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• Crafting the commons: an ethnography on collectivity and identity in action

  49-63

  Trime Halili

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  204

  Studies on social movements underwent a prominent shift from the rigid division between the ‘personal’ and the ‘political’ into the feminist perspective from the renowned concept and slogan popularised by second-wave feminism in the 60s’ and 70s’ “the personal is political”, that served and was used by many movements of the time. This shift aimed to illuminate the strong link between these concepts focusing on lifestyle and the effects on culture. Following the concept of prefigurative politics (Boggs, 1997), where the embodiment of the different forms of socialties and human experiences is the ultimate goal within the political practice of a movement, this paper is based on an ethnographic case study that examines a network of five organised communities – Toestand (Brussels, Belgium), Termokiss (Prishtina, Kosova), Space Tetova (Tetova, North Macedonia), DKC Sarajevo (Bosnia and Herzegovina) and Pomorandza (Podgorica, Montenegro). The findings show how members of these communities, who besides their respective communities are part of a joint network, engage in lifestyle choices and adopt cooperative practices as acts of resistance and transformation, challenging contemporary capitalist values and their surrounding sociocultural realities.

• The Sudan Gezira Irrigation Agricultural Scheme: The Agrarian Neoliberal Reforms in the Scheme—A Break from or Reconfiguration within the Governing Colonial Epistemology?

  29-54

  Ibrahim Ibrahim

  Mohamed A. G. Bakhit

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  0

  Founded during Anglo-Egyptian Condominium colonial Rule (1899-1956) and continuing into postcolonial Sudan as the main development project, the scheme underwent significant governance changes, shifting from a centrally managed system characterised by a bureaucratic irrigation network and relatively well-functioning infrastructure to a more liberalised and decentralised system, as presented by the dominant literature. In this view, the reforms are regarded as a break from the inherited colonial logic, marked by the state’s withdrawal and the transfer of risks and responsibilities to tenants, labourers, and local subsistence economies. Such accounts highlight a rupture with earlier forms of governance, often portraying the colonial system as more coherent and effective than the current one. However, this perspective overlooks how these changes conceal the persistence of an underlying colonial epistemological and governance framework that continues to organise, classify, and control land, labour, population, and nature. The scheme continues to be operated through a centralised hydraulic irrigation system, despite uneven recent conditions for its reproduction, functioning as a mechanism for regulating farmers and agricultural production. This is intertwined with the ongoing development of agrarian subjectivities within the tenancy regime, which recognises local Arab groups as political agrarian entities. Conversely, West African labourers and ethnic minority groups are marginalised and excluded subjects. The recent reforms reflect and deepen the logic of the colonial extractive economy, which prioritises technocratic scientific knowledge over local systems of understanding and indigenous needs. By combining long-standing ethnography with a Decolonial perspective and employing a methodological framework that integrates multi-sided ethnography with Decolonial critical literature, this approach enables scholars to trace how colonial epistemologies have persisted in hegemonic, reinterpreted, and contested forms across comparable Sudanese agrarian contexts and throughout postcolonial Africa.