Varieties of Constitutionalism in Asia

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Li-ann Thio

Abstract Western liberal constitutionalism, the dominant vision of which is rights-oriented and court centric is hegemonic to the discourse. While important, this is a particular rather than total expression of constitutionalism which conflates constitutionalism with liberalism and treat this as paradigmatic. This may obscure all other non-liberal models or fuel their dismissal as sham constitutions. A third space must be found, without collapsing anti-constitutionalist, illiberal despotism with no objective limits on power into the sphere of constitutionalism, and without equating judicial review with constitutionalism. To that end, this article seeks to advance the project of pluralising understandings of constitutionalism, drawing from the rich variety of constitutional experiments in Asia, with its multiplicity of religions, political ideologies government systems, cultures, and levels of economic development. Against an idealised model of liberal constitutionalism deployed as an organisational tool to highlight features of non-liberal constitutionalism in their full variety, the article examines three typologies of constitutionalism: religious, socialist and communitarian. In so doing, the idea of normatively desirable and defensible constitutionalist models is investigated, through an inquiry that goes beyond text and courts to other sites of constitutional practice and governance.

1985 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-82
Author(s):  
Zia Ul Haq

Amiya Kumar Bagchi, an eminent economist of the modern Cambridge tradition, has produced a timely treatise, in a condensed form, on the development problems of the Third World countries. The author's general thesis is that economic development in the developing societies necessarily requires a radical transformation in the economic, social and political structures. As economic development is actually a social process, economic growth should not be narrowly defined as the growth of the stock of rich capitalists. Neither can their savings be equated to capital formation whose impact on income will presumably 'trickle down' to the working classes. Economic growth strategies must not aim at creating rich elites, because, according to the author, "maximizing the surplus in the hands of the rich in the Third World is not, however, necessarily a way of maximizing the rate of growth".


Author(s):  
Travis D. Stimeling

This chapter offers a historiographic survey of country music scholarship from the publication of Bill C. Malone’s “A History of Commercial Country Music in the United States, 1920–1964” (1965) to the leading publications of the today. Very little of substance has been written on country music recorded since the 1970s, especially when compared to the wealth of available literature on early country recording artists. Ethnographic studies of country music and country music culture are rare, and including ethnographic methods in country music studies offers new insights into the rich variety of ways in which people make, consume, and engage with country music as a genre. The chapter traces the influence of folklore studies, sociology, cultural studies, and musicology on the development of country music studies and proposes some directions for future research in the field.


2019 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 211-233
Author(s):  
Jiaxing Jiang ◽  
Jingyuan Zhang

Emotion, as a classic topic in psychological studies, has been intensively investigated by scholars across disciplines. In discursive psychology, emotion discourse refers to the rich variety and situated uses of emotion words and metaphors. Many studies of emotion in discursive psychology focus on the rhetorical contrasts of emotion. Conceptual analysis is another significant part of emotion discourse, and one that requires further investigation. To reveal how people describe and evoke emotions in discourse, this article starts with a reinterpretation of emotion in discursive psychology, followed by setting up an emotion system from a systemic functional perspective to illustrate how conceptual analysis may be conducted and rhetorical contrasts explored. During the process of establishing the emotion system, the paper elaborates upon the emotion concept and rhetorical contrasts on the basis of four illustrative examples taken from authentic extracts (including news and testimonies). The paper discusses the purpose behind the construction of the emotion system in terms of (1) the constituents in conceptual analysis and rhetorical contrasts of discursive psychology from a functional perspective, (2) the collaboration between conceptual analysis and rhetorical contrasts, (3) the traits of the emotion system as a method of discursive psychology analysis.


2009 ◽  
Vol 42 (04) ◽  
pp. 661-666 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Keefer

Epic redistributive struggles between the rich and poor lie at the heart of prominent theories of economic development and the emergence of democracy (e.g., Boix 2003; Acemoglu and Robinson 2006). The poor pursue democracy to secure credible redistribution away from wealthy elites; elites, fearing redistribution, but also the costs of revolution, decide whether to repress these efforts or to surrender to them. These theories, and the historical examples of working classes exacting redistributive or political concessions from elites, have been interpreted as suggesting that inequality and redistributive struggles should be central features of development and democratization. Where inequality is high, democracy should be unlikely to emerge, or to emerge and be unstable. Because elites in unequal societies are unwilling to adopt institutions that encourage growth and investment (such as institutions that protect non-elites from predation by elites), incomes should be lower as well.


2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 77-97
Author(s):  
John Bosco Ngendakurio

Abstract This article seeks to reveal the primary barriers to fair economic development based on Kenyans’ perceptions of power and globalization. This search was initially sparked by the seeming disinterest of First World scholars to understand the reasons why poor countries benefit so little from the global market as reflected in a subsequent lack of a wide-ranging existing literature about the subject. The literature suggests that global capitalism is dominated by a powerful small elite, the so-called Transnational Capitalist Class (TCC), but how does this relate to Kenya and Africa in general? We know that the TCC has strong connections to financial capital and wealthy transnational corporations. It also pushes neo-liberalism, which becomes the taken-for-granted everyday language and culture that justifies state policies that result in a further class polarization between the rich and poor. Using Kenya as a case study, this article draws on original qualitative research involving face-to-face interviews with Kenyan residents in different sectors who spoke freely about what they perceive to be Kenya’s place in the world order. My interview results show that, on top of the general lack of economic power in the world order, the main barriers to Africa’s performance are neo-colonial and imperialist practices, poor technology, poor infrastructure, general governance issues, and purchasing power.


Though the existence of Jewish regional cultures is widely known, the origins of the most prominent groups, Ashkenaz and Sepharad, are poorly understood, and the rich variety of other regional Jewish identities is often overlooked. Yet all these subcultures emerged in the Middle Ages. Scholars contributing to the present study were invited to consider how such regional identities were fashioned, propagated, reinforced, contested, and reshaped — and to reflect on the developments, events, or encounters that made these identities manifest. They were asked to identify how subcultural identities proved to be useful, and the circumstances in which they were deployed. The resulting volume spans the ninth to sixteenth centuries, and explores Jewish cultural developments in western Europe, the Balkans, North Africa, and Asia Minor. In its own way, each chapter considers factors — demographic, geographical, historical, economic, political, institutional, legal, intellectual, theological, cultural, and even biological — that led medieval Jews to conceive of themselves, or to be perceived by others, as bearers of a discrete Jewish regional identity. Notwithstanding the singularity of each chapter, they collectively attest to the inherent dynamism of Jewish regional identities.


Author(s):  
Ka Hong ◽  
Elena Solana ◽  
Mauro Coduri ◽  
Clemens Ritter ◽  
Paul Attfield

Abstract A new CaFe3O5-type phase NiFe3O5 (orthorhombic Cmcm symmetry, cell parameters a = 2.89126(7), b = 9.71988(21) and c = 12.52694(27) Å) has been synthesised under pressures of 12-13 GPa at 1200 °C. NiFe3O5 has an inverse cation site distribution and reveals an interesting evolution from M2+(Fe3+ )2Fe2+O5 to Fe2+(M2+ 0.5Fe3+ 0.5)2Fe3+O5 distributions over three distinct cation sites as M2+ cation size decreases from Ca to Ni. Magnetic susceptibility measurements show successive transitions at 275, ~150, and ~20 K and neutron diffraction data reveal a series of at least three spin-ordered phases with evolving propagation vectors k = [0 0 0] [0 ky 0]  [½ ½ 0] on cooling. The rich variety of magnetically ordered phases in NiFe3O5 likely results from frustration of Goodenough-Kanamori exchange interactions between the three spin sublattices, and further interesting magnetic materials are expected to be accessible within the CaFe3O5-type family.


Author(s):  
Lendol Calder

Monetization, which describes the process whereby money became the dominant means of exchange in developing commercial societies, is an economic development whose profound social, political, and cultural consequences are not yet well understood. The monetization of household economic life elevated practices that once affected only the wealthy – Fan Li's ‘golden rules for business success’ – to core competencies of living, mandatory for everyone. Reflecting on the scholarship that has examined saving and spending, this article examines consumption and why historians of consumer culture have not given the financial affairs of consumers the attention the subject deserves. The historical work that has been done, though sparse, amply demonstrates the rich potential of the financial arts for generating significant problem areas for research. Few other subjects in the glittering universe of consumption lead more directly to the largest questions we can ask about desire, virtue, and the construction of the modern self. The article also considers the history of thrift, money management, and financialization.


Author(s):  
Vera Boneva

The article systematizes information about the current cultural heritage programs in the Bulgarian higher education area. The data shows that in eleven Bulgarian universities a diploma of cultural heritage can be obtained. 17 master's and 3 bachelor's programs prepare over 500 students a year. Two doctoral programs are also accredited. The rich variety of curricula is an objective result of the complex structure of cultural heritage in itself. However, it is also an indicator for the fragmentation of the higher education system in Bulgaria. The conclusion proposes approaches to overcoming the mentioned fragmentation, as the interdisciplinarity of the scientific field requires pooling of competencies and efforts for better results.


Proglas ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Petya Tsoneva ◽  
◽  
Margreta Grigorova ◽  
◽  
◽  
...  

“Heart of Darkness” is a multilayered but coherent work whose universally acclaimed appeal draws on its thematic preoccupation with the problems of initiation and cognition. The rich variety of interpretations and creative reworks of the novella vary from discussions of its importance as a sample of anticolonial fiction to the acknowledgement of its role as a precursor to contemporary fantastic literature. The first Bulgarian dramatisation of “Heart of Darkness”, screen-written and directed by Valeria Valcheva, is an insightful and successful attempt to do justice to both its contents and the suggestive power of its poetics translated into the language of drama. The performance combines the stylistic features of farce, cabaret, ritual and classical theatre, inserting fragments of Edgar Allan Poe, Vachel Lindsay, Tom Waits, Thomas Eliot and even Pushkin’s poems. Valcheva is particularly concerned with reading Conrad’s work as a “European” collective narrative where the African Other is rendered through the poetic features of mask-wearing and the symbolic “curtain” of the jungle. The performance is likewise accompanied by music that includes the “talking drums” of Congo, and its stage design was apparently borrowed from Orson Welles’s cinematic adaptations. One of the outstanding contributions of the Bulgarian performance to the earlier attempts at dramatising Conrad’s work is the use of a marionette to represent Kurtz’s self-glorified condition. The play likewise foregrounds the biographical aspect of Conrad’s work related to Conrad and Marguerite Poradowska’s correspondence.


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