At the Antarctic Treaty Consultative Meetings, an Indian delegate proposed a new research base located within an environmental protection area, because it is where India and Antarctica were connected on the 125-million-year-old continent of Gondwana. How did this claim come to be successful for the Indian Antarctic Program? In the production of documents within international governing bodies, policy makers enroll allies, emphasizing particular aspects of their plans to members of diverse epistemic communities. Instead of trying to make nationally oriented ideas work through uniform procedural rules, international policy makers reshape the contours of acceptable policy-making procedure and the political possibilities of international governance.

The debate over sovereignty in Lebanon involves a battle among distinct and varying political imaginaries. This struggle is evident in the negotiation of the Syrian presence within Lebanon prior to the withdrawal of the Syrian military in the spring of 2005. I focus here on the early public call for change made by the Maronite Patriarch that preceded the broader national movement for Syrian withdrawal. I argue that this statement challenged previously entrenched concepts regarding the relationship between Syria and Lebanon and contributed to redefining Lebanese discourses of sovereignty. Specifically, I look at the metaphor of kin relations: aspects of a sibling relationship that embed Lebanon in a script of reciprocal obligations are contrasted with a more individuated notion of state rights. The rhetorical strategy of contrasting the rights and obligations of brotherhood relations through the use of marked terms of dependency and inequality became a means for revising the discussion of the political relationship between the two countries while still maintaining the trope of Arab brotherhood.

This article examines the unprecedented victory of the Islamic Group in the 2004 municipal elections in a town on the northern border of Lebanon that was renowned for a history of leftist political activism. The article investigates local idioms of political representation and, using ethnographic material, demonstrates how the political process was framed in a discourse of “trial and error.” It explores the traditional idiom of `ā’ila (lineage) and, through a comparison of three municipal elections in their historical and political contexts, argues that `ā’ila served as a principal idiom of democracy through which residents sought to change their political landscape in the postwar context by aiming to elevate their politics to the national sphere. The article contributes to an understanding of the manner in which Muslims relate to Islamist politics and to the literature that focuses on democracy as an ethnographically emergent construct.

Consociational democracy, as a political project of passive coexistence and agreement among ethnic elites, has been shaping sociopolitical processes in the world's postconflict regions, including Northern Ireland, Lebanon, and Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). In BiH, this political model, when combined with continuous governance by the International Community, solidifies war-generated ethnic segregation and erodes state sovereignty. Furthermore, these political, social, and spatial arrangements lead to the institutionalized separation of ethnic groups and territories in BiH. At the famous Mostar Gymnasium, my primary research site, this is manifested in the simultaneous unification of the school management and segregation of classroom spaces, classroom instruction, and students along the ethnic lines. The implementation of a top-down cartography of peace building at the school led to the destruction of common spaces for students to interact. This spatial ethnic division limited what the students call, in the local vernacular, miješanje (mixing). I understand mixing as a long-standing cultural practice of interconnectedness and intermingling among ethnic groups. This article pays special attention to the practices of bathroom mixing at the school that unfolded alongside the consociational model of democracy and the history of mixing as an interethnic social order. Focusing on bathroom mixing illuminates the paradoxes and unintended effects of the spatial governmentality of peace-building in BiH.

Centered on one village, Aukre, this article discusses new types of intervillage ties and coordination in the Kayapó lands in Brazil. Present-day village politics are animated by a diverse array of old and emergent partnerships in the Amazon region. The Kayapó effort to preserve their homeland has resulted in communities’ networking, articulating, and partnering with many different types of stakeholders as a response to the territorialization of their homeland and the increased bureaucratization of their livelihoods. Ethnographic data from one village suggests that current community relationships are part of a multilayered political and social landscape. Now, village ties are forged and maintained because of ramped-up transportation and communication within the territory, bureaucratic structures that demand consistent intervillage diplomacy, economic incentives that offer Kayapó communities opportunities for engagement and competition, and ongoing alliances to protect and defend the integrity of the Kayapó lands and their territorial boundaries.

In this article, I analyze Bolivians’ public condemnations of patronage—the buying of political support with jobs or favors—over the past decade. The rise of indigenous and leftist governments in Latin America has led many to hope for a transition from neoliberalism. In Bolivia, the new Morales government has promised to effect this transition in part by rooting out clientelismo and peguismo (patronage job seeking), long a mainstay of Bolivian politics. I argue, however, that at the level of everyday practice, Bolivians engage hybrid ideals—of patronage, populism, state capitalism, liberalism, and left-indigenist democracy. Focusing on debates over patronage in the central Bolivian Cochabamba region, I show that most people who denounced patronage were unable to avoid others’ counterdenunciations that they were buscapegas (patronage seekers). Furthermore, while residents of Sacaba often expressed a yearning for ideological purity by denouncing patronage, they also used the language of patron–client reciprocity to assert demands for radical democracy.

Explicitly prohibiting US military counternarcotics assistance to foreign military units facing credible allegations of abuses, Leahy Law creation and implementation illuminates the epistemological challenges of knowledge production about violence in the policy process. First passed in 1997, the law emerged from strategic alliances between elite NGO advocates, grassroots activists, and critically located Congressional aides in response to the perceived inability of Congress to act on human rights information. I explore the resulting transformation of aid delivery; rather than suspend aid when no “clean” units could be found, US officials convinced their Colombian allies to create new units consisting of vetted soldiers. I use the implementation of the law in Colombia to explore how the vetting process exposed the knowledge practices inherent in policy implementation, the social production of credibility, and ways in which some forms of political violence were made visible while others were erased.