Jutta Bakonyi
Biographic Data
| ID | 108276 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jutta Bakonyi |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jutta |
| FAMILY NAME | Bakonyi |
| SIGNATURE | BAKONYI J |
| AFFILIATIONS | Durham University |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-8385-7979 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 19 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 102 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 18 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 7 |
Port infrastructures and the making of historical time in the Horn of Africa
As infrastructures mushroom across Africa, this article investigates narratives accompanying infrastructural investments in East African cities, Djibouti-city (Djibouti) and Berbera (Somaliland). While cities in the Global North move towards a post-industrial future, the Horn of Africa depicts other endpoints, breaking with experiences of colonisation while hoping to diminish asymmetries in a Western-dominated global system. Inspired by models th…
Infrastructures and Capitalist World Ordering
In this forum, we employ infrastructures as an analytical lens to explore contemporary world ordering, which we root in the dynamics of capitalism. Beyond enabling mobility and facilitating capital's expansionist transgression of social and geographical barriers, we show how the current densification and expansion of infrastructures are actively undermining the imaginary of a world ordered through spatially bounded, internally unified entities. I…
Infrastructures and International Relations
In a world of accelerated movements, this article examines how infrastructures matter in international relations. We first show that the International Relations (IR) discipline has relegated infrastructures to the background of their studies and treated them as passive tools despite their forcible role in the establishment of the modern state system. By adopting a sociological definition of “the international,” this article emphasizes the central…
Precarious Urbanism
This book explores relationships between war, displacement and city-making. Focusing on people seeking refuge in Somali cities after being forced to migrate by violence, environmental shocks or economic pressures, it highlights how in-migrants are actively transforming urban space. Using first-hand testimonies and participatory photography, the book documents and analyses the micropolitics of urban camp management and infrastructure, evictions an…
The Political Economy of Displacement
Displacement is urbanizing. Urban violence increasingly contributes to displacement while a growing number of displaced people across the globe seeks refuge in cities. This article builds on original research in four Somali cities to explore the link between violence, displacement and urbanization. It identifies and comparatively explores three types of urban settlements of displaced people: urban camps at cities’ outskirts, inner‐city squatter s…
Modular sovereignty and infrastructural power
This article uses the example of the Mogadishu International Airport zone and takes a spatio-temporal lens to explore how (sovereign) power unfolds in international interventions that aim at building a sovereign state. I show that the Mogadishu International Airport zone emerges as an elastic frontier zone that contradicts the sovereign imaginary intervenors aim to project and undermines many of the taken-for-granted boundaries that states tend t…
Precarity, Mobility and the City
Drawing on empirically rich and theoretically grounded case studies, the articles in this issue explore ways in which global governmental processes affect mobility and, similarly, how seemingly local movements impact upon global processes
Precarious labour – Precarious lives
Displacement and mass migration have contributed to extremely rapid urbanization in the Somali territories of the Horn of Africa. Often displaced from rural areas, newcomers to cities hope to find safety and the means to rebuild their lives. However, displaced people often find themselves stranded in dilapidated settlements and entangled in exploitative labour relations or exhausting forms of petty entrepreneurship in order to survive. This artic…
Precarious spaces and violent site effects
This paper addresses precarity from a spatial perspective. It draws attention to how power becomes inscribed in urban space and shapes particular spatial arrangements connected with socio-economic vulnerabilities. This is empirically illustrated with a case study of Hargeisa, a city historically marked by the violence of the Somali civil war. Our analysis draws on interviews and participant photography, to foreground the ‘everyday’ experiences of…
War and city-making in Somalia
Rapid urbanisation in Somalia, as in many other war-torn countries, is driven by in-migration of displaced people who are often amassed in camps. Although such camps become institutionalised sites of exclusion where ‘bare life’ is generated and disposed, they are also characterised by socially messy and continuously evolving relations of space, power, violence and displacement. The article draws on fieldwork with displaced people in Somali cities…
Seeing Like Bureaucracies
Development promotes bureaucratization, and bureaucracies are based on knowledge and produce knowledge. Failures of development are therefore regularly attributed to a lack of knowledge. The article argues that the quest for knowledge is embedded in the managerial rationality of interventions. This rationality also structures the developmental knowledge field and thereby generates ignorance. The example of a state-building program in Somalia is u…
Ideoscapes in the World Society
The article uses the example of the Somali war to analyse how globally travelling ideas and political concepts are adapted to local settings and translated into frames that promote collective action and feature violence. It outlines how two ideas with universal claim, nationalism and modernisation were combined with an anti-colonial rhetoric and evolved into the meta-narrative of Somali history. This meta-narrative changed little, and keywords su…
A Micro-Sociology of Violence
Micro-Sociology of Violence
Authority and administration beyond the state
After 1995, southern and central Somalia splintered into a patchwork of weakly institutionalized forms of authority. These localized power-figurations had common characteristics: they were established by clan-based militias, used primary forms of revenue extraction and mobilized followers on the basis of clan affiliation. Their degree of legitimacy varied considerably between the regions, depending on the history of conquest, the organizational s…
Between protest, revenge and material interests
This paper examines practices of looting in the Somali war.1 Rather than being inspired primarily by economic objectives, lootings are complex and ambiguous social activities, which are embedded in daily practices and the political rhetoric of the war. In Somalia, looting activities have been driven by a broad range of motives, including military-strategic considerations and/or desire to revenge past atrocities and (perceived) injustices, as well…
Moral Economies of Mass Violence
The focus in the article is on the beginning and expansion of the Somali war between 1988 and 1992. Three patterns and dynamics of mass-mobilisation are comparatively examined: the relatively sudden transformation of the northern guerrilla struggle in a civil war 1988, the expansion of the war to the southern region after 1989 and the mass-upheaval in Mogadishu 1990/91. Although clan-affiliation became a prominent tool to mobilising violence and …
The Mosaic of Violence – An Introduction
Violence & social order beyond the state
This paper examines the activities of non-state actors in war in Somalia and Angola. Arguing that prolonged wars are characterised by the emergence of social orders of violence beyond the state, our analytical focus is on how actors establish and sustain these orders. A core influence is the insight from research on war economies that war is not equal to the breakdown of societal order, but represents an alternative form of social order. We there…
Violence & social order beyond the state
This paper examines the activities of non-state actors in war in Somalia and Angola. Arguing that prolonged wars are characterised by the emergence of social orders of violence beyond the state, our analytical focus is on how actors establish and sustain these orders. A core influence is the insight from research on war economies that war is not equal to the breakdown of societal order, but represents an alternative form of social order. We there…
Moral Economies of Mass Violence
The focus in the article is on the beginning and expansion of the Somali war between 1988 and 1992. Three patterns and dynamics of mass-mobilisation are comparatively examined: the relatively sudden transformation of the northern guerrilla struggle in a civil war 1988, the expansion of the war to the southern region after 1989 and the mass-upheaval in Mogadishu 1990/91. Although clan-affiliation became a prominent tool to mobilising violence and …
War and city-making in Somalia
Rapid urbanisation in Somalia, as in many other war-torn countries, is driven by in-migration of displaced people who are often amassed in camps. Although such camps become institutionalised sites of exclusion where ‘bare life’ is generated and disposed, they are also characterised by socially messy and continuously evolving relations of space, power, violence and displacement. The article draws on fieldwork with displaced people in Somali cities…
Seeing Like Bureaucracies
Development promotes bureaucratization, and bureaucracies are based on knowledge and produce knowledge. Failures of development are therefore regularly attributed to a lack of knowledge. The article argues that the quest for knowledge is embedded in the managerial rationality of interventions. This rationality also structures the developmental knowledge field and thereby generates ignorance. The example of a state-building program in Somalia is u…
Modular sovereignty and infrastructural power
This article uses the example of the Mogadishu International Airport zone and takes a spatio-temporal lens to explore how (sovereign) power unfolds in international interventions that aim at building a sovereign state. I show that the Mogadishu International Airport zone emerges as an elastic frontier zone that contradicts the sovereign imaginary intervenors aim to project and undermines many of the taken-for-granted boundaries that states tend t…
Authority and administration beyond the state
After 1995, southern and central Somalia splintered into a patchwork of weakly institutionalized forms of authority. These localized power-figurations had common characteristics: they were established by clan-based militias, used primary forms of revenue extraction and mobilized followers on the basis of clan affiliation. Their degree of legitimacy varied considerably between the regions, depending on the history of conquest, the organizational s…
The Mosaic of Violence – An Introduction
Between protest, revenge and material interests
This paper examines practices of looting in the Somali war.1 Rather than being inspired primarily by economic objectives, lootings are complex and ambiguous social activities, which are embedded in daily practices and the political rhetoric of the war. In Somalia, looting activities have been driven by a broad range of motives, including military-strategic considerations and/or desire to revenge past atrocities and (perceived) injustices, as well…
Infrastructures and International Relations
In a world of accelerated movements, this article examines how infrastructures matter in international relations. We first show that the International Relations (IR) discipline has relegated infrastructures to the background of their studies and treated them as passive tools despite their forcible role in the establishment of the modern state system. By adopting a sociological definition of “the international,” this article emphasizes the central…
Port infrastructures and the making of historical time in the Horn of Africa
As infrastructures mushroom across Africa, this article investigates narratives accompanying infrastructural investments in East African cities, Djibouti-city (Djibouti) and Berbera (Somaliland). While cities in the Global North move towards a post-industrial future, the Horn of Africa depicts other endpoints, breaking with experiences of colonisation while hoping to diminish asymmetries in a Western-dominated global system. Inspired by models th…
Infrastructures and Capitalist World Ordering
In this forum, we employ infrastructures as an analytical lens to explore contemporary world ordering, which we root in the dynamics of capitalism. Beyond enabling mobility and facilitating capital's expansionist transgression of social and geographical barriers, we show how the current densification and expansion of infrastructures are actively undermining the imaginary of a world ordered through spatially bounded, internally unified entities. I…
Precarity, Mobility and the City
Drawing on empirically rich and theoretically grounded case studies, the articles in this issue explore ways in which global governmental processes affect mobility and, similarly, how seemingly local movements impact upon global processes
Ideoscapes in the World Society
The article uses the example of the Somali war to analyse how globally travelling ideas and political concepts are adapted to local settings and translated into frames that promote collective action and feature violence. It outlines how two ideas with universal claim, nationalism and modernisation were combined with an anti-colonial rhetoric and evolved into the meta-narrative of Somali history. This meta-narrative changed little, and keywords su…
Violence & social order beyond the state
This paper examines the activities of non-state actors in war in Somalia and Angola. Arguing that prolonged wars are characterised by the emergence of social orders of violence beyond the state, our analytical focus is on how actors establish and sustain these orders. A core influence is the insight from research on war economies that war is not equal to the breakdown of societal order, but represents an alternative form of social order. We there…
Moral Economies of Mass Violence
The focus in the article is on the beginning and expansion of the Somali war between 1988 and 1992. Three patterns and dynamics of mass-mobilisation are comparatively examined: the relatively sudden transformation of the northern guerrilla struggle in a civil war 1988, the expansion of the war to the southern region after 1989 and the mass-upheaval in Mogadishu 1990/91. Although clan-affiliation became a prominent tool to mobilising violence and …
The Mosaic of Violence – An Introduction
Between protest, revenge and material interests
This paper examines practices of looting in the Somali war.1 Rather than being inspired primarily by economic objectives, lootings are complex and ambiguous social activities, which are embedded in daily practices and the political rhetoric of the war. In Somalia, looting activities have been driven by a broad range of motives, including military-strategic considerations and/or desire to revenge past atrocities and (perceived) injustices, as well…
Authority and administration beyond the state
After 1995, southern and central Somalia splintered into a patchwork of weakly institutionalized forms of authority. These localized power-figurations had common characteristics: they were established by clan-based militias, used primary forms of revenue extraction and mobilized followers on the basis of clan affiliation. Their degree of legitimacy varied considerably between the regions, depending on the history of conquest, the organizational s…
A Micro-Sociology of Violence
Micro-Sociology of Violence
Ideoscapes in the World Society
The article uses the example of the Somali war to analyse how globally travelling ideas and political concepts are adapted to local settings and translated into frames that promote collective action and feature violence. It outlines how two ideas with universal claim, nationalism and modernisation were combined with an anti-colonial rhetoric and evolved into the meta-narrative of Somali history. This meta-narrative changed little, and keywords su…
Seeing Like Bureaucracies
Development promotes bureaucratization, and bureaucracies are based on knowledge and produce knowledge. Failures of development are therefore regularly attributed to a lack of knowledge. The article argues that the quest for knowledge is embedded in the managerial rationality of interventions. This rationality also structures the developmental knowledge field and thereby generates ignorance. The example of a state-building program in Somalia is u…
War and city-making in Somalia
Rapid urbanisation in Somalia, as in many other war-torn countries, is driven by in-migration of displaced people who are often amassed in camps. Although such camps become institutionalised sites of exclusion where ‘bare life’ is generated and disposed, they are also characterised by socially messy and continuously evolving relations of space, power, violence and displacement. The article draws on fieldwork with displaced people in Somali cities…
The Political Economy of Displacement
Displacement is urbanizing. Urban violence increasingly contributes to displacement while a growing number of displaced people across the globe seeks refuge in cities. This article builds on original research in four Somali cities to explore the link between violence, displacement and urbanization. It identifies and comparatively explores three types of urban settlements of displaced people: urban camps at cities’ outskirts, inner‐city squatter s…
Modular sovereignty and infrastructural power
This article uses the example of the Mogadishu International Airport zone and takes a spatio-temporal lens to explore how (sovereign) power unfolds in international interventions that aim at building a sovereign state. I show that the Mogadishu International Airport zone emerges as an elastic frontier zone that contradicts the sovereign imaginary intervenors aim to project and undermines many of the taken-for-granted boundaries that states tend t…
Precarity, Mobility and the City
Drawing on empirically rich and theoretically grounded case studies, the articles in this issue explore ways in which global governmental processes affect mobility and, similarly, how seemingly local movements impact upon global processes
Precarious labour – Precarious lives
Displacement and mass migration have contributed to extremely rapid urbanization in the Somali territories of the Horn of Africa. Often displaced from rural areas, newcomers to cities hope to find safety and the means to rebuild their lives. However, displaced people often find themselves stranded in dilapidated settlements and entangled in exploitative labour relations or exhausting forms of petty entrepreneurship in order to survive. This artic…
Precarious spaces and violent site effects
This paper addresses precarity from a spatial perspective. It draws attention to how power becomes inscribed in urban space and shapes particular spatial arrangements connected with socio-economic vulnerabilities. This is empirically illustrated with a case study of Hargeisa, a city historically marked by the violence of the Somali civil war. Our analysis draws on interviews and participant photography, to foreground the ‘everyday’ experiences of…
Precarious Urbanism
This book explores relationships between war, displacement and city-making. Focusing on people seeking refuge in Somali cities after being forced to migrate by violence, environmental shocks or economic pressures, it highlights how in-migrants are actively transforming urban space. Using first-hand testimonies and participatory photography, the book documents and analyses the micropolitics of urban camp management and infrastructure, evictions an…
Infrastructures and International Relations
In a world of accelerated movements, this article examines how infrastructures matter in international relations. We first show that the International Relations (IR) discipline has relegated infrastructures to the background of their studies and treated them as passive tools despite their forcible role in the establishment of the modern state system. By adopting a sociological definition of “the international,” this article emphasizes the central…
Port infrastructures and the making of historical time in the Horn of Africa
As infrastructures mushroom across Africa, this article investigates narratives accompanying infrastructural investments in East African cities, Djibouti-city (Djibouti) and Berbera (Somaliland). While cities in the Global North move towards a post-industrial future, the Horn of Africa depicts other endpoints, breaking with experiences of colonisation while hoping to diminish asymmetries in a Western-dominated global system. Inspired by models th…
Infrastructures and Capitalist World Ordering
In this forum, we employ infrastructures as an analytical lens to explore contemporary world ordering, which we root in the dynamics of capitalism. Beyond enabling mobility and facilitating capital's expansionist transgression of social and geographical barriers, we show how the current densification and expansion of infrastructures are actively undermining the imaginary of a world ordered through spatially bounded, internally unified entities. I…
Sociology (17 works) · Political science (16 works) · Politics (12 works) · Law (11 works) · Economics (10 works) · Law (9 works) · Political economy (9 works) · Somali (8 works) · Geography (7 works) · Political Conflict and Governance (5 works)