Studying Complex Interactions and Outcomes Through Qualitative Comparative Analysis: A Practical ... more Studying Complex Interactions and Outcomes Through Qualitative Comparative Analysis: A Practical Guide to Comparative Case Studies and Ethnographic Data Analysis offers practical, methodological, and theoretically robust guidelines to systematically study the causalities, dynamics, and outcomes of complex social interactions in multiple source data sets. It demonstrates how to convert data from multisited ethnography of investment politics, mobilizations, and citizen struggles into a Qualitative Comparative Analysis (QCA).
In this book, Markus Kröger focuses on how data collected primarily via multisited political ethnography, supplemented by other materials and verified by multiple forms of triangulation, can be systematically analyzed through QCA. The results of this QCA offer insight on how to study the political and economic outcomes in natural resource conflicts, across different contexts and political systems. This book applies the method in practice using examples from the author’s own research. With a focus on social movement studies, it shows how QCA can be used to analyze a multiple data source database, that includes results from multiple case studies.
This book is a practical guide for researchers and students in social movement studies and other disciplines that produce ethnographic data from multiple sources on how to analyze complex databases through the QCA.
Iron Will: Global Extractivism and Mining Resistance in Brazil and India, 2020
Iron Will lays bare the role of extractivist policies and efforts to resist these policies throug... more Iron Will lays bare the role of extractivist policies and efforts to resist these policies through a deep ethnographic exploration of globally important iron ore mining in Brazil and India. Markus Kröger addresses resistance strategies to extractivism and tracks their success, or lack thereof, through a comparison of peaceful and armed resource conflicts, explaining how different means of resistance arise. Using the distinctly different contexts and political systems of Brazil and India highlights the importance of local context for resistance. For example, if there is an armed conflict at a planned mining site, how does this influence the possibility to use peaceful resistance strategies? To answer such questions, Kröger assesses the inter-relations of contentious, electoral, institutional, judicial, and private politics that surround conflicts and interactions, offering a new theoretical framework of "investment politics" that can be applied generally by scholars and students of social movements, environmental studies, and political economy, and even more broadly in Social Scientific and Environmental Policy research.
”The Intercultural Encounter between the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and Veracel Ce... more ”The Intercultural Encounter between the Brazilian Landless Workers Movement (MST) and Veracel Celulose: A Power Analysis” – study’s aim was to transdisciplinarily analyze the encounter between MST and Veracel. The working hypothesis was that the encounter was, besides its physical nature - also an intercultural encounter between two symbolic systems. The research focused on bringing forwards the meanings and interplay of power, knowledge and culture in such an encounter by using as a theoretical framework a “theory of intercultural encounters”, which was crafted particularly for this thesis. In this, Pierre Bourdieu’s, Michel Foucault’s and Greg Urban’s theories on culture’s, power’s and knowledge’s – on human being’s – habits and motions through time and across space were applied. Veracel Celulose SA’s and MST’s social, economic and political dimensions, symbolic capital, power and intercultural encounters in the context of Brazilian Bahia were analyzed in this research. Research methodology consisted transdisciplinarily of discourse analysis, economics, ethnography, political sciences and of some of the ways in which the three above mentioned authors have analyzed culture, economy, politics, power and discourses. In the research was found that the encounter between Veracel and MST was an encounter between two different symbolic systems. It was a dispositive of two power/knowledge formations, in foucauldian terms. From the point of view of the thesis’ theoretical framework, in this dispositive the most important conception under negotiation was human-land relationship. Furthermore, it was found that also historically the conception of human-land relationship has been under negotiation in the Brazilian context. It was not only a physical encounter, when MST occupied/invaded 25 hectares of Veracel’s eucalyptus plantation in April 2004. This study demonstrates the way in which it was also an intercultural encounter, in which MST used symbolic means in order to affect lands’ and eucalyptus’ values and general social conceptualizations and this way gain also economic, structural and political capital. The physical encounter resulted in the materialization of the cultural elements pertinent to both MST and Veracel, thus the immaterial, the cultural could be analyzed. The most important research results demonstrated that the symbolic system particular to Veracel is marked by the international business field and by the Brazilian Positivist management culture. Transformation is taking place within Veracel not only through the pathways, using Greg Urban’s terms, which connect it to these, but moreover through the pathway which is set between Veracel, Stora Enso and Finland. On the other hand, the symbolic system of MST is an alternative to the “Brazilian” power field’s symbolic system, in bourdiean terms. Cultural elements pertinent to it are, primarily, the Liberation Theology conceptualized by Leonardo Boff and the pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire. These elements are manifested in the practices (praxis ) of the social movement and in its rituals like the Místico.
Over the past two decades, large-scale resource extraction has returned to center stage in the po... more Over the past two decades, large-scale resource extraction has returned to center stage in the political economy of capitalism – and in the resistance to it. Called " extractivism " by scholars and activists, resource extraction in the 21st century has assumed new prominence in an era of unusually high commodity prices and the widespread questioning of fossil fuel infrastructures. Far from limited to resource and energy question, recent extractivisms have linked up with manifold forms of land grabbing and cash-crop agriculture to create new agrarian questions of survival and justice in an era of runaway climate change. Crucially, many Indigenous Peoples, peasants, workers, and other groups have confronted the extractivist projects. Many of them have not only opposed place-specific projects but questioned the Nature/Society dualisms that have framed and legitimated the racialized, gendered, and colonial domination that has been fundamental to capitalism's environmental histories. We are witnessing a new wave of challenges to capitalism as an ontological formation – a new ontological politics that confronts capitalism as a world-ecology of power, re/production, and nature. Extractivisms, Social Movements and Ontological Formations is the fourth annual conference of the World-Ecology Research Network. We invite papers on the widest range of topics addressing the new extractivism, its political economy and political ecology, and movements against extractivist projects. We also welcome proposals for thematic sessions. Proposals from artists and activists are encouraged. Papers off-topic but relevant to the world-ecology conversation are also welcome.
This article critically examines the usability of the concept of 'social licence to operate' (SLO... more This article critically examines the usability of the concept of 'social licence to operate' (SLO) in the Latin American context as an indicator of the social acceptability granted by local stakeholders to multinational forestry companies. We identify four potential problems (risks of co-optation, structural power imbalances, conflicting worldviews, and the silencing effects of global certification schemes) that emerge when the current practice and literature on SLO is implemented in the context of forestry operations in Global South's rural areas, commonly marked by dynamic and contentious corporate-community relations. Based on empirical material from local communities affected by industrial tree plantations (ITPs) in a setting claimed to have an absence of conflicts (Uruguay) and another where visible conflicts have been present (Chile), we then ask: What does SLO mean to those it is supposed to represent the most, the local communities affected by industrial forestry? The findings illustrate that caution is necessary prior to claiming that a company, investment, or industry has achieved an all-encompassing SLO at the local level. Instead, to understand the dynamic and contentious corporate-community relations we argue for a more nuanced approach to how locals engage with different economic alternatives based on their own place-based capacity to sustain and reproduce life in community.
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Papers by Markus Kröger
In this book, Markus Kröger focuses on how data collected primarily via multisited political ethnography, supplemented by other materials and verified by multiple forms of triangulation, can be systematically analyzed through QCA. The results of this QCA offer insight on how to study the political and economic outcomes in natural resource conflicts, across different contexts and political systems. This book applies the method in practice using examples from the author’s own research. With a focus on social movement studies, it shows how QCA can be used to analyze a multiple data source database, that includes results from multiple case studies.
This book is a practical guide for researchers and students in social movement studies and other disciplines that produce ethnographic data from multiple sources on how to analyze complex databases through the QCA.
A Power Analysis” – study’s aim was to transdisciplinarily analyze the encounter between MST and Veracel.
The working hypothesis was that the encounter was, besides its physical nature - also an intercultural encounter
between two symbolic systems. The research focused on bringing forwards the meanings and interplay of
power, knowledge and culture in such an encounter by using as a theoretical framework a “theory of
intercultural encounters”, which was crafted particularly for this thesis. In this, Pierre Bourdieu’s, Michel
Foucault’s and Greg Urban’s theories on culture’s, power’s and knowledge’s – on human being’s – habits and
motions through time and across space were applied.
Veracel Celulose SA’s and MST’s social, economic and political dimensions, symbolic capital, power and
intercultural encounters in the context of Brazilian Bahia were analyzed in this research. Research methodology
consisted transdisciplinarily of discourse analysis, economics, ethnography, political sciences and of some of the
ways in which the three above mentioned authors have analyzed culture, economy, politics, power and
discourses.
In the research was found that the encounter between Veracel and MST was an encounter between two different
symbolic systems. It was a dispositive of two power/knowledge formations, in foucauldian terms. From the
point of view of the thesis’ theoretical framework, in this dispositive the most important conception under
negotiation was human-land relationship. Furthermore, it was found that also historically the conception of
human-land relationship has been under negotiation in the Brazilian context. It was not only a physical
encounter, when MST occupied/invaded 25 hectares of Veracel’s eucalyptus plantation in April 2004. This
study demonstrates the way in which it was also an intercultural encounter, in which MST used symbolic means
in order to affect lands’ and eucalyptus’ values and general social conceptualizations and this way gain also
economic, structural and political capital.
The physical encounter resulted in the materialization of the cultural elements pertinent to both MST and
Veracel, thus the immaterial, the cultural could be analyzed. The most important research results demonstrated
that the symbolic system particular to Veracel is marked by the international business field and by the Brazilian
Positivist management culture. Transformation is taking place within Veracel not only through the pathways,
using Greg Urban’s terms, which connect it to these, but moreover through the pathway which is set between
Veracel, Stora Enso and Finland. On the other hand, the symbolic system of MST is an alternative to the
“Brazilian” power field’s symbolic system, in bourdiean terms. Cultural elements pertinent to it are, primarily,
the Liberation Theology conceptualized by Leonardo Boff and the pedagogy of the oppressed by Paulo Freire.
These elements are manifested in the practices (praxis ) of the social movement and in its rituals like the
Místico.