Democratic Careening

2013 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 729-763 ◽  
Author(s):  
Dan Slater
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Developing Country ◽  
Review Essay ◽  
Developing World ◽  
Political Instability ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Democratic Accountability ◽  
Detailed Case ◽  
Twenty First Century

Democracy in the developing world is generally outliving expectations, but not outperforming them. Democratic collapse has happily been a far rarer event thus far in the twenty-first century than it was in the twentieth. Yet it does not exactly ring true to say that most developing country democracies are consolidating. This review essay ventures the claim that political scientists need to transcend their rightful concerns with how and why young democracies collapse or consolidate, and devote more attention to theorizing how and why they careen. It defines democratic careening as political instability sparked by intense conflict between partisan actors deploying competing visions of democratic accountability. Careening occurs when actors who argue that democracy requires substantial inclusivity of the entire populace (vertical accountability) clash with rivals who defend democracy for its constraints against excessive concentrations of unaccountable power, particularly in the political executive (horizontal accountability). These arguments are elaborated through reviews of leading theoretical works on democratic break-down as well as detailed case studies of Thailand and taiwan.

Anglican Inter-Faith Relations from 1910 to the Twenty-First Century

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paul Hedges
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
First Century ◽  
Sri Lankan ◽  
Historical Overview ◽  
Number Of Factors ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter explores the development of Anglican inter-faith relations since 1910 which has been shaped by a number of factors including: the ecumenical context, changing dynamics within the global Communion, globalization issues, and moves from mission to dialogue. The chapter begins with a historical overview and traces developments in key Anglican Communion texts and meetings, especially in recent times the Lambeth Conferences of 1988, 1998, and 2008. The ecumenical context which has shaped thought on inter-faith relations in this period is also given strong attention. The chapter concludes with two case studies. The first explores relations with Buddhism in the Sri Lankan context, while the second looks at relations with Islam focusing on the Middle East. While charting some general trends, it is noted that very different dynamics and varying standpoints exist in Anglican attitudes on inter-faith relations and have been part of the historical development throughout the period surveyed.

American Custom, Ritual, and Holidays

2018 ◽  
pp. 255-276
Author(s):  
Jack Santino
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Course ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Since the nineteenth century, attention in folklore and folklife studies has shifted from viewing certain customary symbolic actions such as “calendar customs” and rituals of the life course to a more inclusive performance-oriented perspective on holidays and customs. Folklorists recognize the multiplicity of events that people may consider ritual and festival, and the porous nature of these categories. The concept of the “sacred” has expanded to include realms other than the strictly religious, so as to include the political and other domains, both official and unofficial. A comprehensive study of ritual and festival incorporates a close study of folk and popular actions as well as institutional ceremony. In the twenty-first century, approaching events as both carnivalesque and ritualesque allows folklorists to describe purpose and intention in public events, and to account for political, commemorative, celebratory, and festive elements in any particular event.

The Younghusband-Waddell Collection and Its People: the Social Life of Tibetan Books Gathered in a Late-colonial Enterprise

Inner Asia ◽  
2012 ◽  
Vol 14 (1) ◽  
pp. 131-171
Author(s):  
Hildegard Diemberger
Keyword(s):  
Digital Technology ◽  
Social Life ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Academic Institutions ◽  
Cultural Biography ◽  
The Social ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
New Perspective ◽  
Insight Into

AbstractIn this paper I follow the social life of the Tibetan books belonging to the Younghusband-Waddell collection. I show how books as literary artefacts can transform from ritual objects into loot, into commodities and into academic treasures and how books can have agency over people, creating networks and shaping identities. Exploring connections between books and people, I look at colonial collecting, Orientalist scholarship and imperial visions from an unusual perspective in which the social life and cultural biography of people and things intertwine and mutually define each other. By following the trajectory of these literary artefacts, I show how their traces left in letters, minutes and acquisition documents give insight into the functioning of academic institutions and their relationship to imperial governing structures and individual aspirations. In particular, I outline the lives of a group of scholars who were involved with this collection in different capacities and whose deeds are unevenly known. This adds a new perspective to the study of this period, which has so far been largely focused on the deeds of key individuals and the political and military setting in which they operated. Finally, I show how the books of this collection have continued to exercise their attraction and moral pressure on twenty-first-century scholars, both Tibetan and international, linking them through digital technology and cyberspace.

The Dilemmas of Islamic Bioethics in the Twenty-first Century

2011 ◽  
Vol 28 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-75
Author(s):  
Dr. Anke Iman Bouzenita
Keyword(s):  
Brain Death ◽  
Medical Care ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Islamic Law ◽  
Life Sciences ◽  
First Century ◽  
Islamic Bioethics ◽  
Islamic World ◽  
Twenty First Century

The current discourse on bioethical questions often reveals a certain patchiness or seeming inability to answer contemporary bioethical problems within an Islamic epistemological paradigm. Attempting to analyze the causes of this phenomenon, the author describes the decontextualization of Islamic concepts from a background of secularized medical care and the ethics in the Islamic world—as well as the estrangement due to these questions of Islamic law from its holistic framework of application as a pervasive phenomenon, which brought about the dilemmas of bioethics in the twenty-first century. The author discusses chosen bioethical case studies in this light, with a focus on the concept of brain death. Doing so, the author takes into consideration the paradigmatic relationship between science, bioethical models, and the implications of the relevant different worldviews. The author shows how constructed realities related to the life sciences have been imported from the secular setting into an already estranged Islamic context to be answered, and describes the evolving dilemmas that make Islamic bioethics appear like a stranger moving in a strange land.

Prophetic Imagination and Empire in Asia

2018 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 91-116
Author(s):  
Jude Lal Fernando
Keyword(s):  
East Asia ◽  
Personal Narrative ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Empire Building ◽  
Christian Communities ◽  
Political Reality ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Prophetic Imagination ◽  
Twenty First Century

The aim of this article is to identify the glimpses of prophetic imagination amongst the Christian communities in Asia, particularly in Korea and Japan, who are engaged in resisting the new round of militarization in the twenty-first century. This resistance denounces the globalist security complex in the region and announces a nonmilitaristic alternative forming a praxis that is necessary for a new theology of peace in East Asia and in Asia broadly. The political reality of the new round of military empire-building will be discussed with a personal narrative and a political analysis after which the theological meaning of prophetic imagination as opposed to imperial consciousness will be analyzed, correlating the personal and political with the theological. The ways in which the resistance to militarization resonates with the prophetic imagination of an alternative consciousness and community will be examined through an analysis of memories and renunciation of war by the churches. Broad implications of these resonances for a peace theology in Asia will be identified.

A la dérive

2020 ◽  
pp. 271-286
Author(s):  
Eric Robertson
Keyword(s):  
Case Studies ◽  
Visual Art ◽  
Georges Bataille ◽  
First Century ◽  
Free Verse ◽  
Michel Leiris ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Carl Einstein ◽  
Formal Constraints

The notion of the formless found a lasting definition in Documents, the dissident Surrealist magazine led by Georges Bataille, Carl Einstein and Michel Leiris from 1929 to 1931.  In an unassuming short entry for its ‘Dictionnaire’, Bataille presents the informe emphatically not as a system or a structure, but as ‘un terme servant à déclasser’; yet neither the disruptive impulse of the 'Dictionnaire', nor the more recent exhibitions it has generated, can avoid a measure of taxonomic organisation (L'Informe: mode d'emploi, 1996; Undercover Surrealism, 2006). In the realm of poetry, free verse has eroded the boundaries of the poetic, but its freedom from formal constraints is limited too; as Jay Parini (2008) contends, ‘formless poetry does not really exist, as poets inevitably create patterns in language that replicate forms of experience.’  Through  a small number of case studies, this chapter will consider the legacy of Bataille’s definition while assessing the ongoing tension between form and its undoing in textual and visual art of the twenty-first century.

Coda

2018 ◽  
pp. 182-194
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Insko
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Historical Monuments ◽  
Twenty First Century

The book’s final chapter turns to the twenty-first-century historical present to examine the resurgence of pious warnings about the dangers of presentism in current debates over historical monuments and other forms of historical commemoration. After linking, by way of Afrofuturism, the recent political slogan #StayWoke to the political disposition identified in the book’s previous chapters, I turn to debates about the renaming of college buildings in order to challenge the ideas about history promoted by antipresentists, whose claims are themselves often ahistorical. The historiographical injunction against presentism, I claim, has unwittingly sustained white supremacy in the United States. I feel strongly that we’re not yet done with history—but not done precisely because of, not despite, the history that we inhabit.

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