Papers by Darshan Vigneswaran
International Orders in the Early Modern World
This chapter asks to what extent the English School concept of the ‘expansion of an European soci... more This chapter asks to what extent the English School concept of the ‘expansion of an European society of states’ helps us to understand early encounters between Europeans and non-Europeans on the Indian sub-continent. The chapter tests this framework through an in-depth analysis of official correspondence amongst members of the British East India Company at the founding moment of British sovereign authority on the Indian coast in the middle of the sixteenth century. The treaties established by the East India Company to establish forts at places like Armagon and Chennai constitute a key test case for the English School assumption that shared culture is a fundamental prerequisite of international sociability. East India Company servants and the negotiators for sub-continental princes and emperors came from different cultural universes. Would cultural differences prevent them from establishing agreements over who could rule what territory? An English School approach provides us with few resources for under- standing this important historical moment, because it fundamentally misrepresents the thoughts of the primary actors in this historical drama. While Company servants were interested in ‘expanding’ British territory, they had no interest in the expansion of any civilizational standard of rule. While some of the actors in these negotiations had European origins, they did not draw on any discernible ‘European’ norms to determine with whom they would negotiate, or on what terms. While normative concerns helped to shape how Company servants understood their role, these were consistently trumped by base material considerations. Finally, there was no actor resembling a ‘state’ participating on either side of these negotiations. Having established this critical distance from an English School perspec- tive, the chapter responds to the question framed by this volume’s editors: can shared ‘international’ norms emerge in the absence of a common culture? Here, the chapter is more constructive while remaining sceptical of any hope for a resuscitation of an English School agenda. I argue that the lack of a common ‘culture’ between British agents and their sub-continental counterparts presented no significant obstacle to their efforts to realize shared norms for how territorial jurisdiction should be distributed. However, the set of norms that British agents and their sub-continental counterparts shared are not those that have been emphasized by English School theory: war, great powers, diplomacy, balance of power, international law or sovereignty. Rather, the contemporary term that best defines the shared normative orientations of these two sets of parties is ‘corruption’: a shared belief in their mutual prerogatives to profit personally from sovereign institutions and infrastructure, and particularly fortifications. Put simply, since both Company servants and the underlings of sub-continental lords came from parasitic, rent-seeking classes in their respective countries, both were keen to fabricate political institutions that ensured their continued mutual gain. Understanding this phenomenon requires that we abandon misleading the- oretical starting points like a hypothetical ‘society of states’ and focus our attention on the groups and individuals that actually determined when and where the British acquired fortified territory in India. The ‘society’ that defined, negotiated and contested the initial conquest of India, setting the terms for British expansion over the next two centuries, is perhaps best seen as a transnational clique of contending but cooperating agents, who sought to capitalize on the benefits of new international trade. International Relations (IR) scholars commonly seek to use the empirical invalidation of one theoretical paradigm to support or buttress another. Arguments invalidating the power of ideas or norms invariably seek to advance the case for materialist or rationalist frameworks. This case study does not suggest that such an approach would be particularly helpful. Despite the fact that base material interests and the rational interests of traders help to account for much of the behaviour of inter-continental negotiators in this case study, this does not validate the merits of a materialist or rationalist approach. Indeed, the chapter suggests that such approaches do similar injustices to history. In particular, they fail to see that the ‘corrupt culture’ that undergirded the emergence of a rudimentary international society between the British and Indian rulers and allowed this transnational elite to divert public institutions towards private ends, was not a mere post hoc justification of utilitarian interests but a specific way of structuring how interests were perceived and calculated that was peculiar to a specific historical setting. As socio-cultural changes in the United Kingdom began to undermine the culture of ‘old corruption’ in the middle of the eighteenth century, the ability of British and…
Contemporary Slavery
Working Papers are the work of staff members as well as visitors to the Institute's events. The a... more Working Papers are the work of staff members as well as visitors to the Institute's events. The analyses and opinions presented in the papers do not reflect those of the Institute but are those of the author alone.
The images of the body of Aylan Kurdi, who drowned off the coast of Turkey, have shaped global pe... more The images of the body of Aylan Kurdi, who drowned off the coast of Turkey, have shaped global perceptions of refugees and refugee policy in Europe. This is a recording of a symposium which sought to encourage more sustained reflection on the nature and meaning of these images and the ethics and the politics of their use. How do we balance the emotions that the images evoke with our drive for sober and critical analysis? Can we establish a position on the subject that in some way does justice to the boy’s life, his family members and all those affected by the consistent failure to provide a humanitarian solution for refugees in Europe? The discussion, held at the Institute for Migration and Ethnic Studies at the University of Amsterdam aimed to provide staff and students with - not a definitive analysis - but some ways of charting their path through the questions at hand.
Survey research on refugee and migrant populations can provide invaluable information, but in ord... more Survey research on refugee and migrant populations can provide invaluable information, but in order to generate this information it is necessary to confront a variety of methodological challenges. It has proved particularly difficult to generate representative samples of mobile populations in developing cities, where refugees and asylum seekers attempt to ‘hide’ from surveyors, and conventional sampling frames are confounded by intractable urban landscapes and a shortage of reliable baselines. This collection of papers addresses these problems by drawing on a decade of survey research in a city where these problems are especially acute: Johannesburg, South Africa. The contributors reflect on their field experiences, and associated successes and failures, in order to generate practical guidance and tips for researchers and practitioners working on similar issues elsewhere. In particular, the collection challenges the notion that representativity is an unachievable ideal in survey research on refugee populations, and thereby develops concepts and techniques to further refine sampling methods.
A review of the book "Cape Town after Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City,&q... more A review of the book "Cape Town after Apartheid: Crime and Governance in the Divided City," by Tony R. Samara, is presented.
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space
This Symposium reflects on the growing relevance of biopolitical perspectives in camps studies, b... more This Symposium reflects on the growing relevance of biopolitical perspectives in camps studies, border studies, refugee studies, and in particular in research at the intersection between mobility studies and political geography. The five interventions accordingly engage with questions regarding the use of biopolitics as an analytical framework, but also as a pervasive strategy and governmental tool in Western societies. Through an analysis of several empirical cases – most notably hotspots on the Greek Aegean Island, refugee’s forced hyper mobility in Europe, speech acts connected to the ethnic cleansing of the Rohingya people in Myanmar and the ‘voluntary return’ policies in Europe, and the paper borders created by visa systems – the authors indicate new possible fields of enquiry related to the biopolitical critically inspired by the work of authors such as Giorgio Agamben and Jasbir Puar, while also clearly restating the fundamental importance of Foucault’s original contribution ...
International migrants are subject to many types of violence, such as trafficking, detention, and... more International migrants are subject to many types of violence, such as trafficking, detention, and forced labour. We need an improved understanding of what protects migrants from such violence. The concept of ‘migrant protection regimes’ draws our attention away from formal rights advocacy and to both the informal dimensions of protection and the way migrants help determine the quality of protection they receive. ‘Migrant protection regimes’ are sets of rules and practices regarding who ought to protect whom. These regimes include formal rights to protection in the law and informal relationships that protect migrants from lawful violence by the state. They may be changed by ‘power grabs’, when sovereign actors seek to monopolise protection relationships, but also by ‘exits’, when migrants refuse to accept the protection on offer. The study demonstrates the value of these concepts by using them to explain an unlikely case: a change in laws concerning migrant protection in an authorita...
European Journal of International Relations
We hope once again that this brief editorial finds our readers safe and well. It is that time of ... more We hope once again that this brief editorial finds our readers safe and well. It is that time of year again for the European Journal of International Relations (EJIR). Annually, a committee of the European International Studies Association (EISA) meets to award the association's best article prize. The winner is chosen from among the OnlineFirst articles published in the EJIR during the previous calendar year, in this case 2020. The jury of four consists of two EISA board members (Felix Berenskoetter and Joanne Yao), one external member (Marieke de Goede), and one member of the journal's editorial team (this time, Darshan Vigneswaran). In early September the winning article was announced. Our sincere congratulations are in order and I hope our readership all join us in praise of the co-author winners of the annual EISA best article prize for 2020: Xymena Kurowska (Central European University) and Anatoly Reshetnikov (Webster Private University, Vienna). The winning article was 'Trickstery: pluralising stigma in international society', early online from 5
Security Dialogue
What sort of political actors are international migrants? This article approaches this question b... more What sort of political actors are international migrants? This article approaches this question by studying how migrants move between legality and illegality. We have struggled to understand the political content of this behaviour, because we have viewed it as either an attempt to gain the state’s acceptance as quasi-citizens or an attempt to autonomously subvert the state. However, migrants are more ambivalent political actors than either of these perspectives suggest. We argue that the political content of migrants’ efforts to move between legality and illegality can be better understood as a form of ‘hacking’: the ‘repurposing’ of institutionalized forms of political status in ways that compel the ‘reprogramming’ of systems of control. In order to develop this argument empirically, we draw on ethnographic research on the governance of migration between Myanmar and Malaysia.
European Journal of International Relations
This Introduction contextualises this special anniversary issue of the journal. The Editors of a ... more This Introduction contextualises this special anniversary issue of the journal. The Editors of a previous 2013 special issue of the EJIR (The End of International Relations Theory?) asked if the paradigmatic “theoretical cacophony” in IR was deep and irresolvable. We argue that there is still very much a conversation going on across ‘generalist’ and specialised IR journals, and that renewal and broadening is more important than boundaries per se. Meanwhile the field of International Relations has continued to broaden, absorbing much from other social science disciplines in the process. Yet IR has a problematic relationship with interdisciplinarity, often discovering as ‘new’ what other fields have long debated and in turn ‘domesticating’ these insights from other fields by fitting them into existing IR paradigms. This special issue is thus aimed above all at what ‘we’ in IR are not seeing from other disciplines, and we go on to argue how IR scholars might best employ ‘transdisciplin...
Journal of Southern African Studies
Violence consistently undermines efforts to make space public. However, this does not mean that v... more Violence consistently undermines efforts to make space public. However, this does not mean that violence and public space can be meaningfully studied in isolation from one another. Rather, it may mean that we need to be even more closely attuned to the reasons why the process of making space public frequently springs fromand results inviolent acts. I argue that we can better understand how violence makes (and un-makes) public space if we pay more attention to the concept of 'protection'. Protection relationships can create contexts in which public dialogue can occur, but relations of protection are themselves the object of contestation and dialogue, and the dynamics of protection can promote unequal, arbitrary outcomes. I illustrate and further explore this dilemma by examining an 'extreme' case, where achieving protection constitutes the core public problem at hand: the neighbourhoods of Hillbrow and Berea in inner-city Johannesburg, South Africa. I use this exploratory case study to call for more attention to the manner in which violence feeds into the ongoing process of making space public.
International Political Sociology
Our understanding of contemporary international relations rests on flawed images of the past. One... more Our understanding of contemporary international relations rests on flawed images of the past. One of the most problematic dimensions of this history is the idea that the core institutions and practices of modern territorial sovereignty originated in Europe before being gradually extended to other parts of the globe. A key dimension of this Euro-centric historiography is the story that the territorial sovereignty norm was invented in Europe in the seventeenth century, before Europeans honed it into a standard technique of state practice in the twentieth. This paper uses original archival research to critically interrogate the consensus position. The paper demonstrates that the dominant narrative significantly misconstrues the way rulers and governments sought to control migration across the longue durée. European rulers were more collectively seeking to transnationally promote migration at the same time as they individually acquired territorial sovereign control over it. Extra-Europe...
Environment and Planning C: Politics and Space
Territorial exclusion is a multi-scalar phenomenon. However, research has tended to focus on excl... more Territorial exclusion is a multi-scalar phenomenon. However, research has tended to focus on exclusion at separate scales. This paper develops a conversation between research on the territorial exclusion of international migrants at the national scale and the territorial exclusion of lower- and working-class residents at the urban scale. Both strands of research have encountered a common empirical puzzle: territorially exclusive practices rarely comport with official government policies. The paper argues that these apparent “policy gaps”—and efforts to overcome them—can be more fruitfully studied as outcomes of the scalar structuration of legitimate violence, which shapes the way that policy-makers seek to achieve exclusionary goals. The paper suggests that this approach may be used as the platform for richer inter-disciplinary conversations between Human Geography and International Relations (IR) about territorial exclusion and the historical scaling and rescaling of legitimate vio...
International Migration Review
All governments enforce immigration laws, but we have a limited understanding of the factors that... more All governments enforce immigration laws, but we have a limited understanding of the factors that determine how much they do so. Immigration policymakers can empower or compel officials and non-state actors to enforce immigration laws. This study suggests that non-immigration policymakers may play an equally important role — albeit in complex ways. Policies designed to control human mobility in other ways (transportation, crime control, segregation, etc.) can determine the amount of resources a given country devotes to immigration enforcement and the effectiveness of enforcement efforts. When officials ban old — or invent new — forms of movement control, they can determine how much resources are available to enforce immigration laws, whether these resources are used for immigration enforcement, and how effective they are. The study demonstrates this potential power of non-immigration policy through an in-depth analysis of South Africa’s unexpected capacity to control migration. Sout...
Environment and Planning A, 2017
Urban public space is once again high on the agenda of social science researchers across discipli... more Urban public space is once again high on the agenda of social science researchers across disciplines. The reasons for this renewed interest include a range of dramatic events that are redefining its importance as a centre for social encounter and interaction, forum for discussion and dissent, interface of virtual and material connections and stage for the reinstatement of democratic practice and resistance in the face of state repression. Beginning with occupations of squares, parks and streets in a global wave of revolutions and demonstrations from the Middle East to Europe, North-America, Africa and the Asia-Pacific, public space has been reinstated as the symbolic core of urban life. Equally significant are transformations associated with new mobile media and computing technologies that enable large and diverse groups of people to communicate with each other in order to plan social activities from political uprisings to do-it-yourself housing interventions and other forms of informal urbanism. Public spaces increasingly host violent conflagrations and vigilante policing associated with resurgent nationalisms. At the same time, persistent privatization and securitization in response to perceived threats of financial and national security and the desire for 'clean' and 'safe' redevelopment to attract elite and middle class users are creating sanitized public spaces that increase realestate values rather than enhance civic life. In this set of papers, we want to establish some parameters for this resurgent debate. While persisting as one of the key terms of urban geographical and sociological studies across several decades, 'public space' remains a notoriously difficult concept to define and put to work. The papers in this collection seek to demonstrate both its ongoing utility and importance, and to chart a course for scholarly investigation that can better understand its variable, fragile and contested emergence through social struggle, expanding publicity and collective action. Most importantly, this theme issue emphasizes the making of public space
International Relations, 2010
Territory, Migration and the Evolution of the International System, 2013
I want to conclude this study by exploring some new possibilities for research on territoriality,... more I want to conclude this study by exploring some new possibilities for research on territoriality, migration and the evolution of the international system. I specifically want to argue in favour of work that combines the historical knowledge I have sought to systematize in this book with case material drawn from a significantly expanded geographical trove. This is a significant step beyond the path I have taken in this book. The current study is firmly grounded in a theoretical tradition and debate that posits Europe as the origin and instigator of territorial ideas and change. Even when I followed the British Empire to the Indian subcontinent, I was mostly interested in discussing how Europeans made decisions about territorial expansion and how these Europeans reflected on their home-grown territorial norms.
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Papers by Darshan Vigneswaran