the state. It also examines the related concept of ‘nation’ in the theories of Carl Schmitt and Hermann Heller.

In the early 2000s, the author conducted four years of fieldwork – an ‘apprentice ethnography’ – at New York Glass, a glassblowing studio in New York City, where she became a glassblower, albeit a modest one. ‘Caught up’ in fieldwork, her writing addressed ‘where the action is,’ namely the actual, embodied practice of glassblowing, including becoming both a glassblower and part of the glassblowing social world. Extrapolating upon a facet of that experience – falling in love with Sarkis, a glassblower – the author investigates shifting meanings of love in the field. Drawing from writers including June Jordan, Audre Lorde, Dina Gilio-Whitaker, Luce Irigaray, and Sara Ahmed, she moves from an a heteronormative ‘erotics of recognition’ to a queerer erotics of material promiscuity. The author shows how craft production in the glassblowing studio mirrors heteronormative love when proceeding from ‘lack’ – a Platonic heritage that commences from a clearing, a ‘field’. Only by embracing the material multiplicities of, by and with which we are always becoming – by saying ‘no’ to the clearing from which one produces – the author argues, can we begin to understand these queerer loves and, as a glassblower, make as non-production. This requires ‘exiting’ the field altogether with the onto-epistemological break of material becomings. Love, shorn of its heteronormative trajectory, shows the way.

Against the student protests of 2015–2016 in South African universities, this chapter looks at issues of sexual harassment and rape culture that took place within these movement spaces. A personal reflection on what transpired at the time, it shows the implications of such violence emanating from within progressive spaces for this and related progressive social movements.

Current discussions on sexual harassment have been, because of its extent, impact and celebrity involvement, overdetermined by the #MeToo phenomenon. In India, ‘the List’ has defined the terms of recent feminist debates on harassment in academia. This has deflected our gaze from developments in Indian higher education campuses which anticipated issues raised by the List. This chapter traces this pre-history by exploring the shifting discourse on sexual harassment within student politics in India. Using the case study of the 2014 Hokkolorob (let there be clamour) students’ movement in Jadavpur University, Kolkata, which started in response to a harassment incident, the chapter explores the discursive and ideological changes in the framing of sexual harassment and the engagement with gender and sexuality issues within campus politics. It locates these shifts within a larger context of changing student demographics, privatisation of education which coexists with increasing state intervention in public universities, funding cuts and other factors. While focussing on Hokkolorob, other harassment cases will also be analysed to examine the discussions they have generated on the need for a feminist understanding of sexism and abuse in interpersonal, professional even political relationships and their intersections with caste and class dynamics within campuses responding to the contradictory pulls of neoliberalism and democratisation. Understanding these issues can help to better locate the #MeToo moment in Indian academia and see it not just as a List-inspired crisis but a manifestation of larger changes.

This chapter focuses on the history and the current potentialities of a social housing complex in Barcelona (Bon Pastor), which may be considered both as emblematic and exceptional: emblematic because in its history and in its threatened everydayness it epitomizes the commoning spirit that prevails in such urban communities, and exceptional because it has not only become the site of important struggles connected to shared values and aspirations based on community experiences but also the focus of an international architectural competition meant to explore alternatives to “urban renewal”. The chapter includes an interview with an important activist of the Bon Pastor struggle.

‘Parallel society’ is a term with clear negative connotations, often used as self-evident without further need for explanation. In Northern Europe, the term has been used to describe a danger scenario – an unwillingness to integrate, a growing risk of disintegrated society, crime, ethnic enclaves and Islamic fundamentalism – and it has provided journalists, police and politicians with a ‘scientific’ term to forward anti-migration and anti-multiculturalism discourses. The term ‘parallel society’ (parallellsamhällen) is new to Sweden, but has lately been increasingly used in reports from the police, where it is framed as a force on its way to take over core societal structures in socio-economically vulnerable areas, such as criminal and private law, banking, housing and labour markets. The ambition of this chapter is to examine the content of the term ‘parallel society’ as it is used in reports from the police, and scrutinise this use considering notions of a punitive turn and the practice of categorisation of population groups in Swedish criminal policy and practice. By drawing on examples of a recent police operation in Sweden and the Danish ‘parallel society law’, I argue that the parallel society discourse might have consequences in terms of police work, by affecting how the police understand and thus act upon social problems and social phenomena, and that this is driven by categorising some population groups as the foreign ‘other’. By transforming social phenomena and problems into police questions, they are translated and understood as criminal problems, as are the population groups connected to the phenomena.

This chapter focuses on the experiences of powerlessness among police detectives in a global world. Specifically, it discusses how Danish detectives often feel that certain foreign national criminals get away with their crimes with impunity – here not necessarily meaning that criminals are not caught and sentenced. Rather, what increasingly frustrates Danish detectives are their experiences of how even convicted foreign national criminals do not seem to think of their conviction as a real form of punishment, as something which is painful or problematic. To the detectives, such unaffectedness troubles not only the intended deterrent aspects of the law and the criminal justice system, it also comes off as a professional provocation – as a sad symbol of how all their work is, in the end, futile. As the chapter goes on to describe, this futility, this police impotence, sometimes becomes a catalyst in the police applying their own sort of ‘street justice’, to make sure that punishment is not only formally handed down but also truly experienced as such by the foreign national criminal. And as the chapter concludingly ponders, such Dirty Harry-style practices may indeed be on the rise in an increasingly globalising world of crime and policing. As not only Danish detectives but police officers worldwide experience that criminals from other places and parts of the world appear unstirred by the threat and force of the criminal justice system, there is a growing risk of the police taking the delivery of punishment into their own hands.

Formal political independence for Kenya from British colonial rule was achieved in 1963. Yet upon its departure, the colonial administration did not leave behind a viable nation. State building was neither the original intention nor the primary objective of the colonial power. The administrative framework they had established provided the justification for economic exploitation and political domination of the newly independent Kenyan state. Even after independence, the Kenyan economy continued to be controlled and directed by its former colonial ruler. Being an outpost of international monopoly capitalism, the Kenyan economy could not help but respond to the demands of the established international market. Independence thus meant the ability to make laws within the country but not the power to change the structure of the economy or the pattern of trade with the outside world. The private sector and private investment from both domestic and external sources were given a critical role to play in the development of the country. Contrary to the claims made to its citizens by the newly independent government to set the country on a social welfare model, the government instead promoted free enterprise and foreign investment, permitting investors to export their entire profits without assessment for domestic taxation. This predisposed Kenya to a particular pattern of economic development – where the burden of taxation fell on the citizens while the benefits from domestic resource extraction that were accrued were guaranteed for foreign investors.

By 1906, the Pacific had been partitioned between key colonial powers – United Kingdom, France, and Germany. Colonial rule had to be financed and funded. Metropolitan grants-in-aid were either entirely absent, set at minimal levels, or varied between colonial regimes. Colonial officials were responsible for plural communities, including indigenous majorities, settlers, and merchants, each of them having their own fiscal potentials for taxation. This chapter examines taxation in two neighbouring countries, the British Solomon Islands Protectorate, and the jointly governed Anglo-French Condominium of the New Hebrides (Vanuatu). Taxation was imposed with violence in the first three decades of British rule in Solomon Islands and met with indigenous resistance and protest. However, as decolonisation unfolded in the 1960s and 1970s, indigenous Solomon Islanders took control of taxation to fund independence. In the New Hebrides, by contrast, British and French officials could not agree on fiscal policy and taxation. Given the inability to levy effective taxes in the New Hebrides, decisions were made in the early 1970s to convert the country into a tax haven and offshore finance centre. However, while expatriates, investors, and settlers were freed of the need to pay most taxes, indigenous ni-Vanuatu continued to do so. As a result of British rule, Solomon Islands inherited the orthodox metrics of a conventional taxing state during the country’s decolonisation, whereas in the New Hebrides the politics of compromise, deferral, and cancellation between British and French officials meant that Vanuatu achieved independence as a prominent tax haven and offshore finance centre.