How War Makes (and Unmakes) the Democratic State

2021 ◽  
pp. 278-295
Author(s):  
Aziz Z. Huq
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
National Culture ◽  
September 11 ◽  
First Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Marin County ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
September 11 Attacks ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Greek Island

Focusing on the figures of the terrorist and the migrant, Huq suggests that war in the twenty-first century, in partial contrast to its precursors, may prove costly to democracy. Whereas war once served to develop bureaucratic capacity, shrink wealth gaps, and expand the franchise, it is less likely to perform these functions in a period when war is increasingly cabined to distant zones of violence, mechanized, and privatized. Huq considers a pair of novels by Mohsin Hamid, The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Exit West. The former documents the transformation, and potential radicalization, of a young Pakistani professional in the wake of the September 11 attacks; the latter follows a couple from an unspecified city on the brink of civil war to the Greek island of Mykonos, then to London, and finally to Marin County, California, where their relationship dissolves. Whereas right-wing populists cast the terrorist and the migrant as racialized threats to civilization and national culture, Hamid’s protagonists instead embody a commitment to pluralism, inclusion, and democratic openness.

Programmatic Configurations for the Twenty-First-Century Developmental State in Urban Brazil

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 169-190 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher L. Gibson
Keyword(s):  
Social Development ◽  
Developmental State ◽  
First Century ◽  
Public Health Care ◽  
Human Capabilities ◽  
Developmental States ◽  
Democratic State ◽  
Important Health ◽  
Fuzzy Set Analysis ◽  
Twenty First Century

Supplementing a traditional focus on economic dimensions of development, sociologists now frequently examine the origins of macro-level growth in human capabilities. One emergent theoretical framework for doing so emphasizes the promise of “twenty-first-century developmental states” for broadening delivery of capability-enhancing public services like health and education. Nevertheless, the configurations of state-society actors that are consistently willing and able to construct such institutions are far from obvious, highlighting a missing-agent problem at the core of the framework. The article addresses this gap by tracing Brazil's historic improvements in social development to what I call “programmatic configurations,” or broad-based alliances of civil and political society actors that ameliorate vexing public problems by building democratic institutions and state capacities needed to enact rights-based social policies. It argues that frequent local office-holding by “sanitarista” activists from the country's most important health movement, the Sanitarist Movement, has been essential for constituting the programmatic configurations that maximized social development across urban Brazil in recent decades. More specifically, a brief historical account of the movement and fuzzy-set analysis show that programmatic configurations assembled by sanitaristas in Brazil's largest capitals have generally been a sufficient condition for maximizing improvement over time in three outcomes: infant-mortality reduction, municipal spending on health and sanitation, and municipal delivery of primary public health care. I correspondingly argue for broadening the twenty-first-century developmental state framework to accommodate how programmatic configurations—and the pragmatically inclined civil society activists at their core—can contribute to democratic state-building for social development.

Intertextualities in Elfriede Jelinek’s Rein Gold: Ein Bühnenessay

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (2) ◽  
pp. 114-133
Author(s):  
Britta Kallin
Keyword(s):  
Hate Crime ◽  
First Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Communist Manifesto ◽  
German Identity ◽  
Ethnic Germans ◽  
History Of ◽  
Ring Cycle ◽  
Twenty First Century

Elfriede Jelinek’s postdramatic stage essay Rein Gold (2012) interweaves countless texts including Richard Wagner’s operas from the Ring cycle, Karl Marx’s The Capital, and Marx and Friedrich Engels’s The Communist Manifesto as well as contemporary writings and news articles. Scholarship has so far examined the play in comparison to Wagner’s Rheingold opera, which serves as the base for the dialogue between the father Wotan and daughter Brünnhilde. This article examines intertextualities with the story of the National Socialist Underground, an extremist right-wing group that committed hate-crime murders and bank robberies, and with the exploitative history of workers, particularly women, in capitalist systems. Jelinek compares the National Socialist Underground’s attempt to violently rid Germany of non-ethnic Germans with Siegfried’s mythical fight as dragon slayer in the Nibelungenlied that created a hero who has been cast as a German identity figure for an ethnonational narrative and fascist ideas in twenty-first-century Germany.

Gothic Comedy

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-202
Author(s):  
Catherine Spooner
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Identity Politics ◽  
First Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Romantic Comedy ◽  
Significant Function ◽  
Politics Of Difference ◽  
The Family ◽  
Twenty First Century

Comedy has become an increasingly prevalent feature of Gothic in the twenty-first century, and thus Gothic comedy can be found across a multitude of media. This chapter surveys the kinds of comedy that appear in contemporary Gothic (such as sitcom, stand-up, romantic comedy, mock-documentary) and argues that, in the twenty-first century, Gothic comedy often functions to travesty culturally significant concepts of family, domesticity and childhood in the light of a liberal identity politics. Beginning with twentieth-century precedents such as television sitcom The Addams Family (1964–6) and Edward Gorey’s illustrations, the chapter analyses a range of contemporary texts including The League of Gentlemen (1999–2017), Corpse Bride (2005), Ruby Gloom (2006–8),Hotel Transylvania (2012) and What We Do in the Shadows (2014). It concludes that far from being frivolous or disposable, contemporary Gothic comedy forms a politically significant function in its tendency to undermine right-wing ideologies of the family and promote a celebratory politics of difference and inclusion.

scholarly journals Obamageddon: Fear, the Far Right, and the Rise of “Doomsday” Prepping in Obama's America

2019 ◽  
pp. 1-30 ◽  
Author(s):  
MICHAEL F. MILLS
Keyword(s):  
First Century ◽  
Right Wing ◽  
Extreme Right ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Far Right ◽  
American Conservatism ◽  
Twenty First Century

This article examines the politics of American “doomsday” prepping during Barack Obama's presidency. It challenges claims that growing interest in prepping post-2008 arose exclusively from extreme apocalyptic, white supremacist, and anti-government reactions to Obama's electoral successes – claims that suggest prepping to be politically congruent with previous waves of extreme right-wing American “survivalism.” Drawing on ethnography, this paper argues that, while fears of Obama have been central to many preppers’ activities, much of their prepping under his presidency centred on fears that sit outside survivalist politics. Building on this, the article illuminates connections between prepping and America's twenty-first-century electoral mainstream. Engaging with discussions about the “remaking” of American conservatism during Obama's presidency, it particularly frames prepping's growth as being engaged with, and shaped by, currents of mainstream anti-Obama fear that similarly undergirded the Tea Party's rise within popular Republicanism at this time.

The novel of the Greek civil war in the twenty-first century: (post)memory and the weight of the past

2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (2) ◽  
pp. 301-318
Author(s):  
Vassiliki Kaisidou
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Case Studies ◽  
Civil Conflict ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ethical Commitment ◽  
Literary Market ◽  
Twenty First Century

Between the years 2000 and 2015 novels on the Greek civil war (1946–9) flooded the Greek literary market. This raises important questions as to why the burden of the civil conflict weighs heavily upon generations with no experiential connection to these events. This article begins by offering an interpretation for the literary upsurge of the civil war since the 2000s. Then it uses Marianne Hirsch's concept of postmemory to illustrate the authors’ ethical commitment to ‘unsilence’ and redress the past through the use of archival evidence and testimonies. The case studies of ThomasSkassis’Ελληνικόσταυρόλɛξο (2000), Nikos Davvetas’ Λɛυκή πɛτσέτα στορινγκ (2006),and SophiaNikolaidou's Χορɛύουνοιɛλέφαντɛς(2012) serve to illustrate my argument.

Overcoming the Violent Past in Spain, 1939–2009

2012 ◽  
Vol 20 (4) ◽  
pp. 492-504 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pablo Sánchez León
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Supply And Demand ◽  
First Century ◽  
Collective Trauma ◽  
Public Debates ◽  
Revival Movement ◽  
Twenty First Century

Although part of a wider cultural and political phenomenon in world democracies, the revival movement on memory from traumatic past events has in the case of Spain strong contextual bearings. Drawing on the concept of ‘regimes of memory’, this article discusses two successive patterns of supply and demand of discourse and policies on memory from the end of the 1936–1939 Civil War to the beginning of the twenty-first century. Describing the rhetoric of ‘total victory’ under Franco's dictatorship, and later of ‘collective and shared guilt’ under democracy, it outlines a dialectics between hegemonic and non-hegemonic discourses on collective trauma that helps explain the rise and decline of regimes of memory in general, as well as the current orientation of public debates in Spain towards a new regime of memory based on a claim for ‘instituted remembrance’ of the traumatic past.

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