The Crisis of Minorities in Ethnic States: The Case of Palestinian Citizens in Israel

1998 ◽  
Vol 30 (3) ◽  
pp. 321-346 ◽  
Author(s):  
Naditn Rouhana ◽  
Asʿad Ghanem
Keyword(s):  
Equal Opportunity ◽  
International System ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Structure ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Group Rights ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Ethnic Affiliation ◽  
Democratic State

The vast majority of states in the international system, democratic and non-democratic, are multi-ethnic (Gurr 1993). A liberal-democratic multi-ethnic state serves the collective needs of all its citizens regardless of their ethnic affiliation, and citizenship—legally recognized membership in the political structure called a state—is the single criterion for belonging to the state and for granting equal opportunity to all members of the system. Whether a multi-ethnic democratic state should provide group rights above and beyond individual legal equality is an ongoing debate (Gurr & Harff 1994).

States and state systems: democratic, Westphalian or both?

2007 ◽  
Vol 33 (4) ◽  
pp. 577-595 ◽  
Author(s):  
CORNELIA NAVARI
Keyword(s):  
Democratic Transition ◽  
International System ◽  
The State ◽  
State System ◽  
Transition Theory ◽  
Modern State ◽  
English School ◽  
Liberal State ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic State

AbstractTwo rival accounts have come to dominate discussion of the origins and character of the contemporary international system. One, closely associated with the English School and the traditional account, places its origins with the appearance, and acceptance, of the centralised authority of the modern state. We might call this ‘the Westphalia version’. In this account, the modern state system is often represented in terms of what it is not. It is not a feudal regnum with a multiplicity of functionally distinct authorities. It is not a theocratic imperium where one power aimed at ‘the control and protection of Christendom’. It is a society of sovereigns, of de jure equals, each of whom accorded the others’ right to exist, and whose common ideological quantum is low. The rival is located within democratic transition theory. It postulates the modern state system as an extension of the liberal democratic state. The liberal state is not sovereign in the Westphalian sense: liberal authority is diffuse. Moreover, the liberal state produces its own, distinctive, international impulses that distance it in significant ways from the Westphalian pattern. Both see the state system as ‘produced’ by the state, as an immanent effect of stateness, but the account of the state’s trajectory differs radically.

Environmentalists, Nuclear Waste, and the Politics of Passive Exclusion in Germany

2001 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 43-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian Hunold
Keyword(s):  
Public Policy ◽  
Public Sphere ◽  
Nuclear Waste ◽  
Environmental Movement ◽  
The State ◽  
Radioactive Wastes ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Ecological Democracy ◽  
Over Time

In this essay I examine the dispute between the German GreenParty and some of the country’s environmental nongovernmentalorganizations (NGOs) over the March 2001 renewal of rail shipmentsof highly radioactive wastes to Gorleben. My purpose indoing so is to test John Dryzek’s 1996 claim that environmentalistsought to beware of what they wish for concerning inclusion in theliberal democratic state. Inclusion on the wrong terms, arguesDryzek, may prove detrimental to the goals of greening and democratizingpublic policy because such inclusion may compromise thesurvival of a green public sphere that is vital to both. Prospects forecological democracy, understood in terms of strong ecologicalmodernization here, depend on historically conditioned relationshipsbetween the state and the environmental movement that fosterthe emergence and persistence over time of such a public sphere.

Thomas Jefferson’s Virginia Criminal Law Bill

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Markus D. Dubber
Keyword(s):  
Criminal Law ◽  
Critical Analysis ◽  
Criminal Code ◽  
The State ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Historical Account ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Penal State ◽  
State 1

Part III of Dual Penal State uses dual penal state analysis to generate a comparative-historical account of American penality. With comparative glimpses at Germany and, to a lesser extent, England, it distinguishes between two responses to the shared challenge of legitimating state penal power in a modern liberal democratic state: (1) the failure to appreciate the legitimatory challenge of modern state penal power in particular (United States) and of modern state power in general (England); and (2) the failure to address the legitimatory challenge of modern state penal power as an ongoing existential threat to the legitimacy of the state (Germany). Chapter 6 undertakes a critical analysis of Jefferson’s 1779 draft of a criminal law bill for the State of Virginia, concluding that it fell well short of a criminal code that reflected the ideals of the American legal-political project as spelled out, for instance, in Jefferson’s Declaration of Independence of 1776.

War without Citizens

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-38
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Rosow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Citizenship ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Advanced Technologies

Contestation over war memorialization can help democratic theory respond to the current attenuation of citizenship in war in liberal democratic states, especially the United States. As war involves more advanced technologies and fewer soldiers, the relation of citizenship to war changes. In this context war memorialization plays a particular role in refiguring the relation. Current practices of remembering and memorializing war in contemporary neoliberal states respond to a dilemma: the state needs to justify and garner support for continual wars while distancing citizenship from participation. The result is a consumer culture of memorialization that seeks to effect a unity of the political community while it fights wars with few citizens and devalues the public. Neoliberal wars fought with few soldiers and an economic logic reveals the vulnerability to otherness that leads to more active and critical democratic citizenship.

Rural Dibao: The Countryside and Fragmentation

2019 ◽  
pp. 89-105
Author(s):  
Daniel R. Hammond
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Local Government ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Common Source ◽  
Chinese Government ◽  
Social Stability ◽  
Political Structure ◽  
Programme Implementation ◽  
Administrative Capacity

In 2007 the Chinese government nationally implemented the rural dibao programme. The chapter argues that while the circumstances of rural dibao’s implementation were different from its urban predecessor there are three striking similarities. First, in terms of values, it is argued that the rural dibao programme did fit comfortably with the agenda under Hu Jintao and Wen Jiabao to address China’s unequal development and in particular the san nong wenti of the countryside. However, the process surrounding implementation of the rural programme also carried appeals to social stability. Second, the political structure had a significant impact on the implementation of the rural MLG. As with the urban programme implementation faced local intransigence. This was overcome by not only using similar means as with the urban programme; but also through explicitly dealing with one common source of problems, funding. Finally, there is the problem of administrative capacity in running the rural MLG programme. This appears as a classic outcome of the fragmented political and decision making structure in China where local government, often struggling to meet mandates passed down from above, prioritises the resources it has. What this all shows is that the challenges facing social assistance in China are not specific to the urban or the rural programme; but are a consequence of the structure of the state.

Business and Politics

2019 ◽  
pp. 234-259 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Harriss ◽  
Andrew Wyatt
Keyword(s):  
Tamil Nadu ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
Financial Resources ◽  
The Political ◽  
Big Business ◽  
Social Democratic ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Illegal Activities ◽  
The Relationship

The political economy of Tamil Nadu presents a puzzle: in spite of politics that are generally considered to be unhelpful to development, the state does relatively well in terms both of economic growth and of human development. The chapter argues that Tamil Nadu is neither a developmental nor a social democratic state, while having some of the features of both. It is, rather, characterized by Bonapartism. While the state has generally been supportive of big business, the relationship between the corporate sector and the political elite is distinctly “arm’s-length.” The power and influence of business groups has not “grown enormously,” as has been claimed elsewhere. Tamil politicians do not rely for financial resources on big business but have their own sources of finance, some of them in semilegal or illegal activities such as sand mining and granite quarrying.

scholarly journals When the State Speaks, What Should It Say? The Dilemmas of Freedom of Expression and Democratic Persuasion

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (4) ◽  
pp. 1005-1019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Corey Brettschneider
Keyword(s):  
Freedom Of Expression ◽  
The State ◽  
Hate Groups ◽  
Apparent Paradox ◽  
State Action ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Legitimate State ◽  
The One ◽  
Value Neutrality

Hate groups are often thought to reveal a paradox in liberal thinking. On the one hand, such groups challenge the very foundations of liberal thought, including core values of equality and freedom. On the other hand, these same values underlie the rights such as freedom of expression and association that protect hate groups. Thus a liberal democratic state that extends those protections to such groups in the name of value neutrality and freedom of expression may be thought to be undermining the values on which its legitimacy rests. In this paper, I suggest how this apparent paradox might be resolved. I argue that the state should protect the expression of illiberal beliefs, but that the state (along with its citizens) is also obligated to criticize publicly those beliefs. Distinguishing between two kinds of state action—coercive and expressive—I contend that such criticism should be pursued through the state's expressive capacities in its roles as speaker, educator, and spender. Here I extend the familiar idea that law, to be legitimate, must be widely publicized; I contend that a proper theory of the freedom of expression obligates the legitimate state to publicize the reasons that underlie rights, in particular reasons that appeal to the entitlement of each citizen subject to coercion to be treated as free and equal. My theory of freedom of expression is thus “expressive” in two senses: it protects the entitlement of citizens to express any political viewpoint, and it emphasizes a role for the state in explaining these free-speech protections and persuading its citizens of the value of the entitlements that underlie them.

Research in the Political Process

1951 ◽  
Vol 45 (1) ◽  
pp. 69-85 ◽  
Author(s):  
Oliver Garceau
Keyword(s):  
Political Science ◽  
Empirical Research ◽  
Party System ◽  
Political Process ◽  
The Political ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Democratic Polity ◽  
Individual Capacity ◽  
Democratic Faith

A discipline, like an individual, may in some measure be known by the dilemmas it keeps, or more properly by the manner in which it keeps them.A central conceptual controversy, probably inescapable for political scientists because of their disciplinary heritage, is that involved in perceiving uniformities in behavior, describing recurring patterns, identifying the determinants and yet reconciling this effort and its underlying premises about the roots of behavior with the liberal, democratic faith in man's individual capacity to determine his own ends, to think rationally and to reach individual and creative decisions. On this faith rests the political structure of rights, the machinery of the democratic electorate, the party system and the values of the constitutional democratic state whose political process we are concerned to describe and analyze. Cultural anthropologists, social psychologists of many disciplinary schools, hard-boiled “realists” in political science, have recently drawn back from determinist or whole-heartedly relativist positions. Some are concerned that political science, in a fresh enthusiasm for empirical research, may become so engrossed with uniformities and determinants that it will obscure or abandon the normative commitments of a democratic polity.

scholarly journals Plurilingual literary spaces

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-203
Author(s):  
Tristan Leperlier
Keyword(s):  
Field Theory ◽  
Language Barriers ◽  
Balance Of Power ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Official Language ◽  
Language Policies ◽  
Political Structure ◽  
French Case ◽  
Linguistic Groups

In this article, I define the notion of a plurilingual literary space. While drawing from Pierre Bourdieu’s field theory, I adopt a critical stance towards the highly autonomous, territorialized, and monolingual French case that he studied. Even though language is the material that the writers work with, the legitimate representation of the nation remains the major issue for non-central literary spaces, among which are plurilingual spaces. I elaborate on a typology of plurilingual literary spaces, which are heavily related to the political structure and language policies of the state. Then I concentrate on one of the types, that of plurilingual literary fields, where the language issue is the most significant. I argue that tensions or collaborations between the different linguistic groups depend on the symbolic balance of power between them as well as on official language policies. The most autonomous writers do not always desire to build bridges across language barriers, and they would sometimes rather create identity walls. I distinguish between unitarian policies that lead some linguistically dominated writers to reject collaborations and monolingual policies which lead the autonomous writers to reject the linguistic divisions.

Nietzsche on the Rise of Strong Political States and Their Cultivation of Higher Individuals

2019 ◽  
Vol 82 (1) ◽  
pp. 73-95
Author(s):  
Simon Townsend
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Moral Code ◽  
Hostile Environment ◽  
Human Flourishing ◽  
Political Will ◽  
Value System ◽  
Democratic State

AbstractI argue that Nietzsche offers an account of how strong political states develop and how the highest forms of individuality emerge when the political will of these strong states weakens. Communities develop strength in proportion to the hostility of their environment. In order to flourish in a hostile environment, they must cultivate powerful and ambitious citizens by intensifying their most powerful drives, such as a lust for power. To control these citizens they must ruthlessly suppress individuality and allow these drives to be discharged in ways that do not threaten the community. This is achieved through an inflexible value system. When the political will of the state declines and this moral code weakens, the highest forms of individuality emerge. This account clarifies why Nietzsche tends to praise aristocratic states and brings into focus the obstacles to achieving the highest forms of human flourishing within a democratic state.

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