Future States

Despite its planetary scale, the responsibility to deal with the effects of climate change-induced disasters rests primarily with states. Countries like Malawi thus find themselves in a ‘perfect storm’: having contributed least to causing climate change, it bears the brunt of its impacts, exacerbating its already disadvantaged predicament. As a disaster-prone and donor-dependent state, Malawi’s reliance on humanitarian assistance when disaster strikes, presents a conundrum: even though it lacks the capacity and resources to deal with disasters in its territory, the Malawi state is simultaneously indispensable to disaster governance and relief interventions.
Conceptualizing the state not as an empirical entity but as instantiated relationally in civil servants’ everyday practices, this paper is based on 12 months of ethnographic fieldwork conducted in 2019; the year of disaster relief interventions after Cyclone Idai. Focusing on district-level civil servants working with the Department of Disaster Management Affairs, I detail their interactions with colleagues, disaster-affected citizens, humanitarians and international collaborators. In showing how they navigated the demands placed on them by drawing on their sense of duty, I suggest that studying relief interventions throws into sharp relief how the state itself is instantiated as well as what it is up against in today’s world.

A myriad of in-between figures populate the social domain: peer workers, buddies and role models are employed to ‘stand next to citizens’, thereby fulfilling promises of closeness. Social professionals also take on new roles. Increasingly, they have to facilitate networked collaboration and encourage citizens’ active participation in social welfare. The emergence of these new figures and roles in the Dutch welfare context are refashioning state-citizen relationships.
These new figures exist at the interface of what is imagined and made real, turning abstract policy goals into realities. In this paper, I trace how the rationalities underpinning the Dutch welfare state give these intermediary figures a central position in the Dutch welfare context. Using the example of one such figure, the ervaringsdeskundige or peer worker, I ask how these new institutional identities are forged in policy texts, how they are made real in practice, and what new welfare relations they enable. I examine how these figures are written into policy documents and examine which stories they are and are not allowed to tell. I end by asking: What do we learn about new welfare relations when we take these figures as starting point?

Ten years in austerity in Greece and a series of overlapping crises (migrant reception, covid-19 pandemic, climate crisis) have turned crisis into a chronic situation rather than a rupture to a (presumed) normality (Vigh 2008). Moreover, the already devalued Greek state has been further morally devalued in the eyes of its citizenry. The citizen-state relationship has been reconfigured and being a Greek citizen is often deemed as an undesirable or “vertiginous” (Knight 2021) position characterized by temporal disorientation. The commonly used expression “being alive by sheer like” reflects the predominant feelings of insecurity and unpredictability. At the same time, migrants who apply for citizenship arduously navigate the administrative arrangement, aspiring to become Greek citizens formally and legally. Encountering an ever-shifting framework, they experience a different sense of unpredictability and the effects of temporal power in various bureaucratic delays and changing regulations. This paper draws upon the encounters between citizenship applicants and diverse actors (state agents, non-state actors, other brokers) mediating in the citizenship acquisition process to address the questions of citizenship and the unpredictable in Greece. How do these diverse actors experience the unpredictable and what configurations of citizenship emerge in these encounters? What are the temporalities of these citizenships?

Democracy has been touted as an essential condition for development. Yet, the tremors of undemocratic practices, including the routinisation of violence and fear, can be felt in the functioning of democracies across the globe. While dissent and debate have been celebrated as the pillars of democracy, the erosion of both has not gone unnoticed, especially in the case of India as it slides towards soft authoritarianism. By framing the concept of ‘fear of the future’, this paper explores how fear can be operationalised to dissuade young students from exercising dissent and be ‘good’ citizens with ‘bright futures’. I argue that the notion of ‘success’ prompts the newly-minted citizens to stay away from protests as there can be potential harm that can befall the individual. I use Butler’s ‘grievable bodies’ as a framework to engender the epistemological capacity of the state to make examples of dissenters to subjectify (Foucault 1983) the mass and draw the contours of what falls within and beyond the norms defined by the state.

This paper blends ethnographic, historical, and conceptual insight in order to make sense of the changing perception of state power in postwar-Bosnia-Herzegovina, a post-socialist and internationally managed country, characterized at once by an excess of ethnic representation and ordinary and extraordinary forms of social neglect and abandonment (Povinelli 2011). Moving through a series of ethnographic scenes unfolding over the last 15 years, I show how “the state” has evolved from an object of desire to a form of spectral post-presence (Dunn 2008), to something self-devouring and cannibalistic (Kurtović and Hromadžić 2017), that is not only post-biopolitical but potentially detrimental to life and the future itself. I connect each of these sites of transformation to long-durée processes tied to remapping of political and economic power in the postwar period, which include, for example, the proliferation of clientelist relationships tied to nationalist and non-nationalist political parties, as well as the ongoing forms of plunder of industrial, infrastructural, and natural resources. In the last act, the paper zooms in on the intersection of catastrophic rates of emigration and demographic decline, and the accelerating extraction of lumber, sand and hydropower as the most recent sites where the self-devouring logics of the postwar state power are made material and concrete.

After a decades-long celebration of individual responsibility, accompanied by the dismantling of welfare institutions, the state is back. Across Europe, states and citizens are experimenting with doing welfare differently. In these new welfare arrangements, states and non-state actors are collaboratively crafting new socio-political futures. Our paper explores these new visions comparatively through an analysis of two policy texts that seek to reform welfare at different scales, the Master Plan for the neighborhood of Zuidoost in Amsterdam and the National Strategy for Social Integration and Poverty Reduction in Greece.
 We understand policy texts in two ways: as statements and carriers of values and identity (Yanow, 1996), and as prefigurative (Cooper, 2020). Offering new solutions to where other policies have failed, policy texts are artifacts that foretell and craft new socio-political futures. They are prefigurative as they engage in remaking the public good – commonly desired and desirable ideals.
 We situate the two policy texts in their sociopolitical moment, which will inevitably affect how their prefigurative visions will unfold in practice. As such, we unpack the different ways the role of the state and its citizens are represented, imagined and envisioned in the Dutch and Greek society.

For young Turkish Cypriots, the future is often unimaginable, not only because of widespread global uncertainties, but also because of the ongoing state of limbo that exists in the unrecognised Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus. The lack of recognised nationhood coincides with international demonisation, historical violence, economic embargoes, and geographic isolation to create a context of socio-political entrapment for Turkish Cypriot youth. This presentation will explore the ways in which young Turkish Cypriots – the first generation without lived experience of the war – think about the future of both states in Cyprus, the future of the conflict that divides the island, and how these futures will impact their own. The wider doctoral project questions what young people do when their state has little to offer them, and uncertainty becomes the only constant. Drawing on preliminary findings from ethnographic interviews, this paper will focus on the idea of (un)certainty in relation to the present situation in Northern Cyprus, the future of the contested state, and the experiences of Turkish Cypriot youth.

‘Local’ and ‘active’ citizenship in self-supporting communities are of increasing importance in Dutch welfare state arrangements. The state appeals to collectivities to take up new role in welfare governance and provision. Municipal authorities seek to foster communities by opening up spaces for local interaction and creating new positions for citizens vis-à-vis the state.
 In this paper, I use the case of Bospolder-Tussendijken (Rotterdam), a neighborhood I studied over the past two years, to examine the interactions between top-down endeavors and bottom-up initiatives in the context of such governing through communities policies. I focus on policies and programs that emphasize collectivities to realize new visions and futures of the welfare state. I thereby focus on the interaction between policy documents that foreground the neighborhood as a locus for change through community practices, and practices in which these collectives become practice through ‘doing collectivity’. I explore how in the case of Bospolder-Tussendijken, strategies and techniques aimed at collective welfare governance and provision are deployed; and ask how they link community discourse to everyday social life, networks and initiatives, and in doing so (re)shape imaginings and practices of collectivity.

Welfare programs are key elements of social contracts between states and citizens. Yet anthropological studies of welfare in Europe and the US rarely examine such programs as sites for the elaboration of state-citizen relations. Instead, they often limit their gaze to the welfare program itself, highlighting its disciplinary features.
 This paper zooms in on Amsterdam’s Parent and Child Teams, a welfare program that provides free youth help and parenting support and monitors and fosters child well-being. It traces how state-citizen relations were crafted by Parent and Child Teams in an ambiguous moment in and beyond neoliberalism.
 I argue that in order to understand these relations, we need to pay attention to the complex make up of welfare institutions. Welfare institutions are comprised of various elements that articulate different views, commitments and logics, which may well contradict each other. As a result, they rarely reproduce one clear political rationale. I illustrate this through an analysis of the ambiguous state-citizen relations enacted by the Parent and Child Teams, which were animated by shifting political and relational logics.

Oman today is an absolute monarchy, with the country's legislative and executive powers vested solely in the person of the sultan. The previous sultan, the late Qaboos bin Sa'id (r. 1970-2020), introduced different forms of representative councils, whose authority was limited to consultation and advice, through which the Omani population could exercise a modicum of democracy. The extension of the franchise to all adult Omanis in 2003 marked a milestone in this process of democratisation, but in recent elections voter turnout has plummeted, to below 50% in the latest round. In this presentation, based on a fieldwork spanning a decade (2011-2020), I offer an analysis of the refusal of younger Omanis to participate in ostensibly democratic mechanisms. I reflect on the optimism in the wake of the 2011 Omani spring and the pessimism and outright cynicism that sprung from the widespread disillusion that followed. The consultative council's lack of real power is but one factor for the electorate's abstention: I argue that conceptions of what it means to be a good citizen likewise causes Omanis to turn away from the ballot box.

My ongoing PhD research explores prefigurative practice in the Oslo City Public Health Strategy for 2023-2030, a policy process initiated by the Oslo City Government to target social inequality in health. The Oslo Strategy promises to reduce social inequality in health by formulating a set of common definitions, goals, and approaches to inequality to be implemented across Oslo City health and welfare initiatives. My project examines the intentions, assumptions, and biases embedded in the coming-into-being of the Oslo Strategy, and their relation to the Nordic universalist welfare imaginary. Situated in the field of political ethnography, I ask how prefigurations of social equality are negotiated in the Strategy, how forms of evidence are called upon to justify these visions of transformation, and how voices are lifted or silenced in ensuing debates. My project is in the early stages of fieldwork and the methods I employ include practice-oriented document analysis, semi-structured interviews, and participant observation. I have identified that, while Oslo policymakers attempt to establish social inequality in health as a core characteristic of contemporary Norwegian society in the Strategy, they simultaneously embed ideals of a future state of health equality within their policymaking practices.

How is identity politics transforming electoral competition in Brazil? Having conducted ethnographic research among politicians and campaign workers, I analyse their often over-looked perspective to understand how these actors make sense of the changing political landscape, their own role in it, and the strategies they use to claim legitimacy (and monopoly) over their own identities. My research spans from 2018 to 2022, covering the exact tenure of President Jair Bolsonaro, including field visits and data collection during the three elections that took place during this term. My study offers insights into what Brazilian politics will increasingly become: a politics where the identities of political candidates are not only central to defining voters' choices but also the locus of competition for legitimacy and hegemony. Who is allowed to use their own identities as political platforms? Which identities can be used by the Left, and which by the Right? What are the expectations for those who do capitalise on certain identities, and how these frame elected politicians performance and construction of the state? These are some of the words this presentation will seek to answer.

In 2020, the Latvian Ministry of Health introduced a new approach to collecting the opinions of patients, physicians, and representatives of institutions involved in oncology care - a design thinking method. It was carried out by a group of social scientists (social anthropologists and political scientists) in order to take into account both the experience of users and the limitations of the political system as part of the preparation of the "Plan for Improving Health Care in Oncology 2022–2024". Previous methods of policymaking-meetings with stakeholders within existing collaborative formats and legislative frameworks-have been challenged by low stakeholder input and general distrust of the government approach to policymaking. The purpose of this article is to assess medical staff perceptions of the role of state in health care development. What state-performance are stakeholders willing to accept and co-perform? Conclusions: There are several perceptional paradoxes that can be concluded: "democracy stealing the vote" to "democracy of doctors"; a desire for a "state to turn on and off". The general feeling that the state is too weak to enforce right decisions but too strong to enforce wrong decisions is prevalent in the perceptions analyzed.

Western Balkan societies have witnessed a never-ending political and socio-economic transition for over three decades. Recent developments evince that de-democratization practices and procedures threaten democratization processes and that autocratic tendencies are pressing forward in this region.
Initially, most Western Balkan countries emerged as independent states after the disintegration of the former (post-90s), experiencing bloody conflicts and embarking on state-consolidation paths with difficulties and ethnic hatred relationships. During this period, Albania came out of severe isolation - from one of the harshest communist systems in the eastern block, while Montenegro coexisted with Serbia until 2006.
This paper aims to present a general overview of the Western Balkans states structural weaknesses descending into a detailed comparative analysis between Montenegro and Albania, trying to understand the state governance performance struggle between very archaic and progressive forces during transition. How efficient the dialectic relationship between society/public and governance is in these states, and what results are accomplished in practice?
Lastly, what are the prospects and capacities for these states set in such unpredictable contexts, boundaryless threats, political blindfold, and malign influences to fortify the leverages of democracy and meet public needs and aspirations.