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ID: 153676

It’s all bollocks!’ and other critical standpoints on the UK Government’s vision of global citizenship / Griffiths, Mark

Griffiths, Mark	Journal Article
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Summary/Abstract

The UK Government’s International Citizen Service (ICS) sends volunteers abroad to ‘fight global poverty’ as ‘global citizens’. Perhaps unsurprisingly, the construction of development on the ICS programme forecloses important political and historical contexts, resulting in a model of global citizenship we might term ‘soft’. This article presents data from interviews with ICS volunteers with a specific methodological concern of recognizing the agency of young people and allowing their responses to lead discussion. The outcome is a range of themes across the data that critique the Government’s model of citizenship and, I argue, shows the volunteers to be ‘critical’ global citizens. I then ask whether we can consider this a mode of resistance. I conclude with a final data set that – the case is made – presents an imperative to allow these volunteers to have their perspectives on historical and contemporary North–South relations recognized as a critical mode of global citizenship.

Key Words

Development ; Postcolonialism ; Resistance ; Global Citizenship ; Big Society ; International Volunteering

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ID: 178343

Women and checkpoints in Palestine / Griffiths, Mark; Repo, Jemima

Repo, Jemima	Journal Article
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The objective of this article is to bring Palestinian women to the centre of a discussion about the gendered dimensions of Israel’s convoluted permit system and checkpoint security infrastructure. Drawing on fieldwork close to one of the largest checkpoint terminals in the West Bank, Checkpoint 300 between Bethlehem and Jerusalem, the article develops knowledge about checkpoints in three important ways: i) as gendered spaces that regulate women’s mobility differently from that of men; ii) as spaces that produce particular embodied experiences for women; and iii) as security mechanisms that disrupt and regulate relations of care. This knowledge builds towards the main argument of the article: Palestinian women’s lives are profoundly affected by Israel’s imposition of permit systems and checkpoints in terms of highly gendered impositions of (im)mobility, embodied experience and relations of care. The research presented here thus makes two wider contributions to research on security to do with how the checkpoint brings the politics of gender and occupation to the fore, and how security infrastructure connects to the politics of care under military occupation.

Key Words

Palestine ; Israel ; Military Occupation ; Mobility ; Checkpoints ; Gender and Security

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