Corruption and the Governance of Disaster Risk

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Alexander
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Economic Status ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Political Influence ◽  
Disaster Risk ◽  
Humanitarian Assistance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Disaster Mitigation ◽  
Humanitarian Emergencies ◽  
The Relationship

This article considers how corruption affects the management of disaster mitigation, relief, and recovery. Corruption is a very serious and pervasive issue that affects all countries and many operations related to disasters, yet it has not been studied to the degree that it merits. This is because it is difficult to define, hard to measure and difficult to separate from other issues, such as excessive political influence and economic mismanagement. Not all corruption is illegal, and not all of that which is against the law is vigorously pursued by law enforcement. In essence, corruption subverts public resources for private gain, to the damage of the body politic and people at large. It is often associated with political violence and authoritarianism and is a highly exploitative phenomenon. Corruption knows no boundaries of social class or economic status. It tends to be greatest where there are strong juxtapositions of extreme wealth and poverty. Corruption is intimately bound up with the armaments trade. The relationship between arms supply and humanitarian assistance and support for democracy is complex and difficult to decipher. So is the relationship between disasters and organized crime. In both cases, disasters are seen as opportunities for corruption and potentially massive gains, achieved amid the fear, suffering, and disruption of the aftermath. In humanitarian emergencies, black markets can thrive, which, although they support people by providing basic incomes, do nothing to reduce disaster risk. In counties in which the informal sector is very large, there are few, and perhaps insufficient, controls on corruption in business and economic affairs. Corruption is a major factor in weakening efforts to bring the problem of disasters under control. The solution is to reduce its impact by ensuring that transactions connected with disasters are transparent, ethically justifiable, and in line with what the affected population wants and needs. In this respect, the phenomenon is bound up with fundamental human rights. Denial or restriction of such rights can reduce a person’s access to information and freedom to act in favor of disaster reduction. Corruption can exacerbate such situations. Yet disasters often reveal the effects of corruption, for example, in the collapse of buildings that were not built to established safety codes.

Fear of the Thirty Years War

Facing Fear ◽  
2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Lederer
Keyword(s):  
Political Culture ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Fear Response ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter explores the relationship between fears and crises by focusing on the Thirty Years War. It considers how the war evoked a universal fear response and highlights expressions of preexisting apocalyptic fears in the material context of a long-term crisis. It also examines universal and traditional elements in contemporary portrayals of fear aroused by the specific events of the war. During the Thirty Years War, the body politic often appeared twisted, contorted, or monstrous in form, suggesting a fearful condition affecting society as a whole. In other words, the body functioned as a repository of fear during the conflict. The chapter argues that the linchpin of the relationship between crises and fear during the Thirty Years War was their literal embodiment by contemporary political culture and a peculiar understanding of history.

Education and the Curious Case of Conservative Compromise

2019 ◽  
pp. 106591291986650
Author(s):  
James M. Glaser ◽  
Jeffrey M. Berry ◽  
Deborah J. Schildkraut
Keyword(s):  
Political Attitudes ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Democratic Governance ◽  
The Body ◽  
Attitudes And Behaviors ◽  
Political Compromise ◽  
And Behaviors ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Impact ◽  
The Relationship

“Education,” notes Philip Converse, “is everywhere the universal solvent.” Whatever the ill of the body politic, many believe that greater education improves the condition. Much scholarship explores the impact of education on political attitudes and behaviors, but scholars have not examined the relationship of education to support for political compromise. This is especially topical, as compromise between parties seems harder than ever to achieve, yet compromise is necessary for democratic governance. We examine whether higher levels of education lead to support for compromise and find that education does matter, but the relationship is conditional. For liberals and moderates, more education promotes greater support for compromise. For conservatives, those with more education are not more likely to support compromise than those with less education. We argue that for conservatives, education matters for compromise support, but it also leads to better understanding of bedrock ideological principles that inhibit approval of compromise.

Effective abandonment: The neoliberal economy of violence in Israel and the Occupied Territories

2013 ◽  
Vol 44 (5-6) ◽  
pp. 449-466 ◽  
Author(s):  
François-Xavier Plasse-Couture
Keyword(s):  
Body Politic ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The Body ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
State And Society ◽  
Mode Of Operation ◽  
Occupied Territories ◽  
Legitimate State ◽  
Israel Defense Forces ◽  
The Relationship

Towards the end of 2012, a group of Israeli settlers and right-wing activists attacked an Israel Defense Forces (IDF) base on the West Bank. IDF soldiers and members of the Israeli Knesset had provided information to the attackers, who adopted a ‘bring it on’ tone that commentators described as echoing ‘civil war’. As the occupation blurs the categories of inside/outside, what we are witnessing is a challenge to the traditional distinction between politics and war. Accordingly, we are moved to think in terms of the distribution and variable intensities of violence, rather than to accept simple debates about either the absence or presence of war or the monopoly of violence. This article seeks to examine the evolving relationship between the state and society in the wake of the so-called Arab Spring through an investigation of the relationship between neoliberalism and sovereign violence. It argues that ‘price tag’ actions perpetrated in the Occupied Territories and Israel are the effect of a neoliberal organization of power characterized by a form of governing by non-intervention, where the abandonment of certain parts of society produces the desired containment of elements considered undesirable to the body politic. This article challenges Weber’s theory of state sovereignty as the monopoly of legitimate state violence, arguing instead that state apparatuses may in fact ‘outsource’ violence. We can understand this shift in the mode of operation of sovereignty by theorizing ‘society’ as the effect of warlike relations whereby particular tactics and strategies are employed as a way of organizing and policing forms of life necessary for the continuation of a particular body politic.

The Deaths of the Republic

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Walters
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Republic ◽  
Political Oratory

This book examines imagery of the body politic in the works of Cicero and his contemporaries and explores its impact on the politics of Rome in the first century BCE. Emphasis throughout is on the ideological underpinnings of such images and their uses as a means of persuasion. Chapter 1 reads the well-known fable of Menenius Agrippa as a paradigm for late-republican invocations of the embodied state. Chapter 2 examines imagery of disease and healing, focusing especially on connections with political violence. Chapter 3 considers claims of wounding and mutilating the republic. Chapter 4 explores references to the body politic’s demise in invective and consolations. Political oratory provides much of the evidence of these chapters, but is everywhere supplemented by other sources. Chapter 5 historicizes prior discussions by focusing on a single controversial image, that of murdering the fatherland, in the aftermath of Caesar’s assassination.

The lives of subjects

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Common Good ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The State ◽  
The Body ◽  
Ontological Status ◽  
The Common ◽  
The Law ◽  
The Individual ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

This chapter discusses the relationship of the state to its subjects as necessarily physically embodied beings. The primary way in which the commonwealth commands its subjects is through the medium of its law. The law is for the common good and obliges the community as a whole, and thus the ontological status of the law—as distinct from any particular command of a superior to an individual—is intimately tied to that of the body politic. The question, then, concerning the relationship of the state to the natural body of the individual can be framed in terms of the extent of the obligation of the civil law.

The Pharmacotic War on Terrorism

2002 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 161-186 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry N. George
Keyword(s):  
Political Violence ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The United States ◽  
Political Mobilization ◽  
The Body ◽  
War On Terrorism ◽  
Clash Of Civilizations ◽  
Us Military ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
The Us

The Greek words `pharmakon' and `pharmakos' allude to the complex relations between political violence and the health or disorder of the body politic. This article explores analogies of war as disease and contagion, and contrasts these with metaphors of war as politically healthy and medicinal - as in Randolph Bourne's notion of war as `the health of the state'. It then applies these to the unfolding US `War on Terrorism' through the concept of `pharmacotic war', by way of examining the disturbing political implications of both unfolding US military actions abroad and the scapegoating of internal `enemies' within the United States. The article then critiques various strategies for interrupting the momentum towards a catastrophic `clash of civilizations' between the US and the Islamic world, and proposes a strategy of broadly based, grassroots political mobilization for opposing this trend.

scholarly journals The Air-conditioned Nation under Global Warming – An Exploratory Study of the Speech and Assembly Freedom and Politics of Space in Singapore

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (SI) ◽  
pp. 15-31
Author(s):  
Hei Ting Wong
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Body ◽  
Economic Stability ◽  
Public Places ◽  
Politics Of Space ◽  
The Government ◽  
The Relationship

Singapore is known to have a citizenry loyal to its one-party dominated government. Cherian George refers Singapore as the “Air-conditioned Nation,” wherein free speech is sacrificed for economic stability in this metaphorical or virtual greenhouse and fostered a controlled and docile politic. Dissent from members of registered opposition parties or ordinary citizens, however, has been voiced during “illegal gatherings” in public places. Many of these attempts, both purposeful and accidental, challenge rules designed to limit the citizenry’s ability to voice publicly. In this paper, I examine these civil disobedient acts under the framework of construction and politics of socially- and mentally-constructed space in connection to the laws of Singapore. Utilizing the ideas of space as defined by Henri Lefebvre and Michel Foucault, I analyze three separate accounts of assembly and/or procession. I identify the relevant laws of Singapore and examine how these laws are interpreted and applied by law enforcement, revealing a tension between space and the body politic. Politics of space is a concept usually connected to social class; yet, class consciousness is what the Singaporean government strives to eliminate through the control of ideology and by limiting the freedom of speech in public spaces. My contribution examines the relationship between space and politics, reflecting the conflicts between the government, which has the power over the use of places and citizens who would like to express ideas differently from governmental-led ideologies physically and publicly in these places, and the opposition’s actions in this virtually-caged public space named Singapore.

How to desire control

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (62) (2) ◽  
pp. 15-24
Author(s):  
Sudipto SANYAL
Keyword(s):  
Special Reference ◽  
Prime Minister ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Arts ◽  
Health And Disease ◽  
The Relationship

"The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in a once-in-a-generation unfolding of the ideas of the normal and the pathological into one another in a public and spectacular way. The following essay attempts to examine this confusion of the relationship between health and disease in the body politic through special reference to a nationally televised address by the Indian Prime Minister at the outbreak of the pandemic. It interrogates the ways in which the pandemic has functioned as a cover for extending a state of exception through the arts of government. It also glimpses at the ways in which the idea of the citizen has been inverted to create a governmentalized subject desiring to be controlled."

Ethnicity and the city: the Kurdish quarter of Damascus between Ottoman and French rule, c. 1724–1946

Urban History ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 30 (2) ◽  
pp. 206-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
NELIDA FUCCARO
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Identity ◽  
Spatial Organization ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
Colonial Period ◽  
The Body ◽  
Public Action ◽  
Historical Processes ◽  
New Ideas ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The City

This article concentrates on the Kurdish quarter of Damascus and investigates the relationship between communal/ethnic identity, spatial organization and the socio-political structures of the city. It challenges the notion of quarter as an ‘ethnic cluster’ by examining historical processes of integration of the Kurdish community in the body politic of Damascus. In the colonial period the emergence of new arenas of public action for the Kurdish community are analysed with reference to the emergence of new ideas of class and community.

Pictorial body metaphors in Japanese advertising

2014 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 425-454
Author(s):  
Ulrich Heinze
Keyword(s):  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
The Body ◽  
Postwar Germany ◽  
Political Dialogue ◽  
Oral Consumption ◽  
Body Metaphor ◽  
Oral Fixation ◽  
Body Metaphors ◽  
The Relationship

This article explores the use of the body metaphor as a core communicative tool in times of economic crisis and national indebtedness, and the ways in which it thwarts political dialogue. It first traces the body metaphor in the manga version of Hitler’s Mein Kampf, following Andreas Musolff’s theory of the ‘body politic’ in Nazi Germany. It then argues that the economic resurrection, or ‘miracles’, in postwar Germany and Japan replaced the discourse of the body nation with that of the body economy. Charles Forceville has shown how advertising uses pictorial metaphors to depict commodities and emphasise their qualities. My analysis of Japanese commercials reveals that their metaphors work to ‘incorporate’ consumers through the act of oral consumption, merging them with the commodities. An ‘oral fixation’ is presumed, rendering the relationship between the body economy and the consumer as one between mother and infant. Advertising functions as the wrapping, or ‘skin’, of this body economy, encouraging us to suckle at the mother’s breasts and at the same time to inject unlimited amounts of money into her veins.

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