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The conclusion provides an overview of the book’s main arguments while looking ahead to the future. In contrast to ‘residual’ and some ‘semi-relational’ approaches to poverty, the book has argued that analysis of class relations is central to understanding the conditions of classes of labour, and the possibilities for pro-labouring class change. Class relations have been analysed primarily in terms of changing forms of exploitation and domination, and the ways they are mediated by forms of collective action and the state. As the bases of classes of labour’s reproduction and patterns of capitalist accumulation are modified, so too are the ways in which labour is controlled and is able to extract concessions from capital and the state. The uneven trajectories of class relations have been illustrated through longitudinal fieldwork material in a number of south Indian villages. Labour relations differ in form between villages with greater and lesser levels of irrigation, between villages that are more or less tightly integrated into non-agricultural labour markets, between those where accumulation remains focused on agriculture or has become more oriented around the state, and between the countryside and the city. While local government institutions and ‘neoliberal’ civil society organisations tend to reinforce the status quo, the interplay of labouring class organisation and pro-labour government policy can produce minor gains for classes of labour. If both can be scaled up, labour’s conditions improve, and the possibilities for more broad-based social change increase.

The chapter highlights the pernicious use of race as a means of categorisation to determine access to scarce and desired resources. The way whiteness selectively privileges groups is discussed. The chapter introduces readers to the everyday performance of white supremacy as the underlying structure of white privilege. In this regard, whiteness is counterposed as privilege against whiteness as dominance as the locus of understanding the effect of whiteness and the resulting marginalisation and subjugation of Blacks and non-Whites. The chapter ends by defining some key terms for understanding racial stratification.

Around 1996, the review re-orientated its political critique to examine how the globalisation of financial capitalism had hamstrung the progressive left. Michel Surya’s De la domination described capitalism as a form of domination that exercised a form of power without politics, and decried the moralisation of economics which suggested that as long as businesses behaved well, the global financial system itself was unimpeachable. The chapter demonstrates that Surya’s work was influenced by Jean Baudrillard, but that this latter thinker’s account of a now entirely virtual financial economy increasingly seemed inadequate, and the review turned back to Guy Debord for a more Marxist critique of the alienation produced by contemporary capitalism. After exploring this historical genealogy, the chapter explores the Lignes contributions of Groupe Krisis to see how this Frankfurt School-inspired group both predicted the 2008 financial crisis and provided an apocalyptic account of capitalism’s inevitable demise. Yet this account is also seen to be inherently de-politicising and foreclosing political action, and the chapter closes by contrasting it to the analyses of other Lignes contributors, such as Daniel Bensaïd, especially when discussing the EU treatment of Greece after the financial crisis.

This chapter has introduced into this analysis the concepts of viral innovations” and “disruptive contagions”. Building on the insights which have preceded it, it eschews conventional conceptions of the social as “stable” and the political as “dynamic”. Fundamentally, it takes seriously the fact that power is always necessarily mobile and therefore any and all social orderings will be in a constant state of flux and reconstitution. Moreover, it understands hegemony as a viral discursive that is marked primarily by its contextual adaptability as opposed to ideological uniformity or “actually existing homogeneity”. To be clear, these postulations are a far cry from asserting the total randomness of the social or its complete variability. By contrast, it is to show how a relatively coherent set of logics can be flexibly customised and “infect” otherwise contrasting “host contexts”. Its strength, hence, is found its infectious qualities not necessarily or even primarily its orthodoxy. Practically, this mobility of power and virality of hegemony translated into dominant cultures of constant innovation rooted in the social production of “cultural environments” which must be creatively and continuously improved upon by its populace (and if necessary outside actors). These innovative “cultural environments” extend from physical spaces, digital networks, to internal subjectivities.

As this book has shown, Yemen’s interactions with the world are characterized by a form of mutual interdependence. The country is confronted with a number of structural challenges that it will not resolve themselves on their own. Amongst them, the issue of water scarcity is assumedly the most fundamental. However, as the dominant world continues to neglect these challenges and remains obsessed with jihadi violence or Iranian encroachment, it is likely that these structural, and yet forgotten challenges, will emerge in the global agenda.

Mattias Iser analyzes the circumstances under which citizens are justified in taking up arms against their government. He argues that the paradigm of self- and other-defense adopted by many contemporary Just War theorists is ill-equipped to deal with political violence. If we concentrate on imminent harm in self- or other-defense and the moral rights of individuals endangered in such situations, we will be unable to recognize when and why violent overthrow of a regime is justified. Iser discusses the conditions under which the importance of constituting a just basic structure that secures non-domination allows for the transition from protest and civil disobedience to militant resistance.

This chapter examines an intertextual relationship between Toni Morrison's novel, A Mercy (2008) and Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936). A Mercy returns to racial motifs in Faulkner's work and shifts the focus from the dominant culture to the marginalized and explores racial meanings that have eluded readers for whom black and white are discrete, dichotomous categories. Whereas the narrators of Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! are the white upper class that Morrison calls “the dominant cultural body,” Morrison's novel incorporates narrators include all perspectives--white, black, Native American, free, and slave--and Morrison's culturally marginalized narrators foreground meanings that are implicit, but often withheld, disguised, or denied by Faulkner's narrators.

This chapter discusses the antisuffragists' apocalyptic predictions of the doomsday that would arrive in the South if women received the vote and explains that social order would collapse in the wake of woman suffrage, as it threatened to bring “Negro Domination” and the ruing of the white southern family. It observes that while the “antis”' most dramatic claims failed to materialize, the sudden influx of women into public politics transformed the social drama of politics and challenged the supremacy of white males in ways that many antisuffragists had predicted with dread. The chapter observes further that the Nineteenth Amendment blurred the lines of gender and race that were so central to the order of Jim Crow South, as white and black women embraced their new status as voters.

This chapter focuses on the changing dynamics of exploitation in rural India. It explores different forms of informality and fragmentation, and shows how the dominant class reproduces its control over rural-based labour when it is i) working in agriculture, ii) commuting to nearby cities, and iii) migrating to distant cities primarily to work in the construction sector. Although labour relations in agriculture have become less personalised they continue to be characterised by various ties and forms of unfreedom (bonded labour, neo-bonded debt-tied labour, sharecropping and piece-rate labour are all discussed). Meanwhile, construction capital uses forms of ‘remote control’ over circular migrants - using intermediaries to discipline labour, and ensuring widespread marginalisation from pro-labour state regulations and programmes. The final part of the chapter considers the possibility for pro-labouring class change, and changing socio-political dynamics and how they vary across commuting and circulating labour.

Contextualised by an outline of Karnataka’s recent political history, this chapter focuses on how the dominant class uses political institutions to maintain and advance its position. It is concerned with the interplay of accumulation, domination and the everyday workings of political institutions. Although primarily focused on dynamics of domination and exploitation at local government level (and in connection with state poverty reduction programmes), it also traces the links between accumulation and domination up to the level of state institutions, and points to the links between political power and agribusiness, mining and real estate. At the level of local government the chapter shows the critical role played by gatekeepers (those who man the interface between state and society) in shaping the material and political outcomes of state policy. More influential gatekeepers, who tend to be from the dominant class and caste, are able to advance their economic position and strengthen their political position by using their role as distributors of public resources to reproduce labouring class dependence. The chapter locates processes of corruption among class relations, and argues that talk of a shift towards ‘post-clientilist’ states is premature and overstated - particularly in areas with relatively steep social hierarchies.

Republican freedom is freedom from domination, whereas negative freedom is freedom from interference. Proponents argue that republican freedom is superior, since it highlights that individuals can lose freedoms even when they are not subject to interference, and claim republican freedom is more ‘resilient’. I examine the debate through the ‘coalition problem’ for republican freedom. Ssince there is always a coalition of others who could dominate any agent in any sphere, all agents are subject to domination, and hence no one can ever have republican freedom. Pettit’s simple solution to this reductio ad absurdum distinguishes potential from actual coalitions: individuals are only dominated by actual not potential coalitions. The simple solution highlights moralization problems as it demonstrates that domination cannot be purely institutionally defined, but requires consideration of dispositions and expectations about others’ behaviour. I argue that the differences between the ‘free man’ and ‘unfree person’ paradigmatic to republican arguments are best captured not by the difference between domination and interference but, rather, from familiar distinctions between different types of rights and freedoms. Resilience is a practical matter that might track some of these familiar distinctions.

This chapter explores the republican concept of freedom and contrasts this with the liberal view. It outlines how an understanding of freedom as non-domination can inform the definition and scope of constitutional rights. Finally it considers how this understanding is reflected in the Irish context.

Cultural contact is discussed as a perspective that can hide the colonial essence inherent in the processes of interaction between indigenous societies of the American continent and Europeans. The history of investigation of the so-called contact period in the Greater Antilles are presented, and the need to implement a focus that permits understanding of its multiple facets and moments of interaction between the indigenous and the Europeans. The act of domination marks this process, as well as the difference between the contact situation and the colonial situation. The establishment of the encomienda as a system of domination and organization, and the exploitation of the indigenous societies and resources of the New World, represents the consolidation of a colonial situation. This domination reaches all aspects of life, from quotidian domestic activities and economy to the spiritual world and is managed and faced in diverse ways by the indigenous and other dominated groups.

Chapter 9 summarizes the information presented in the previous chapters. It concludes that El Chorro de Maíta in its final existence was a town of Indian encomendados inserted into the regional scheme of colonial exploitation in northeastern Cuba. In this settlement the process of interaction was organized to function according to the plan of Spanish domination, although the indigenous population maneuvered to maintain the necessities for their survival and followed diverse practices and interests. It insists on the importance of the study of Spanish/indigenous interaction as a specific topic that is given value through methodological resources and suitable concepts. In this regard, it notes the importance of archaeological research at sites to really understand the colonial existence and the leadership in it of stakeholders, like the Indio, that traditional history underestimates or ignores.

In this chapter, Patti Tamara Lenard responds to Peter Balint’s neutralist rejection of minority rights claims. The chapter examines Balint’s claim that culture is too hard to define, and rejects it, on the grounds that it is possible for culture to matter even if there are disputes about what should count as a culture; tricky definitional questions about culture do not undermine the real importance that cultures play in the lives of individuals. The chapter then examines the “domination” worry that Balint highlighted, the worry that if cultural groups are permitted preservation rights, the more powerful community members will dominate those who are less powerful. To do so, the chapter considers the political participation rates of Orthodox Jewish communities in the United States, to show that political inclusion can travel with community separation. Finally, the chapter expresses skepticism of the role that toleration can play in sustaining solidarity in a diverse political space, as Balint claimed.

The chapter opens the first section of the book, focusing on the various challenges of Yemen through its relations with the outside world. The chapter shows how much its history has been shaped by the outside world, despite an image of backwardness. It presents the divided trajectories of north and south Yemen as well as some of the specificities of its populations, in particular in terms of tribal structures and religious identities, and how they came into play since the beginning of the twentieth century, letting Yemen appear as an issue in the international game.

This chapter explores the often ignored interactions of foreigners with Yemen. Rather than a secluded society, Yemen is shaped by its many relations with foreign travelers, Asian and African communities, foreign students who study in Islamic and language institutes and Western diplomats and engineers. The interactions that are developed are often fascinating as they are characterized by complex and often ambiguous emotions.