Resistance studies seminar on Anti-privatisation struggles in India
Stellan Vinthagen April 19th, 2009
On Thursday we have the next resistance studies seminar in Gothenburg. We are honoured to have PhD Katrin Uba from Department of Government, Uppsala University who will present her research on resistance against privatisation in India. Her PhD; “Do Protests Make a Difference?: The impact of anti-privatisation mobilisation in India and Peru”, was presented 2007.
In order to get a good discussion at the seminar we urge all participants to read parts of her thesis beforehand. Of course it is not necessary to read it all, but some of it, in order to get the critical discussion going forward.
Katrin Uba suggest that participants of the seminar read the thesis in one of the two ways – depending on the main interests of the reader:
This time we also get an introductory lecture between 13-15 from Katrin, before the seminar (room 403). And as always, we gather for the seminar between 15 and 17, and then for the post-seminar session at restaurant Gyllene Prag from 17 and onwards. (More practical information you will find at the link “Seminars” above).
All welcome!
- Literature , Resistance , The Network , Uncategorized , subaltern agency
- Comments(3)
i wonder if any studies have been done of privatisation as resistance to rigid government control. for some of us growing up during the transition from license ridden control freak and arbitrarily corrupt government controlled enterprises to the privatisation of the early 90s, it seemed that the new policies *were the resistance. that dream was shattered, but for a while, lol, multinational corporates saved us.
I am not aware of such a study but I do understand your point and it is interesting. There are of course a lot of groups (states, funds, intelligence agencies, think-tanks, etc) which tries to support “democracy” through actual support of free-trade, transnational corporations, and oppositional forces, in order to bring down “anti-western” regimes (e.g. North Korea, Cuba, and during the Cold War numerous other “socialist” regimes) in an attempt to make “resistance” to authoritarian and corrupt government controlled enterprises. I think this form of “resistance” is a double-edged sword and bad replacement for genuine popular movement opposition to corruption and authoritarian states. People that search for intervention from the US, CIA, EU, the World Bank, IMF or similar neo-imperial bodies are simply replacing one local evil with a global evil. I hope we do have other more efficient alternatives, although I do understand frustrated people living in e.g. North Korea or Burma looking for help from the US… But they should look on what kind of “help” Iraq or Afghanistan did get….that might sober them and become more realistic…
good point, stellan, about the problem of external “help”. while i can speak only for india, and only for my own experience, the hopes some of us had put in privatisation were rather quickly dashed. instead of an apathetic system to deal with, we now have a keen malicious intelligence fronting for the old beast. the only real hope i see is in small-and though a loaded word-gandhian revolutions at the grassroots.