Search Results

Chapter 5 shows how and where citizenship fits into an account of the relationship between morality and politics. It claims that citizenship is the essential institutional link between individual human agency and collective political action. It deduces from Gewirth's notion of rational agency a purely political conception of agency that, it contends, flows from his theory of action and interaction. Citizenship is better understood as an institutional role than as a status, and less about passive rights-holding than it is about effective powers to shape existential conditions. The argument presented here is that citizenship is instrumental to persons’ being able to carry out their mutual obligations as moral agents; its task is to render agency operative, by transmuting political agency into capacity for collective action. Thus, citizenship is not a desirable contingency but a moral necessity, and a third primary good, the powers of citizenship, should be added to Gewirth's two primary goods of freedom and well-being.

The last chapter of the book summarizes the text, reviews the links between resilience and resistance, and draws some conclusions about the existential and political dilemmas of life in Dheisheh. How could the camp inhabitants keep their integrity when constantly feeling invaded? The temporariness of prolonged refugee-ness also evoked problems when it came to political agency and steadfastness (sumud). The conclusion is that when we try to understand the Palestinian predicament, we need to take into account both the existential and political dimensions. In this context, politics is not ‘just’ about peace negotiations between political leaders, death tolls and destroyed infrastructure, the repatriation of refugees, or human rights abuses—it is about existence itself.

This chapter draws on debates in social movement theory and activism as well as on an analysis of a select number of narrative practices circulated on Syrian digital ‘protest websites’ and created by activists and ordinary people to contest power structures and repressive rule. A feature of the complex transformations in the contemporary Arab world is the reversal in popular perceptions of political agency and participation. This is manifest, in its most dramatic forms, in collective public acts of disruptive politics, and, in its most expressive forms, in the plethora of individual and collective voices engaged in creatively telling, witnessing, and constructing alternative modes of being. These narratives invite co-identifications with real, lived sociopolitical situations and ways of knowing, as well as with alternative collective memories. While these narratives do not necessarily change the status quo, they may, and can, propel activism, and help explain why people who are not formally affiliated with political parties or organized in social movements move from cultures of political disengagement to cultures of political agency and public dissent.

This chapter examines the ‘communication circuit’ of the most influential book written on Haiti in the Victorian period, Spenser St John’s Hayti or the Black Republic (1884). During the ‘life-cycle’ of this book, from its research, writing, publishing, reading, and the re-writing (in its second edition), the meanings of Haiti varied. Through exploring the dynamics of this book’s communication circuit, I track the construction and rejection of certain ideas about Haiti. In the books’ text, some pre-existing ideas about the ‘Black Republic’, especially those concerning ‘Vaudoux’ and cannibalism, were consolidated whereas the more problematic notions of Haitian sovereignty were discarded. Yet, it is in the readings of the book performed by Haitians and certain political commentators across the Caribbean that counter-visions of Haiti emerge and are reinforced. In this moment, Haiti could be deployed equally as evidence in the case for expanding political agency to people of African descent in the British Caribbean.