India: Federalism, Majoritarian Nationalism, and the Vulnerable and Marginalized

2021 ◽  
pp. 173-188
Author(s):  
Reeta Chowdhari Tremblay ◽  
Namitha George

This chapter traces the history of Covid-19 in India and the government’s response. India has a long and tarnished history of reaching for emergency powers, which stretches back to the colonial period, in times of political crisis. Although India did not declare a formal constitutional emergency after its first reported case of Covid-19, within just under eight weeks, India went from “no health emergency” to a country-wide twenty-one-day lockdown. Despite a daily record jump in the number of deaths and cases each day since mid-March, India’s Ministry of Health, Family, and Welfare has consistently maintained a narrative that the growth rate of the Covid-19 cases in India has remained linear and not exponential; that its strict twenty-one-day lockdown, whose objective was preventive, has successfully slowed the spread of the virus; that India is “on the path of success and will win the war against the pandemic”; and that the two extensions of the lockdown should be considered an exit strategy. The chapter then discusses the policy instruments invoked to respond to the pandemic and examines some of the challenges and consequences resulting from them: the federal jurisdictional management of a pandemic, particularly in the treatment of informal migrant workers; and the reinforcement of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s populism and Hindutva majoritarian nationalism.

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-113
Author(s):  
N. E. Anikeeva

In this article the author analyses the development of political process in Spain between the two crises of 2015–2016 and 2019–2020, highlighting the strong suits and problem issues of the domestic political debate, including the Catalan issue, as well as the problem related to the migration aspect. An overview of the evolution of the country’s foreign policy agenda is presented, including the foreign policy course towards the Russian Federation. The author analyzes political and economic aspects after the general parliamentary elections of June 26, 2016, which resulted in overcoming the governmental crisis that began in Spain in December 2015 and establishing Mariano Rajoy the head of the Popular Party (PP) government. The latest cabinet of the PP government was approved in November 2016. Rajoy himself had been serving as a Prime Minister of Spain from December 2011 to June 2018. Soon, a new stage in the political history of the Spanish state began, which was associated with the rise to power of the Spanish Socialist Workers Party (PSOE) led by Pedro Sánchez since 2018. PSOE thus won the parliamentary elections in Spain on April 28, 2019. The next elections in 2019 were held on November 10 and turned out to be much more complex and unpredictable than the previous one. PSOE stroke a similar political balance of power to that of April. Confirmation of Pedro Sánchez as a Prime Minister of Spain in January 2020 ended a protracted political crisis in the country, when the Spanish government had been in an acting status for some eight months.


Oh Capitano! ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 79-94
Author(s):  
Rudolph J. Vecoli ◽  
Francesco Durante

This chapter examines Celso Cesare Moreno's role in the political crisis that culminated in the overthrow of the Kingdom of Hawaii. It first provides a background on the history of the Kingdom of Hawaii and describes its political situation upon Moreno's arrival in 1879. It then considers Moreno's alliance with David Kalākaua, king of Hawaii, and how the animosity between Moreno and the American ambassador, James M. Comly, helped precipitate a political upheaval in the kingdom. It also discusses Moreno's attempt to secure a subsidy from the Kingdom for his steamship line, the China Merchants Steam Navigation Company (CMSNC), before concluding with an analysis of the constitutional crisis that erupted in 1880 after Kalākaua suspended the legislature, formed a new cabinet, and appointed Moreno prime minister and minister of foreign affairs.


Author(s):  
Durba Mitra

During the colonial period in India, European scholars, British officials, and elite Indian intellectuals—philologists, administrators, doctors, ethnologists, sociologists, and social critics—deployed ideas about sexuality to understand modern Indian society. This book shows how deviant female sexuality, particularly the concept of the prostitute, became foundational to this knowledge project and became the primary way to think and write about Indian society. The book reveals that deviant female sexuality was critical to debates about social progress and exclusion, caste domination, marriage, widowhood and inheritance, women's performance, the trafficking of girls, abortion and infanticide, industrial and domestic labor, indentured servitude, and ideologies about the dangers of Muslim sexuality. British authorities and Indian intellectuals used the concept of the prostitute to argue for the dramatic reorganization of modern Indian society around Hindu monogamy. The book demonstrates how the intellectual history of modern social thought is based in a dangerous civilizational logic built on the control and erasure of women's sexuality. This logic continues to hold sway in present-day South Asia and the postcolonial world. Reframing the prostitute as a concept, the book overturns long-established notions of how to write the history of modern social thought in colonial India, and opens up new approaches for the global history of sexuality.


2020 ◽  
pp. 74-86
Author(s):  
Alexandra Arkhangelskaya

The history of the formation of South Africa as a single state is closely intertwined with events of international scale, which have accordingly influenced the definition and development of the main characteristics of the foreign policy of the emerging state. The Anglo-Boer wars and a number of other political and economic events led to the creation of the Union of South Africa under the protectorate of the British Empire in 1910. The political and economic evolution of the Union of South Africa has some specific features arising from specific historical conditions. The colonization of South Africa took place primarily due to the relocation of Dutch and English people who were mainly engaged in business activities (trade, mining, agriculture, etc.). Connected by many economic and financial threads with the elite of the countries from which the settlers left, the local elite began to develop production in the region at an accelerated pace. South Africa’s favorable climate and natural resources have made it a hub for foreign and local capital throughout the African continent. The geostrategic position is of particular importance for foreign policy in South Africa, which in many ways predetermined a great interest and was one of the fundamental factors of international involvement in the development of the region. The role of Jan Smuts, who served as Prime Minister of the Union of South Africa from 1919 to 1924 and from 1939 to 1948, was particularly prominent in the implementation of the foreign and domestic policy of the Union of South Africa in the focus period of this study. The main purpose of this article is to study the process of forming the mechanisms of the foreign policy of the Union of South Africa and the development of its diplomatic network in the period from 1910 to 1948.


Author(s):  
Andrzej Marzec

The author analyzes Sven Agustijnen's Specters from the philosophical perspective. He tries to prove that the cinema of the Belgian director is haunted because it presents the reality as made out of traces, which disturb the traditional division into presence and absence. The author analyzes Augustijnen's film techniques and uses Jacques Derrida hauntology to show, how contemporary cinema tries to face the difficult and unfinished colonial history of Belgium (the genocide in Congo during the reign of the Belgian king Leopold II and the murder of the first prime minister of the independent Congo, Patrice Lumumba).


Asian Survey ◽  
2015 ◽  
Vol 55 (1) ◽  
pp. 48-59
Author(s):  
Aqil Shah ◽  
Bushra Asif

A year after assuming power, Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif’s government faced a political crisis fomented by the pro-military opposition leader Imran Khan, who mobilized his supporters to protest alleged electoral rigging in the 2013 poll. Khan had to call off the protests after the Pakistani Taliban’s grisly terrorist attack on an army-run school in retaliation for the army’s offensive against them in North Waziristan.


2021 ◽  
pp. 223386592110183
Author(s):  
Yuliya Brel-Fournier ◽  
Minion K.C. Morrison

Belarusian citizens elected their first president in 1994. More than 20 years later, in October 2015, the same person triumphantly won the fifth consecutive presidential election. In August 2020, President Lukashenko’s attempt to get re-elected for the sixth time ended in months’ long mass protests against the electoral fraud, unspeakable violence used by the riot police against peaceful protesters and the deepest political crisis in the modern history of Belarus. This article analyzes how and why the first democratically elected Belarusian president attained this long-serving status. It suggests that his political longevity was conditioned by a specific social contract with the society that was sustained for many years. In light of the recent events, it is obvious that the contract is breached with the regime no longer living up to the bargain with the Belarusian people. As a result, the citizens seem unwilling to maintain their obligation for loyalty. We analyze the escalating daily price for maintaining the status quo and conclude considering the possible implications of this broken pact for the future of Belarus.


Author(s):  
Enrico Landoni

The election of Bettino Craxi as PSI general secretary marked, from 1976, a very important turning point in thehistory of Italian socialism. His dynamic and charismatic leadership in fact contributed to a profound revisionof its ideological seeds, the so-called scientific Marxism, and above all to the recovery of the humanitarianand libertarian suggestions of pre-Marxist socialism. This led to the clear and definitive condemnation of theMarxist-Leninist model, which had found its practical realization in the Soviet system and in the countriesbeyond the Curtain, and prompted PSI to support the anti-communist dissidence and to establish strongrelations with the Polish opposition and above all with Solidarność. Craxi, both in the role of PSI generalsecretary and as Italian prime minister, was able to provide it with a great political-diplomatic support and alot of concrete help. Up to now, the history of these relations has not yet been adequately studied and thispaper therefore aims to fill the gap.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christopher S. van den Berg

Cicero's Brutus (46 BCE), a tour-de-force of intellectual and political history, was written amidst political crisis: Caesar's defeat of the republican resistance at the battle of Thapsus. This magisterial example of the dialogue genre capaciously documents the intellectual vibrancy of the Roman Republic and its Greco-Roman traditions. This book is the first study of the work from several distinct yet interrelated perspectives: Cicero's account of oratorical history, the confrontation with Caesar, and the exploration of what it means to write a history of an artistic practice. Close readings of this dialogue-including its apparent contradictions and tendentious fabrications-reveal a crucial and crucially productive moment in Greco-Roman thought. Cicero, this book argues, created the first nuanced, sophisticated, and ultimately 'modern' literary history, crafting both a compelling justification of Rome's oratorical traditions and also laying a foundation for literary historiography that abides to this day.


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