scholarly journals Showing One's Colours: The political work of elections in post-war Sri Lanka

2014 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 1091-1121 ◽  
Author(s):  
BART KLEM
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
East Coast ◽  
The Political ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Group Identities ◽  
Post War

AbstractThis article analyses Sri Lanka's April 2010 parliamentary elections as they played out in the Muslim community on the east coast. The political work of elections, as the article shows, involves a lot more than the composition of government. Antagonism over group identities and boundaries are at centre stage. Elections force people to show their colours, which causes turbulence as they grapple with several, possibly contradictory, loyalties. The article argues that elections bring together different political storylines, rather than one master antagonism. It is the interaction between different narratives that paradoxically provides elections both with a sense of gravity and dignity, and with the lingering threat of rupture and disturbance.

scholarly journals Islam, Politics and Violence in Eastern Sri Lanka

2011 ◽  
Vol 70 (3) ◽  
pp. 730-753 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bart Klem
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Muslim Community ◽  
Muslim Identity ◽  
Islam And Politics ◽  
Political Dimensions ◽  
Academic Debate ◽  
Contemporary Islam

This article bridges Sri Lankan studies and the academic debate on the relation between contemporary Islam and politics. It constitutes a case study of the Muslim community in Akkaraipattu on Sri Lanka's war-ridden east coast. Over two decades of ethnically colored conflict have made Muslim identity of paramount importance, but the meanings attached to that identity vary substantively. Politicians, mosque leaders, Sufis and Tablighis define the ethnic, religious and political dimensions of “Muslimness” differently and this leads to intra-Muslim contradictions. The case study thus helps resolve the puzzle of Sri Lankan Muslims: they are surrounded by hostility, but they continue to be internally divided. Akkaraipattu's Muslims jockey between principled politics, pragmatic politics and anti-politics, because they have to navigate different trajectories. This article thus corroborates recent studies on Islam elsewhere that argue for contextualized and nuanced approaches to the variegated interface between Islam and politics.

scholarly journals Post-War Livelihood Development in Batticaloa District, Sri Lanka

2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 102-106
Author(s):  
Suresh Kanesh
Keyword(s):  
Sri Lanka ◽  
International Organizations ◽  
East Coast ◽  
Youth Unemployment ◽  
Primary Data ◽  
Development Path ◽  
Stakeholder Perspectives ◽  
Post War ◽  
Basic Infrastructure ◽  
Small Industries

This paper examines the post war livelihood development in Batticaloa district, in the East coast of Sri Lanka. Batticaloa has been ravaged three decades of civil war and end of war the district has been emerging the development path. This paper discusses trends of major livelihood recovery of the district,fishing, agriculture, tourism and financial sector development in the district. Number of developments programmes initiated by the successive governments and international organizations in the district. This study measures the stakeholder perspectives of the livelihood recovery of the district. The study used primary data from more than 200 sample respondents and interviews with relevant stakeholders. The study revealed that major livelihood such as fishing and agriculture improved slightly since end of the war 2009. However, lack of financial support and basic infrastructure hinder the livelihood initiatives. Study further revealed that the absent of small industries or factories in the district causes persistent youth unemployment.

scholarly journals ‘WHO THE HELL ARE ORDINARY PEOPLE?’ ORDINARINESS AS A CATEGORY OF HISTORICAL ANALYSIS

2018 ◽  
Vol 28 ◽  
pp. 175-195 ◽  
Author(s):  
Claire Langhamer
Keyword(s):  
World War I ◽  
Historical Analysis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Leader ◽  
Decent People ◽  
Political Debates ◽  
Political Work ◽  
Moral Category ◽  
Ordinary Person ◽  
Post War

ABSTRACTOrdinariness was a frequently deployed category in the political debates of 2016. According to one political leader, the vote for Brexit was ‘a victory for ordinary, decent people who've taken on the establishment and won’. In making this claim, Nigel Farage sought to link a dramatic political moment with a powerful, yet conveniently nebulous, construction of the ordinary person. In this paper, I want to historicise recent use of the category by returning to another moment when ordinariness held deep political significance: the years immediately following the Second World War. I will explore the range of values, styles and specific behaviours that gave meaning to the claim to be ordinary; consider the relationship between ordinariness, everyday experience and knowledge; and map the political work ordinariness was called upon to perform. I argue that the immediate post-war period was a critical moment in the formation of ordinariness as a social category, an affective category, a moral category, a consumerist category and, above all, a political category. Crucially, ordinariness itself became a form of expertise, a finding that complicates our understanding of the ‘meritocratic moment’.

Ein Ende mit Schrecken – Frankreich nach den Wahlen

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (188) ◽  
pp. 495-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felix Syrovatka
Keyword(s):  
Political System ◽  
Political Support ◽  
The Political ◽  
Parliamentary Elections ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Crisis Of Representation ◽  
Election Results ◽  
Deep Crisis

The presidential and parliamentary elections were a political earthquake for the French political system. While the two big parties experienced massive losses of political support, the rise of new political formations took place. Emmanuel Macron is not only the youngest president of the V. Republic so far, he is also the first president not to be supported by either one of the two biggest parties. This article argues that the election results are an expression of a deep crisis of representation in France that is rooted in the economic transformations of the 1970s. The article analyses the political situation after the elections and tries to give an outlook on further political developments in France.

Nazistowski mord na Żydach w prasie polskich komunistów (1942–1944).

2006 ◽  
pp. 54-75
Author(s):  
Klaus Peter Friedrich
Keyword(s):  
Shared Responsibility ◽  
The Political ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Social Democrats ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Polish Government ◽  
The Right ◽  
Political Right

Facing the decisive struggle between Nazism and Soviet communism for dominance in Europe, in 1942/43 Polish communists sojourning in the USSR espoused anti-German concepts of the political right. Their aim was an ethnic Polish ‘national communism’. Meanwhile, the Polish Workers’ Party in the occupied country advocated a maximum intensification of civilian resistance and partisan struggle. In this context, commentaries on the Nazi judeocide were an important element in their endeavors to influence the prevailing mood in the country: The underground communist press often pointed to the fate of the murdered Jews as a warning in order to make it clear to the Polish population where a deficient lack of resistance could lead. However, an agreed, unconditional Polish and Jewish armed resistance did not come about. At the same time, the communist press constantly expanded its demagogic confrontation with Polish “reactionaries” and accused them of shared responsibility for the Nazi murder of the Jews, while the Polish government (in London) was attacked for its failure. This antagonism was intensified in the fierce dispute between the Polish and Soviet governments after the rift which followed revelations about the Katyn massacre. Now the communist propaganda image of the enemy came to the fore in respect to the government and its representatives in occupied Poland. It viewed the government-in-exile as being allied with the “reactionaries,” indifferent to the murder of the Jews, and thus acting ultimately on behalf of Nazi German policy. The communists denounced the real and supposed antisemitism of their adversaries more and more bluntly. In view of their political isolation, they coupled them together, in an undifferentiated manner, extending from the right-wing radical ONR to the social democrats and the other parties represented in the underground parliament loyal to the London based Polish government. Thereby communist propaganda tried to discredit their opponents and to justify the need for a new start in a post-war Poland whose fate should be shaped by the revolutionary left. They were thus paving the way for the ultimate communist takeover

What is a Complex? Freudian Resistances

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Simon Morgan Wortham
Keyword(s):  
Value Theory ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
The Political ◽  
Industrial Complex ◽  
Military Industrial Complex ◽  
Noam Chomsky ◽  
Cultural Legacy ◽  
Contemporary Science ◽  
The Common ◽  
Post War

This chapter evaluates the question of the ‘complex’ in a range of scientific, political and psychoanalytic contexts, asking not only where lines of connection and demarcation occur among specific distributions of meaning, value, theory and practice; but also probing the psychoanalytic corpus, notably Freud’s writings on the notion of a ‘complex’, in order to reframe various implications of the idea that this term tends to resist its own utilisation as both an object and form of analysis. This section establishes connections between three sets of theoretical questions: the common practice of describing modernity and its wake in terms of a drive towards increasing complexity; the meaning and cultural legacy of phrases such as ‘military-industrial complex’ and sundry derivations in the political sphere; and the intricacies and ambiguities subtending the term ‘complex’ within psychoanalytic theory. As a concept that Freud both utilised and repudiated, the provocative power of the term ‘complex’ is linked to the way it thwarts various attempts at systemization (providing nonetheless an apparatus of sorts through which contemporary science, Slavoj Žižek, Noam Chomsky, Freud, Eisenhower, and post-war politics can be articulated to one another).

State-run celebration of Liberation Day in Czechoslovakia (based on audiovisual sources)

2019 ◽  
pp. 251-268
Author(s):  
Timur Gimadeev
Keyword(s):  
Political Development ◽  
Communist Regime ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Experience ◽  
History Of ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Military

The article deals with the history of celebrating the Liberation Day in Czechoslovakia organised by the state. Various aspects of the history of the holiday have been considered with the extensive use of audiovisual documents (materials from Czechoslovak newsreels and TV archives), which allowed for a detailed analysis of the propaganda representation of the holiday. As a result, it has been possible to identify the main stages of the historical evolution of the celebrations of Liberation Day, to discover the close interdependence between these stages and the country’s political development. The establishment of the holiday itself — its concept and the military parade as the main ritual — took place in the first post-war years, simultaneously with the consolidation of the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia. Later, until the end of the 1960s, the celebrations gradually evolved along the political regime, acquiring new ritual forms (ceremonial meetings, and “guards of memory”). In 1968, at the same time as there was an attempt to rethink the entire socialist regime and the historical experience connected with it, an attempt was made to reconstruct Liberation Day. However, political “normalisation” led to the normalisation of the celebration itself, which played an important role in legitimising the Soviet presence in the country. At this stage, the role of ceremonial meetings and “guards of memory” increased, while inventions released in time for 9 May appeared and “May TV” was specially produced. The fall of the Communist regime in 1989 led to the fall of the concept of Liberation Day on 9 May, resulting in changes of the title, date and paradigm of the holiday, which became Victory Day and has been since celebrated on 8 May.

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