The Familiar Face of the State: Affect, Emotion and Citizen Entitlements in Dehradun, India

Abstract

Municipal Councillors (MCs) are the 'familiar face of the state' in Dehradun, India: the first port of call for citizens seeking to claim entitlements from the state. The way MCs respond to the requests of their constituents is a major factor in the uneven distribution of government welfare and services. This article seeks to contribute to understandings of citizen entitlements by drawing attention to the role of affect and emotion in shaping the interactions between MCs and voters. I examine the ways citizens consciously or unconsciously engender emotions and affective responses, and the effect these have in mobilizing MCs. Attention to the, at times, involuntary nature of these responses suggests a need to go beyond the instrumental and calculating motivations of municipal councillors, to consider the way they are compelled and animated to meet the demands of some citizens, but not of others. The capacity to affect, and the ways one is affected, are tied to the social identities and self-making projects of both the MC and the voter, resulting in an uneven (mal)distribution of state resources. A focus on affective configurations in urban governance thereby reveals heretofore overlooked determinants of unequal access to urban resources and services.

BETWEEN DEPRESSION AND HOPE: Affective Mediations of Urban Restructuring in Leipzig, East Germany

“…However, in the scholarship cited, affects remain undertheorized regarding the specific workings of both their emergence and impact. A recent exception, published in this journal, is Jakimow's (2020) analysis of affect in interactions between local state representatives and citizens in northern India. She points out a crucial dimension of affect that I explore in this article, concerning its co‐contingency on the distribution of power and resources.…”

“…Contrary to Jakimow's (2020) detailed accounts of individual's affects, in this article I seek to understand affects as supra‐individual, relational phenomena, moods, or ‘atmospheres [that] have the potential to reinforce social inequity or build coalitions of resistance’ (Leff, 2021: 1). This supra‐individual perspective seems counterintuitive, considering the very corporal definition of affect as the ‘capacity which a body has to be affected … and to affect …’ (Anderson, 2006: 735), which, contrary to emotion, is considered non‐ or pre‐cognitive (Pile, 2010).…”

“…Thus, affects and atmospheres are ‘affecting politics, as much as they are affected by politics’ (Pain, 2009: 478). Jakimow points explicitly to the affective surplus of interactions in her analysis of how ‘affective configurations of encounters between state agents and citizens … shed light on local power relations and the ways these produce unequal access to urban services and resources’ (Jakimow, 2020: 434).…”

The ambiguous labour of hope: Affective governance and the struggles of displaced street vendors in Belo Horizonte, Brazil

“…Recently, studies have revealed the often ambiguous role that collective affects such as fear (Azab & Santoro, 2017), rage (Lloyd, 2019) and hope (Airas, 2019) play in the everyday of political movements. Following this affective turn in politics, urban scholars have explored the affective and emotional dimensions of urban governance systems (Jakimow, 2020;Tucker, 2017). Jakimov (2020, p.430) has argued that "affective and emotional animations" are overlooked aspects of state-society relations which "shape citizens' [differentiated] access to government services".…”

“…Recently, studies have revealed the often ambiguous role that collective affects such as fear (Azab and Santoro, 2017), rage (Lloyd, 2019) and hope (Airas, 2019) play in the everyday of political movements. Following this affective turn in politics, urban scholars have explored the affective and emotional dimensions of urban governance systems (Jakimow, 2020;Tucker, 2017).…”