Utopias of youth: politics of class in Maoist post-revolutionary mobilisation

Hirslund, Dan V.

doi:10.1080/1070289x.2017.1400279

Cited by 2 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 11 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Second, the Maoist discourse of class struggle upholds the ideal of a female liberatory subject that Mahmood’s ethnography destabilizes. Yet, it is possible to examine how the cultivation of communist virtues is crucial to bringing about the revolutionary subject, a dynamic that Hirslund conceptualizes through the notion of ‘communist piety’ (Hirslund, 2012: 187). My focus is not so much on how the women ex-fighters cultivated embodied capacities to approximate an ideal of a revolutionary subject, but on how this subjectivity was ‘inhabited’ (Mahmood, 2012: 22) differently and made into something new in the post-conflict context.…”

Section: Decoupling Agency From Resistance: Engaging With Saba Mahmoomentioning

confidence: 99%

Withdrawing from politics? Gender, agency and women ex-fighters in Nepal

Ketola

2020

Security Dialogue

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Conceptualizations of post-conflict agency have been widely debated in feminist security studies and critical international relations studies. This article distinguishes between three feminist approaches to post-conflict agency: narrative of return, representations of agency and local agency. It argues that all these approaches in distinct ways emphasize a modality of agency as resistance. To offer a more encompassing account of post-conflict agency the article engages Saba Mahmood’s (2012) critique of the modality of agency in feminist theory and her decoupling of agency from resistance. The article explores experiences of women who fought in the People’s Liberation Army (PLA) in Nepal. It focuses on ‘withdrawing from politics’, a dynamic whereby women ex-fighters move away from party activities and the public sphere, and rearticulates this withdrawing as a location of political agency. The article argues that being an ‘ex-PLA’ emerges as a form of subjectivity that is crafted through experiencing war and encountering peacebuilding, enabling a production of heterogeneous modalities of agency in the post-conflict context. By examining these modalities, the article challenges us to rethink post-conflict agency beyond the capacity to subvert regulatory gender norms and/or discourses of liberal peace.

show abstract

Section: Decoupling Agency From Resistance: Engaging With Saba Mahmoomentioning

confidence: 99%

Withdrawing from politics? Gender, agency and women ex-fighters in Nepal

Ketola

2020

Security Dialogue

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…From a regional perspective, new contributions on Nepal, Sri Lanka and Maldives would further enrich our understanding of generational communities. Additional emphasis on the way sacrificial students-cum-militants renegotiate their selves when entering mainstream parliamentary party politics could be derived from the post-civil war Nepali case (Ramirez 2002;Lecompte-Tilouine 2006;Zharkevich 2009;Snellinger 2010;Hirslund 2012Hirslund , 2018. Emphasis on borderland and ethnic-based forms of student activism in South Asia, in particular in Pakistan's Baluchistan, Sindh and Azad Kashmir (Nelson 2011;Javid 2020) could complement this approach.…”

Section: Overview Of the Special Issue And Research Prospectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Generational Communities: Student Activism and the Politics of Becoming in South Asia

Martelli¹,

Garalytė²

2019

samaj

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

The wide resonance of the aphorism, "from shadows to the stars," closing the 2016 suicide letter of lower caste student activist Rohith Vemula 1 suggests broken hopes for South Asian educated youth. It points at the tragic obstacles to political change and social upliftment experienced by many young people, reflecting a characteristic desire for individual and collective change. The astounding protests that ensued from Rohith's suicide in India are now contributing to the revival of scholarly interest in the formation of political attitudes among educated youth, subjecting the question of students' socialization into politics to academic scrutiny. Indeed, amidst the uncertain social, economic and political promises of the South Asian educational bulge, 2 contemporary politics in university spaces in South Asia has the potential of shaping youth as idiosyncratic generations. They are characterized not only by their aspirations for a better future, but also by their ability to experience collectively, yet in their own way, major political and social events. 2Making sense of this research agenda revival is core to this special issue's enquiry, which runs through ethnographic and historical insights of eight contributions, covering youths' experiments with politics in Bangladesh, India and Pakistan. This introduction questions the relevance of student politics as an object of inquiry by asking whether it truly constitutes a field that is autonomous from wider organized politics. By interpreting student politics as political becoming, this collection of articles indicates that everyday campus-based activism is a potent vehicle for the (re)production of contemporary South Asian polity. Interrogations over the meaning of this "(re)"sprinkle the issue, as authors debate how student politics, understood as an experimental learning process of politics within a given educational space (Loader, Vromen and Xenos 2014) both produces and reproduces political imaginaries, cultural tropes and social hierarchies. While party politics is not always central in the conduct Generational Communities: Student Activism and the Politics of Becoming in So...

show abstract

Utopias of youth: politics of class in Maoist post-revolutionary mobilisation

Cited by 2 publications

References 11 publications

Withdrawing from politics? Gender, agency and women ex-fighters in Nepal

Withdrawing from politics? Gender, agency and women ex-fighters in Nepal

Generational Communities: Student Activism and the Politics of Becoming in South Asia

Contact Info

Product

Resources

About