Papers (Part 1)

• Development Ideas Meeting Local Realities in Aid Context in Vietnam: A Case Study Analysis Minna Hakkarainen University of Helsinki

  Several earlier studies have noted that words that are central to development theory and practice have different meanings for different actors (e.g. Mosse 2005; Cornwall 2008; White 2004; Kurki 2010; Cornwall & Brock 2005). Concepts that guide aid practice carry values and ideals that are widely shared by the aid community, but are often interpreted in unexpected ways by aid recipients. Inspired by development ethnographies (Ferguson 1994; Li 2007; Mosse 2005) that show how socio-political and historical contexts become apparent in the course of aid interventions, the paper explores how local context and people’s experiences manifest in contestation between different meanings given to the notion of participation. The paper discusses language as a means and an object of contestation in aid practice utilizing Bakhtin’s theory of meaning (Bakhtin 1996). The theory makes a clear division between a word and its meaning and argues that time, space and an individual’s personal experiences are key factors in a meaning construction process. Through an analysis of a case study, the paper explores how different interpretations of participation by a Western development NGO and project beneficiaries in Vietnamese villages were rooted in discrepancies of aid talk (giving exclusively positive attributes to participation) and Vietnamese socio-political realities (marked by state led participatory development practices). The paper further argues that aid interventions, therefore, should strive for creation of ‘micro cosmoses’, alternative realities that shape people’s experiences, and consequently their understanding on concepts that are crucial for the success of chosen interventions, and to do so requires understanding of language as contextual and contested across time and space.

• Environmentally Friendly: Traces of a Concept in an Indonesian Fishery Katharina Schneider

  Based on fieldwork at a Javanese fishing port , this paper examines the marks that ‘environmentally friendly’ has left as it has travelled into debates about fisheries development among fishers and fish traders. The concept is not new in this setting, and people seemed happy to use it in discussions of lifestyle choices. When it appeared in justifications of changes in fisheries policy that were threatening to severely impact their livelihood, however, most declared it irrelevant in this context. I sketch out different strategies for expelling the concept from such debates and indicate how boundaries between fishers and others, large and small, rich and poor, people and government, Indonesia and other nations have been redrawn as a result.

• “The Logic of the One”? Citizen Aid in Cambodia Anne-Meike Fechter University of Sussex

  Critiques of conventional development have highlighted the ‘travelling rationalities’ (Mosse 2011) which oft underpin development programmes devised by donors or large-scale aid agencies. These might include models such as ‘good governance’, forms of healthcare, or modalities of remembrance. These concepts are often presented as universal, while masking their origins in particular historical, political and social contexts. In the case of small-scale private aid activities, which are driven by independent individuals from the Global North and South, such travelling universals may, at first glance, be less evident. These initiatives are characterised, however, by a consistent focus on the ‘logic of the one’, or the belief that ‘every person counts’. Such a framework is fitting and, one might argue, necessary, as these practices are by their nature mostly focused on creating changes in the lives of individuals. Might the ‘logic of the one’ (Malkkii 2016), though, be another such concept which appears universal, while originating in a Western-inspired neoliberal framework, which places the responsibility of one’s own welfare, as well as that of selected others, on the individual person-? Based on ethnographic fieldwork with such small-scale aid projects in Cambodia, the proposed paper will explore these questions.

Papers (Part 2)

• Intermediaries as Translators: Vernacularizing Rule of Law as Development in Myanmar Kristina Simion The Australian National University

  This paper examines the ways in which development intermediaries function as translators of rule of law through a case study of the way the concept was presented by foreign development actors in Myanmar after political transition in 2011. I draw on a framework of ‘vernacularization’ to analyse how intermediaries translate rule of law at the intersection of Law and Society scholarship on justice reform and legal anthropology. The paper contributes to such debates by illustrating the ways in which intermediaries contribute to recursive translations – from the ‘middle-up’ - rather than falling into encapsulated ‘global’ to ‘local’ relationships. Through ethnographic observations and in-depth qualitative interviews collected in Myanmar it shows how intermediaries are powerful in their role as translators: they infuse their own values, buffer conversations, and substitute content where they consider this necessary. This highlights how the collision of norms and priorities, and the appropriation of new concepts for local uses is a key feature of development intervention. The paper shows that the unintended consequences of foreign rule of law assistance, in this case, is ‘rule of law’ with an authoritarian cast.

• Traveling Models of “Dealing with the Past”: The Making of a Memorial Site Between Germany and Cambodia Sina Emde Heidelberg University

  In the context of the Extraordinary Chambers in the Courts of Cambodia (ECCC) the German Civil Peace service funded a number of positions for German peace workers to advise and support Cambodian non-governmental organizations in their transitional justice work emerging with the tribunal. Most of the German volunteers stayed in the country for two to four years, some even longer, working with the same NGO throughout. This paper looks at the processes that were involved in these long term engagements and the projects that emerged from these collaborations with a special focus on one Cambodian Youth NGO at a particular site in rural Cambodia. Drawing on Andrea Behrends’, Sung-Joon Park’s and Richard Rottenburg’s work on unexpected outcomes of travelling models in conflict management I ask what technologies and concepts of dealing with the past were introduced to Cambodian spaces and places of memory and what expected and unexpected processes they set in motion I suggest that German volunteers and donors were heavily influenced by their own history and models of dealing with the past (Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung) in post-war Germany with a strong focus on the materialities and testimonies of memory. These technologies and programs were familiar to many older Cambodians from the earlier memory work of the socialist state of the People’s Republic of Kampuchea, but neglected intangible forms of remembering violence and dealing with the past prevalent in the county. Nevertheless, their implementation contributed to the emergence of new memoryscapes where old and new forms of memory entangled and engendered realms of transgenerational memory in unforeseen ways.

Abstract

Keywords

• Cambodia
• Law
• Theory