Towards a new research agenda II

Or: What do I think matters (within political science)?

[See part one here]

Path-dependence

Since graduating from university, I've had the freedom to set my own intellectual agenda. It's path-dependent, as what I am now reading has been influenced by what I read in my courses, and is influenced to a certain extent by my day job in an economic development agency. However, this time has offered me some space in which to develop new areas of interest and articulate connections between concepts.

At Williams, I studied mostly political theory. The three broad currents that interested me most dealt with questions of power and inequality, war and revolution, and the shape of the polis. In general, I tended (and tend) to be more sympathetic to arguments from the left, rather than conservative or liberal thinkers.

I had (and have) a predilection for supertheories of supereverything; I like to make connections (at times prematurely). As a result, I left myself with the job of more clearly articulating some common themes that run through these three theoretical currents. First, there seems to be something about growth and change - how do political/economic societies expand and mutate? In what ways does capitalist growth have a democratic, leveling tendency, and in what ways does it tend to concentrate power and exacerbate inequality? Under what conditions can society be reformed or radically changed?

I connect this with what I would describe as the critique of progress. In general, we seem confuse the concept of economic growth with that of social progress, lending the latter a self-defeating aura of inevitability and the former a false halo of legitimacy. I would set against that confusion an iconoclastic stance towards the future - i.e. a strategic refusal to see any particular outcomes as either inevitable or impossible. This iconoclasm attempts to disentangle agency and circumstances by analyzing how political actors are free to construct their own agenda, and how they are constrained by history, institutions, and ideologies.

Second, space seems to be important to all three theoretical currents, in obvious and nebulous ways. On the most basic level, all political phenomena depend upon (and construct) particular forms of space - territorial divisions, international integration or disintegration, meeting-rooms, town squares, fences and walls, cyberspaces, etc. So when we discuss the democratic polis, we are also talking about the place in which citizens meet to discuss. Likewise, when we discuss inequality, we are discussing the way in which poverty and riches are distributed and segregated across a territory. When we discuss a revolution (or counterrevolutionary measures), we are talking about terrains - the mazelike Paris that Haussmann cut his boulevards through, the Bolivian jungle, the rubble and shattered streets of Gaza. When we mention power, we are also talking about its dispersion or concentration across space.

As of yet, I have no systematic way of thinking about space.

Rethinking

In the last year, I've attempted to build on these concepts where possible. To a certain degree, my thinking has been influenced by my work in government, which has focused my attention on economic issues (not to mention requiring me to develop an understanding of economics). As I am slightly subversive, not to mention aware of the limits to economics' understanding, I've tried to develop alternative views as well.

Two points from economics strike me as relevant to political science. First, economics pays a great deal of attention to growth and development. It looks at the conditions under which economies can expand, and the results of doing so. As part of this, it considers why some economies are less developed than others - why, for example, most of the Third World has failed to "catch up" to the First World, or why New Zealand has grown more slowly than its neighbor Australia. As a society's political options are circumscribed (in part) by its wealth and income, these are important perspectives.

While it focuses on growth, economics tends to skim over questions of sustainability and distribution. In particular, I am concerned with the effects of various kinds of growth on inequality and concentration of wealth and power. Additionally, I try to keep in mind that our current model of economic growth is rooted in resource extraction and physical expansion, both of which cannot continue forever, as natural resources are limited. As far as I'm concerned, it's worth the time to build these perspectives into our understanding of growth.

Second, economics has recently had to come to terms with a serious financial crisis that the vast majority of its practitioners failed to anticipate. As a result, it's had to revive earlier literature on economic crises. I've found this strain of economics valuable as it tends to highlight capitalism's persistent systemic instability, the longer patterns into which crises fall, and methods for (temporarily) overcoming that instability.

While valuable, economics' response to the crisis has several blind spots. Economists tend to approach such matters with a technocratic mindset. That is to say, they focus on the policy and regulatory errors, such as the repeal of the Glass-Steagal rules separating investment and retail banking or the Federal Reserve's decision to keep interest rates excessively low in the early 2000s, that precipitated the financial crisis, rather than the broader political dynamics that led to those decisions. As a result, economists tend to take too narrow a view of what is needed to put capitalism back on a "stable" footing.

Economists tend to lack the language to place the crisis in context. I might prefer to ask questions like: What is the relationship between financial crisis and inequality? Will the result be to concentrate power, or distribute it more widely as in the Great Depression? Can we use it as an opportunity to create more democratic governance structures? Will it result in the economic exclusion of a greater number of people, and, if so, will that lead to violent struggle? In short, while many have been repeating the words of Obama's chief of staff, who says never to let a crisis go to waste, it takes a dose of political science to understand how that can be done.

Concrete forms

I've been searching for a project or projects to bring together these currents. As I noted earlier, I've concluded that theory is done best when it arises from a practical problem. I've been building up a store of observations that want to turn themselves into research projects.

One project that I keep sticking on is this: Within a decade, most of the world's population will live in urban areas. Third World cities are already the biggest growth areas; they are swelling with unplanned, disorderly growth from millions being driven off the land (by changing climates, land enclosures, competition from subsidized First World agriculture, or city growth itself) or moving into the cities in search of opportunity (for example, in China's burgeoning manufacturing and construction industry).

This migration, which is manifested in part as the rapid growth of slums, shantytowns, and illegal settlements, is an emerging challenge due to its scale and its irregularity. In short, a large mass of people - larger than ever before - is moving from isolated obscurity in the countryside into dense and volatile urban conditions. In short, they are becoming more organizable at the same time as they are cutting themselves loose from their existing social and economic ties. Urban living brings with it new types of poverty and exclusion, but it also places people in a common space, giving them new means to pursue politics.

We think of urban/suburban growth as a Californian phenomenon, in which repetitive tracts of identical single-family houses are bulldozed across the landscape. But the biggest housing boom of the past several decades has taken place in Third World cities, where new migrants without the means to buy or rent claim unused or marginal land and construct their own shelters. In Lagos, for example, shantytowns radiate out for miles along the motorways and fill in the gaps in the city center. These "developments" are spatially and legally irregular - they are typically maze-like, haphazardly constructed, and against the law.

While this strikes me as a crucial feature of today's world, relatively little research has been done on the topic. (Mike Davis's polemical Planet of Slums is one of the few exceptions.) Off the top of my head, I can think of four interlinked ways in which the widespread existence of slums will affect political realities.

1) As mentioned above, slums represent a distinctive form of space. We have become accustomed to cities that are spatially regular - usually laid out on a grid and usually with a tendency to exhibit a concentric social structure, with distinctive "layers" radiating out from the center. The slum-city is an entirely different animal, and its irregular and often chthonic space can give rise to different types of political mobilization. (After witnessing the dampening effect of Haussman's reorganization of Paris on insurrectionary movements there, Engels called for socialists to switch tactics and gain power through legislatures. Could the reverse happen now?) Furthermore, as I saw in Buenos Aires, slums can often emerge in blighted or toxic pockets of land within existing city limits, confounding to a certain extent the existing spatial regularity.

2) Deeply connected to this spatial irregularity is a legal irregularity: Slum-dwellers rarely if ever own the land that they are living on. Instead, they squat on marginal or unused land. When the land does become valuable, they are usually forced out. As a result, they occupy a legal "gray zone" - their home lives are officially illegal, but generally tolerated until it becomes too inconvenient for legal authorities or landowners. This is a significant barrier to their integration within the "normal" rules of society. As the number dwelling in slums increases, this challenge of integration will present a greater challenge to existing property rights structures. In effect, slums present a choice between the legal marginalization of an increasing portion of society, and a significant change in how property is treated.

3) Another option, of course, would be to make slum-dwellers wealthier and more able to purchase their way into legal regularity. However, any attempt to do so will run up against one further irregularity: employment. If slum-dwellers can find work, it is generally within the informal sector. Several views exist on this sector: some (like Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto) describe it as an opportunity for micro-entrepreneurship; others (like Davis) see it as a zone of fine-grained, penurious exploitation. However, as the informal economy also operates within a grey zone of legality, its connection to the formal sector of the economy remains nebulous. The degree to which it is incorporated within national, regional and international divisions of labour is still unclear. As a larger proportion of Third World employment is diverted off into irregular employment, this question will become quite important.

4) Finally, the above three facets all bear upon a topic that is close to the heart of political sciences: war, insurrection, and revolution. In short, the expansion of slums indicates that an increasing proportion of humanity is being thrown out of formal systems of legal rights and economic existence. This "accumulation of misery at one pole" is unlikely not to result in conflict. (In fact, it already is causing conflict.) But what shape will those conflicts take? Here, I suggest, our traditional theories of war, which are rooted in assumptions about state actors and relatively centralized armies, are not a great deal of help. Nor are traditional theories of revolution, which place stress on the role of activism by an organized lower class with a clear place within the economic apparatus. Slums, therefore, should force a rethinking of theories of war and insurrection, just as they have effectively forced the Israeli and American armies to rethink the way they do battle.

This is obviously a quite large topic, and there are some further facets of the situation that I have not addressed here - such as the environmental unsustainability of slum growth, or the public health risks slums pose. But I think that it is one topic that ties strongly into the broader themes discussed above, and that bears upon the central concerns of political science. (It goes without saying that, on a practical level, our goal should be to escape from the planet of slums.)