Virtual Citizenship

Author(s):  
Daniel M. Downes ◽  
Richard Janda

AbstractThis paper examines the importance of metaphor and media to the ideas of citizenship, nation, and place. In particular, the authors explore the relationship between citizenship and the double metaphor of the “nation-state”. If this double metaphor were to lose its hold on the collective imagination, what metaphor could take its place and be represented through modern media of communication? The authors use the example of deterritorialization, discussing first the emergence of the phenomenon particularly given the role of contemporary media of communication, and noting how it bears upon community, place and citizenship to suggest that such an erosion is taking place. They suggest that the “global market” metaphor is gaining ascendancy, and is represented in simulacrum through contemporary information technologies. The third part of this paper conducts a thought experiment implementing a deterritorialized, global market for citizenship, asking to what degree such a market already characterizes contemporary citizenship and assessing what is attractive and unattractive about it. The paper concludes with a caution against either ignoring or embracing this emerging normative construction.

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 15-40
Author(s):  
Archana Prasad

This article explores some questions arising from recent debates on patriarchy and capitalism. The focus is on the role of women in communist-led peasant movements in India and the implications of such struggles on the project of women’s emancipation. The first section lays out a framework for discussing the interface between class consciousness and the anti-patriarchal project, whereby patriarchy is located within the structural contradictions arising out of the contestations within the process of accumulation. The second section documents the historical context, focusing on the relationship between land reforms and social transformation in semi-feudal and early capitalist contexts, and analyzes the extent to which communist-led struggles are anti-patriarchal in character. The third section turns to the participation of women in the contemporary struggles of both agricultural workers and peasant movements and underlines the new emerging dialectics between women’s and peasant organizations under a neoliberal state and with deepening agrarian distress.


2019 ◽  
pp. 124-136
Author(s):  
Jeffrey Q. McCune

“Branded Beautiful” examines the relationship between individual pop celebrity, the promotion of a national identity, and the use of sexuality while branding each. Barbados promotes itself as a site of controlled abandon straddling performances of modernity while cashing in on imaginaries of “primitive” exoticism. Robyn “Rihanna” Fenty’s pop stardom is built on an ever-changing boldness that often includes in your face sexuality. The relationship between Rihanna and representations of Barbados is fraught with ambiguity. Using Rihanna’s August 2011 LOUD tour concert in Barbados, “Branded Beautiful” argues that the events surrounding the show shed light on the differing sexual economies of pop stardom and national tourism; that such divergences highlight the insecurities of nation-states seeking to make a name for themselves within a global market; and that despite the distinctions it is quite hard for a nation-state to divorce celebrity focused attention from an ideal national image.


2020 ◽  
Vol 51 (4) ◽  
pp. 305-322 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas T Hirblinger ◽  
Dana M Landau

‘Inclusion’ has emerged as a prominent theme in peacemaking. However, its exact meaning remains vague, as do assumptions about the relationship between inclusion and peace. This article seeks to problematize the research, policy and practice of inclusion. Focusing on United Nations (UN) peacemaking, we ask how the object of inclusion has been framed, and based on what strategies and underlying rationales. We do so against the backdrop of emerging debates about an agonistic peace, which suggest that violent antagonistic relationships can be overcome if peace processes enable contestation between adversaries. This requires that peacemakers recognize the constitutive role of difference in political settlements. We identify three distinct strategies for inclusion, with corresponding framings of the included. Firstly, inclusion can be used to build a more legitimate peace; secondly, to empower and protect specific actor groups; and thirdly, to transform the sociopolitical structures that underlie conflict. The first strategy frames the included in open terms that can accommodate a heterogeneity of actors, the second in closed terms pertaining to specific identity traits, and the third in relational terms emerging within a specific social, cultural and political context. In practice, this leads to tensions in the operationalization of inclusion, which are evidence of an inchoate attempt to politicize peace processes. In response, we argue for an approach to relational inclusion that recognizes the power relations from which difference emerges; neither brushing over difference, nor essentializing single identity traits, but rather remaining flexible in navigating a larger web of relationships that require transformation.


Author(s):  
Huub J.M. Ruel

The relationship between Advanced Information Technologies (AIT) and organization is complex. Several theories and approaches try to get grip on this complex relationship. Adaptive Structuration Theory (AST) (DeSanctis and Poole, 1994) is one of them. It introduces the concept of spirit of AIT as an important determinant of AIT appropriation. AIT with a clear, coherent spirit will lead to a high level of AIT appropriation. But what about the role of the internal organizational environment? Does this constrain or support the role of the AIT’s spirit regarding AIT appropriation? This paper presents a study that aims to find an answer to this question. Three hypotheses were formulated and tested in four offices where employees used office technologies. Results confirm that a clear spirit is positively related to the level of appropriation as distinguished by DeSanctis and Poole (1994) and Poole and DeSanctis (1990). The results also make clear that this relationship is more positive among users who experienced a low level of change in the internal organizational environment along with the office technology implementation than among users who experienced a high level of change. Furthermore, the relationship is more positive among users with a low level of work autonomy than among users with a high level of work autonomy. This is not fully in line with our expectations. However, we think an explanation is available. We suppose that the answer lies in the office technology development process. All office technologies in this study’s offices were probably developed without anticipating the changes that office technology implementations might bring about in the internal organizational environment and with the aim to build systems that “reconfirm” the current “restrictive” work procedures. This study’s results once again indicate that office technology and other organizational components are interrelated.


Slavic Review ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 77 (3) ◽  
pp. 661-684
Author(s):  
Theodora Dragostinova

This article examines Bulgarian cultural relations with India and Mexico in the 1970s to explore the role of cultural diplomacy in the relationship between the Second and the Third Worlds during the Cold War. In 1975, Liudmila Zhivkova, the daughter of the Bulgarian leader, became the head of the Committee for Culture; under her patronage, Bulgarian officials organized literally hundreds of exhibitions, concerts, academic conferences, book readings, cultural weeks, and visits that involved the three countries in an intense cultural romance. Even though Bulgaria was known as the “Soviet master satellite,” culture provided a considerable level of independence in Bulgarian dealings with international actors, which often caused Soviet irritation. In the end, by using culture, in addition to political and economic aid, Bulgaria managed to forge its role as an intermediary between the Second World and the Global South, and to project its notions of development on a global scene.


1996 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-179 ◽  
Author(s):  
Andreas Wimmer

The study begins with a critical examination of two opposing, theories of nationalism. Next, the relationship between the State and nationalism in the form of the nation state is seen as a process of social formation during which a compromise is established between public and private elites, and the people: loyalty is exchanged for the right to participate in social rights. In the third part, the author considers the future of a number of Southern states in relation to the fundamentals of nation formation.


2019 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 632-644
Author(s):  
Philip Holden

Most of the research presented in this special issue questions the notion of a singular Singaporean story, and yet this narrative persists as a form of Gramscian common sense for most Singaporeans, whether young or old, and also for recent immigrants and international commentators. To understand the reasons for this persistence, I turn to American political scientist Rogers M. Smith's concept of narratives of peoplehood, and in particular his notion of ethically constitutive stories that are central to individual subject formation. The role of the colonial past in such stories of Singapore is contradictory, in that the relationship between colonialism and the nation-state is seen simultaneously in terms of rupture and continuity, and this conceals a further contradiction in terms of the relationship between individual and the collective. In exploring these contradictions, and in tracing reparative possibilities for new stories of peoplehood, I will, in conclusion, turn to recent literary narratives, and in particular recent historical speculative fiction that revisions the colonial past.


2004 ◽  
Vol 36 (1) ◽  
pp. 57-83 ◽  
Author(s):  
JUSTIN WOLFE

This study examines the relationship between labour and nation in nineteenth-century Nicaragua by exploring how the state's institutional efforts to control labour coincided with a prevailing discourse of nation that idealised farmers (agricultores) and wage labourers (jornaleros and operarios) at opposite ends of the spectrum of national citizenship. The article focuses on the towns of the ethnically diverse region of the Prefecture of Granada, an area that included the present-day departments of Granada, Carazo and Masaya, and where coffee production first boomed in Nicaragua. It is argued that labour coercion rested not simply on the building of national, regional and municipal institutions of labour control, but also on defining the political and social role of labourers within the national community. At the same time, subaltern communities, especially indigenous ones, contested these efforts not merely through evasion and subterfuge, but by engaging the discourse of nation-state to claim citizenship as farmers and assert independence from landlords.


2010 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 371-389 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mojca Doupona Topič ◽  
Jay Coakley

Sociology of sport knowledge on national identity is grounded in research that focuses primarily on long established nation-states with widely known histories. The relationship between sport and national identity in postsocialist/Soviet/colonial nations that have gained independence or sovereignty since 1990 has seldom been studied. This paper examines the role of sports in the formation of national identity in postsocialist Slovenia, a nation-state that gained independence in 1990. Our analysis focuses on the recent context in which the current but fluid relationship between sport and Slovenian national identity exists. Using Slovenia as a case study we identify seven factors that may moderate the effectiveness of sports as sites for establishing and maintaining national identity and making successful global identity claims in the twenty-first century. We conclude that these factors should be taken into account to more fully understand the sport-national identity relationship today, especially in new and developing nations.


1994 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 253-287 ◽  
Author(s):  
S. P. Salt

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates the relationship between constitutional ideas and political action during the 1630s by comparing the privately expressed ideas of Sir Simonds D'Ewes regarding ship money with his conduct regarding the levy, especially while he was sheriff of Suffolk in 1639–40. The first section investigates the constitutionalist views expressed in D'Ewes's ‘autobiography’, unpublished during his lifetime, and their relationship to D'Ewes's attitude to the political role of the levy. The second section studies D'Ewes's conduct as sheriff, in which he gave almost no expression to constitutionalist ideas, and suggests that he struck a middle course between neglect and zeal, while finding means to oppose the levy through his connections at court. The third section seeks to establish the reasons for the inconsistencies between D'Ewes's privately expressed ideas and his public conduct, which may have lain in a belief that, in the prevailing political situation, criticism of the levy had, in order to be effective, to be expressed in terms acceptable to potentially sympathetic courtiers; D'Ewes adapted the tone of his comments on ship money to his audience in order to achieve political ends, but had also to act in ways which would make that tone convincing. Participation in the collection of ship money was therefore not inconsistent with opposition to it.


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