“Forward to David the Builder!” Georgia's (re)turn to language-centered nationalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 522-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christofer Berglund
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
The Past ◽  
Building Project ◽  
The Rose ◽  
State Language

After the Rose Revolution, President Saakashvili tried to move away from the exclusionary nationalism of the past, which had poisoned relations between Georgians and their Armenian and Azerbaijani compatriots. His government instead sought to foster an inclusionary nationalism, wherein belonging was contingent upon speaking the state language and all Georgian speakers, irrespective of origin, were to be equals. This article examines this nation-building project from a top-down and bottom-up lens. I first argue that state officials took rigorous steps to signal that Georgian-speaking minorities were part of the national fabric, but failed to abolish religious and historical barriers to their inclusion. I next utilize a large-scale, matched-guise experiment (n= 792) to explore if adolescent Georgians ostracize Georgian-speaking minorities or embrace them as their peers. I find that the upcoming generation of Georgians harbor attitudes in line with Saakashvili's language-centered nationalism, and that current Georgian nationalism therefore is more inclusionary than previous research, or Georgia's tumultuous past, would lead us to believe.

scholarly journals Postsocialism or when ‘Having’ is another Way of ‘Being’. The Reconfiguring of Identity through Land Restitution and the Narratives of the Past

2015 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 39-56
Author(s):  
Elena Chiorean
Keyword(s):  
Identity Construction ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
Political Systems ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
The Past ◽  
Economic Transformations ◽  
Land Restitution

Abstract In this paper I examine the consequences of the 1989 political overturn in Romania on the selfhood. To this purpose, I initiate a twofold analysis: the official discourse of both socio-political systems, socialism and liberalism, and the individual’s quotidian discourse. The first one will enable a comparative view, over the ’bottom-up’ constructed realities, and the second will account for the degree of pervasiveness and naturalization of ideological views and, in this way, of a “top-down” identity construction and its configurations. One of the most apprehensible provisions through which liberalism endeavoured to institutionalize its own way of setting out reality is land restitution. Thereafter, I will discuss the way re-appropriation was experienced and its various subjectivization trajectories, but also the wider frame of the postsocialist economic transformations: rethinking work, money, the state and the interrelations between them. This particular angle of sight will disclose the mechanisms through which liberalism has deconstructed the system of socialist meaning and representation, at the same time replacing it with a socio-political order which reconfigured these meanings.

Belarusian Nationalism in the 2010s: a Case of Anti-Colonialism? Origins, Features and Outcomes of Ongoing ‘Soft Belarusianisation’

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
Anaïs Marin
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Type ◽  
Challenging Situation ◽  
Red Line

Abstract The past decade has seen the emergence of a new type of nationalism in Belarus, a process labelled as ‘soft Belarusianisation’. This trend differs from earlier, mostly top-down (elite-led) episodes of nation-building – the Belarusisation of the 1920s, the nationalists’ movement that followed perestroika, and the ‘Creole nationalism’ incarnated by A. Lukashenko since the mid-1990s. Instead, soft Belarusianisation seems to be a bottom-up process stemming mostly from civil society. It would be wrong to consider it as a traditional revivalist or genuinely grassroots phenomenon however. Yet it appears as an anti-colonialist process, one meant to avoid further assimilation of Belarusians within the Russian whole. Whereas signs of a timid national awakening appeared back in the early 2010s, two sets of factors contributed to shaping and accelerating soft Belarusianisation in recent years. First were exogenous drivers, notably Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Among the endogenous drivers is the Belarusian authorities’ benevolence towards soft Belarusianisation. Although they can exploit the rally-around-the-flag potential that the process entails for mobilising society in support of independence, the fact that soft Belarusianisation is perceived as anti-Russian in Russia proper creates a challenging situation for them. Should Belarusian nationalism overstep a red line, the likely consequences would be to put Belarusian sovereignty and national identity under a greater threat than it already is now.

scholarly journals The Unmaking of Indigeneity

Poliarchia ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (9) ◽  
pp. 97-118
Author(s):  
Natalia Koper
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Social Interactions ◽  
Indigenous People ◽  
Public Policies ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Movie Industry ◽  
The Past ◽  
Building Project

This paper contributes to the debate on racialized and deracialized representations of the category of indigeneity in Mexican cinematography during the Golden Age (1935–1959) as a response to the post‑revolutionary nation‑building project. Based on the analysis of representative movies of that period, I argue that the cinematography reflected indigenista public policies, aimed at homogenizing the society by incorporating indigenous people to the society as Mexicans. Insofar as the state narrative displaced the notion of indigeneity towards the “past” – as a foundation of the national cultural heritage – movie industry romanticized and exoticized the indigenous, but at the same time, it portrayed indigenous characters as submissive and even obsolete, thus perpetrating the colonial archetype of oppression. Images situated in the present, however, rejected any ethnic differentiation, and instead replaced it with a class‑based model of social interactions, but in reality the “raceless” ideal of national identity would continue to ascribe indigeneity to lower social strata.

scholarly journals Recent (Re)Visions of Canlit: Partial Stock-Taking

2020 ◽  
Vol 55 (s2) ◽  
pp. 273-289
Author(s):  
Agnieszka Rzepa
Keyword(s):  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Literary Texts ◽  
Academic Field ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Current State ◽  
Institutional Structures ◽  
Building Project ◽  
Magazine Articles ◽  
Globalising World

Abstract This article approaches recent discussions on the state of contemporary CanLit as a body of literary texts, an academic field, and an institution. The discussion is informed primarily by a number of recent or relatively recent publications, such as Trans.CanLit. Resituating the Study of Canadian Literature (Kamboureli & Miki 2007), Refuse. CanLit in Ruins (McGregor, Rak & Wunker 2018), Luminous Ink: Writers on Writing in Canada (McWatt, Maharaj & Brand 2018), and the discussions and/or controversies some of those generated – expressed through newspaper and magazine articles, scholarly essays, but also through tweets, etc. The texts have been written as a response to the current state and – in some cases – scandals of CanLit. Many constitute attempts at starting or contributing to a discussion aimed at not only taking stock of, but also reinterpreting and re-defining the field and the institution in view of the challenges of the globalising world. Perhaps more importantly, they address also the challenges resulting from the rift between CanLit as implicated in the (post)colonial nation-building project and rigid institutional structures, perpetuating the silencings, erasures, and hierarchies resulting from such entanglements, and actual literary texts produced by an increasingly diversified group of writers working with a widening range of topics and genres, and creating often intimate, autobiographically inspired art with a sense of responsibility to marginalised communities. The article concludes with the example of Indigenous writing and the position some young Indigenous writers take in the current discussions.

scholarly journals Climate Dialog, Climate Action: Can Democracy Do the Job?

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Fred Young Phillips ◽  
LaVonne Reimer ◽  
Rebecca Turner
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Global Climate ◽  
Environmental Issues ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Psychological Mechanisms ◽  
Ipcc Report ◽  
Climate Action

The latest IPCC report forcefully states that immediate, decisive, and large-scale actions are needed to avert climate catastrophe. This essay presumes that democratic governments are best and most desirably positioned to take these actions. Yet in the countries most pivotal to global climate, significant voting blocs are uninterested in environmental issues. The essay urges adding bottom-up dialog between environmental and anti-environmental voters, to current and future top-down technocratic “solutions.” To make this combination result in a unified pro-environment electorate, we must understand: religious objections to environmentalism; the capital-vs.-knowledge strife that slows polluting corporations’ green transitions; and the psychological mechanisms that can make inter-group dialog fruitful.

scholarly journals Beyond the Post-Sovereign State?: The Past, Present, and Future of Constitutional Pluralism

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 6-23
Author(s):  
Michael WILKINSON
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Recent Decade ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
European State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Constitutional Pluralism

AbstractConstitutional pluralism is a theory for the post-sovereign European state. This only makes sense historically, emerging out of postwar European reconstruction through the repression of popular sovereignty and restraining of democracy, including through the project of European integration. It became unsettled at Maastricht and evolved from a series of irritants into a full-blown crisis in the recent decade, with sovereignty claims returning both from the bottom-up and the top-down, to the extent that we can legitimately ask whether we are now moving ‘beyond the post-sovereign state’? Constitutional pluralist literature fails to capture this in that evades material issues of democracy and political economy.

scholarly journals Emissions of Carbon Tetrachloride (CCl<sub>4</sub>) from Europe

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Francesco Graziosi ◽  
Jgor Arduini ◽  
Paolo Bonasoni ◽  
Francesco Furlani ◽  
Umberto Giostra ◽  
...  
Keyword(s):  
Carbon Tetrachloride ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Stratospheric Ozone ◽  
Montreal Protocol ◽  
Scale Production ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Significant Discrepancy ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Atmospheric Observations ◽  
Global Emissions

Abstract. Carbon tetrachloride (CCl4) is a long-lived radiatively-active compound able to destroy stratospheric ozone. Due to its inclusion in the Montreal Protocol on Substances that Deplete the Ozone Layer, the last two decades have seen a sharp decrease in its large scale emissive use with a consequent decline of its atmospheric mole fractions. However, the Montreal Protocol restrictions do not apply to the use of carbon tetrachloride as feedstock for the production of other chemicals, implying the risk of fugitive emissions from the industry sector. The occurrence of such unintended emissions is suggested by a significant discrepancy between global emissions as derived by reported production and feedstock usage (bottom-up emissions), and those based on atmospheric observations (top-down emissions). In order to better constrain the atmospheric budget of carbon tetrachloride, several studies based on a combination of atmospheric observations and inverse modelling have been conducted in recent years in various regions of the world. This study is focused on the European scale and based on long-term high-frequency observations at three European sites, combined with a Bayesian inversion methodology. We estimated that average European emissions for 2006–2014 were 2.3 (± 0.8) Gg yr−1, with an average decreasing trend of 7.3 % per year. Our analysis identified France as the main source of emissions over the whole study period, with an average contribution to total European emissions of 25 %. The inversion was also able to allow the localisation of emission "hot-spots" in the domain, with major source areas in Southern France, Central England (UK) and Benelux (Belgium, The Netherlands, Luxembourg), where most of industrial scale production of basic organic chemicals are located. According to our results, European emissions correspond to 4.0 % of global emissions for 2006–2012. Together with other regional studies, our results allow a better constraint of the global budget of carbon tetrachloride and a better quantification of the gap between top-down and bottom-up estimates.

Contemporary Issues and Christian Models of Integration: Into the Modern/Postmodern Age

1995 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Model Building ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Comprehensive View ◽  
The Past ◽  
Psychological Theories ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Dsm Iv

Model building in Christian psychology has gradually become increasingly outdated and unsophisticated over the past decade, particularly in light of postmodern challenges to the limitations of received modern scientific perspectives and social practices. The present article draws from Rychlak's (1993) “complementarity” model, Sperry's (1993) “bidirectional determinism” concept, and Engel's (1977) biopsychosocial formulation to develop a multiperspectival, holistic framework drawing on the strengths of both modern and postmodern approaches. The proposed model includes inferences from both top down and bottom up formulations, as well as potential for interactions between or among any of the various “groundings” for psychological theories. Such a model seems more faithful to both biblical and scientific perspectives, and thus may provide a more accurate and comprehensive view of persons to facilitate more effective research and treatment. A clinical example is provided with DSM-IV descriptive and criterion referents.

Large scale and cost effective generation of 3D self-supporting oxide nanowire architectures by a top-down and bottom-up combined approach

RSC Advances ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 6 (51) ◽  
pp. 45923-45930 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peixun Fan ◽  
Minlin Zhong ◽  
Benfeng Bai ◽  
Guofan Jin ◽  
Hongjun Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Cost Effective ◽  
Combined Approach ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Effective Generation

Large-scale and cost-effective generation of desired 3D self-supporting macro–micronano-nanowire architectures is realized by a top-down and bottom-up combined approach.

Strong Societies, Weak Parties: Regime Change in Cuba and Venezuela in the 1950s and Today

2001 ◽  
Vol 43 (2) ◽  
pp. 81-113 ◽  
Author(s):  
Javier Corrales
Keyword(s):  
Political Parties ◽  
Bargaining Power ◽  
Regime Change ◽  
The State ◽  
Democratic Institutions ◽  
Best Interest ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Societal Factors ◽  
The 1950S

AbstractThe literature on the origins of democratic institutions is split between bottom-up and top-down approaches. The former emphasize societal factors that press for democracy; the latter, rules and institutions that shape elites' incentives. Can these approaches be reconciled? This article proposes competitive political parties, more so than degrees of modernization and associationalism, as the link between the two. Competitive political parties enhance society's bargaining power with the state and show dominant elites that liberalization is in their best interest; the parties are thus effective conduits of democracy. In the context of party deficit, the prospects for democratization or redemocratization are slim. This is illustrated by comparing Cuba and Venezuela in the 1950s and 1990s.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document