Programme full

Thursday 16 April 2015 11:00 - 12:30
PAPER SESSION 4
public sphere. While in the first few weeks after the attacks there were repeated calls for covert and overt antiimmigration
attitudes to become untenable in Norway, such fundamental changes did not occur in the long-run.
However, some of our informants saw negotiations of societal collectivity to be more present in the public sphere since
the attacks. Others maintained that Norwegian public discourse still is marked by political correctness, giving little
room for anti-immigration viewpoints. Exploring different understandings of the political and social reasons for and
consequences of July 22nd as they emerge in our data, we find that the struggle over the power to define 'the
collective we' is contested by actors with different political outlooks. There is much emphasis on the freedom of
speech, but less on the implications of implicitly racialised notions of the national in the Norwegian context, which
affects the nature of negotiations about 'the collective we'.
The Electoral Rise and Fall Of the British National Party: A Sociological Critique of 'External Supply-side
Theories'
Ashe, S.
(University of Manchester)
In 2006, when the British National Party (BNP) won 12 local council seats in the outer-East London Borough of
Barking and Dagenham, they became the official opposition to the Labour Party. Four years later the BNP lost all 12
of their seats. This paper offers a Gramscian analysis of the extent to which the local political-cultural context may
have facilitated the BNP's electoral rise and fall in outer-East London. It will be argued that the emphasis Antonio
Gramsci's prison notebooks place on the relationship between 'political society' and 'civil society' and the concept of
'hegemonic apparatus' can enhance 'external supply-side' perspectives of extreme right-wing electoral performance.
In doing so, the discussion here also draws attention to recent developments in sociological Marxism and highlights
limitations and key silences in the way in which Erik Olin Wright and Michael Burawoy have interpreted Gramsci's
analysis of the relationship between the state and civil society. It is argued that the concept of 'hegemonic apparatus'
offers us the means to understand more fully how hegemonic apparatuses politicise the cultural and how political
dominance in the local realm is rooted in the contours of local civic society. It will be demonstrated that the BNP's
electoral breakthrough in Barking and Dagenham was not just a warning signal about the 'advanced decay of local
political parties', it was also an indication of the weakening of Labour's local 'hegemonic apparatus' and how the
rebuilding of Labour's hegemonic apparatus contributed to the BNP's electoral demise.
Rights, Violence and Crime
W119, HAMISH WOOD BUILDING
The Mitigation of Climate Change as Genocide
Crook, M.
(School of Advanced Study, University of London)
With the hunan rights implications of climate change well established in the literature, it is morbidly ironic that the
political-economic tools used to mitigate anthropogenic climate, are violating the human rights of indigenous people
and in some cases causing genocide. This paper will argue that market mechanisms institutionalised by the Kyoto
protocol since 1997, such as carbon markets are failing to 'decarbonize' the global economy and transform the
capitalist mode of organization into a 'greener' more sustainable capitalism. Further, drawing on the sociology of
genocide originated and inspired by Raphael Lemkin and the 'value analysis' found in Marxist political economy, the
institutionalisation of carbon markets will be shown to exacerbate uneven development, regional and global
inequalities and hurt the most vulnerable and poorest communities in the developing world, in some cases menacing
the group life of social collectives. Carbon markets will be shown as part of a long history of capitalist devlopment and
merely new modes of capital accumulation which extend the commodification of nature and reconstitute the nature–
society relation in a desperate bid to solve an accumulation crisis. The paper concludes by showing that this new
'ecological regime' is unlikely to alter the nature and operation of capitalism and propel it towards a greener future and
will continue to violate the rights of indigenous people all over the world, in some cases leading to group death, as
understood by a Lemkinian genoicde lens.
The Third World and the International Rights Regime
D'Souza, R.
(University of Westminster)
BSA Annual Conference 2015 158
Glasgow Caledonian University