Pub Date : 2019-12-01Epub Date: 2019-08-23DOI: 10.1093/ips/olz016
Nadine Voelkner
How can a microbial approach to global health security protect life? Contemporary infection control mechanisms set the human and the pathogenic microbe against each other, as the victim versus the menace. This biomedical polarization persistently runs through the contemporary dominant mode of thinking about public health and infectious disease governance. Taking its cue from the currently accepted germ theory of disease, such mechanisms render a global city like Hong Kong not only pervasively "on alert" and under threat of unpredictable and pathogenic viruses and other microbes, it also gives rise to a hygiene and antimicrobial politics that is never entirely able to control pathogenic circulation. The article draws on recent advances in medical microbiology, which depart from germ theory, to invoke an ecological understanding of the human-microbe relation. Here, while a small number of viruses are pathogenic, the majority are benign; some are even essential to human life. Disease is not just the outcome of a pathogenic microbe infecting a human host but emerges from socioeconomic relations, which exacerbate human-animal-microbial interactions. In a final step, the article draws on Daoist thought to reflect on the ways that such a microbial understanding translates into life and city dwelling.
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Pub Date : 2017-01-01Epub Date: 2017-01-09DOI: 10.1093/ips/olw026
MartÍnez Ciro JosÉ, Brent Eng
Recent studies of civil war have problematized frameworks that rely on a strict binary between state-sanctioned order and anarchy. This paper extends these insights and combines them with theories of performativity to examine welfare practices during the Syrian conflict (2011-2015). Specifically, we argue that conceptualizing the state as a construct-as an effect of power-can expand the study of civil war beyond its quantifiable aspects and embrace the performative dimensions of political life. By means of everyday, iterative acts such as welfare provision, competing groups summon the state, and the political order it seeks to enshrine, into existence: they make it both tangible and thinkable. During civil war, the ability to perform these prosaic acts becomes a matter of pressing military and political concern. Through close scrutiny of various cases, we dissect the impact of subsidized bread provision by the Assad regime, the Free Syrian Army, and armed Islamist groups as they struggle to perform the state. our aim is to bring attention to under-studied governance practices so as to analyze the otherwise opaque relations between welfare provision, military success, and civilian agency during Syria's civil war.
{"title":"Struggling to Perform the State: The Politics of Bread in the Syrian Civil War.","authors":"MartÍnez Ciro JosÉ, Brent Eng","doi":"10.1093/ips/olw026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olw026","url":null,"abstract":"<p><p>Recent studies of civil war have problematized frameworks that rely on a strict binary between state-sanctioned order and anarchy. This paper extends these insights and combines them with theories of performativity to examine welfare practices during the Syrian conflict (2011-2015). Specifically, we argue that conceptualizing the state as a construct-as an effect of power-can expand the study of civil war beyond its quantifiable aspects and embrace the performative dimensions of political life. By means of everyday, iterative acts such as welfare provision, competing groups summon the state, and the political order it seeks to enshrine, into existence: they make it both tangible and thinkable. During civil war, the ability to perform these prosaic acts becomes a matter of pressing military and political concern. Through close scrutiny of various cases, we dissect the impact of subsidized bread provision by the Assad regime, the Free Syrian Army, and armed Islamist groups as they struggle to perform the state. our aim is to bring attention to under-studied governance practices so as to analyze the otherwise opaque relations between welfare provision, military success, and civilian agency during Syria's civil war.</p>","PeriodicalId":93192,"journal":{"name":"International political sociology : IPS","volume":"11 2","pages":"130-147"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2017-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1093/ips/olw026","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"38766397","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"OA","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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