However, these mechanisms always aim to 1) forbid that the voice of each be fully heard in determining the present and future of the collectivity they are part of 2) deny to citizens a certain control over the action and behaviour of those who govern them and 3) to discredit the judgment that the governed formulate against their rulers by resorting to their own criteria of justice, equality, freedom, dignity and honesty. These mechanisms of disposition may reside in submission (absolutists regimes), repression and murders (authoritarian regimes) or in delegation and representation (democratic regimes).
#PERIPHERY HAS IT LEAKED HOW TO#
It is from this idea that I would like to propose an enlarged concept of the “periphery”, which will allow us to classify under this term a ll the social groups that, regardless of economic or political development of the country in which they live, are subject to mechanisms that lower their capacity to contribute to questions of general interest and how to collectively seek solutions. From this perspective, the distinction between centre/periphery can be applied when we identify a certain asymmetry in/of power, as is the case when we juxtapose: metropoles and colonies, bourgeoisie and proletariat, imperial powers and “Third World,” rural and urban, included and excluded, winners and losers of globalisation, or the elite and the people. In fact, the installation and the reproduction of an asymmetrical power between “centre” and “periphery” is a principle of domination that we discover in any unequal and hierarchal society, whether it be a democratic regime, authoritarian regime or within a colonial or postcolonial regime. Yet, the institutionalisation of a hierarchy that justifies the power of those who hold the wealth, the legitimisation of social domination, limited access to resources and rights, loss of economic chances, discrimination of gender and ethnic origin, and the deliberate neglect of the voices of the most vulnerable, are not phenomena exclusive to the global South. This view of the "periphery" as an assignment of certain groups of people to a position of eternal subordination unique to the countries of the South and based on their "racialisation" seems too restrictive - even if it reflects the reality of the order of social relations which has generally prevailed in the former countries under colonial or imperialist domination. Behind this notion, we can often find the idea of a radical inequality of status between citizens, that are nonetheless part of a same political entity: on one hand, the powerful that monopolise the structure of the State and benefit from the rules of the global economy game - in terms of power and revenue - to what is known as the “centre.” On the other hand, a group of citizens held in condition of precariousness, unhealth, illiteracy and total subjugation - to what is known as “the periphery.” In this middle ground, a so-called urban and modernised "middle class" would have developed which, admitting the legitimacy of the principles set out by the centre, claims, with more or less vigour, the exercise of its rights in the public space that it helps to build. Today, the notion of “periphery” seems to be used to serve essentially these zones of rural or urban habitat (precarious neighbourhoods, favelas, slums, and abandoned villages) placed in the margin of economic development and “modernisation” that we can observe in countries of the South.
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