Zakhar Prilepin, the National Bolshevik Movement and Catachrestic Politics

2016 ◽  
Vol 12 (1) ◽  
pp. 136-158
Author(s):  
Tomi Huttunen ◽  
Jussi Lassila

This article examines the Russian writer and publicist Zakhar Prilepin, a visible representative of Russiaʼs patriotic currents since 2014, and a well-known activist of the radical oppositional National Bolshevik Party (nbp) since 2006. We argue that Prilepinʼs public views point at particular catachrestic political activism. Catachresis is understood here as a socio-semantic misuse of conventional concepts as well as a practice in which political identifications blur the distinctions defining established political activity. The background for the catachrestic politics, as used in this article, was formed by the 1990s post-Soviet turmoil and by Russiaʼs weak socio-political institutions, which facilitate and sustain the space for the self-purposeful radicalism and non-conformism – the trademarks of nbp. Prilepinʼs and nbpʼs narrated experience of fatherlessness related to the 1990s was compensated by personal networks and cultural idols, which often present mutually conflicting positions. In Pierre Bourdieuʼs terminology, Prilepin and the Nationalist Bolshevik’s case illustrate the strength of the literary field over the civic-political one. Catachrestic politics helps to conceptualize not only Prilepin’s activities but also contributes to the study of the political style of the National Bolshevik Party, Prilepinʼs main political base. As a whole, the paper provides insights into the study of Russiaʼs public intellectuals who have played an important role in Russiaʼs political discussion in the place of of well-established political movements.

2021 ◽  
Vol 17 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-102
Author(s):  
Irina Samarkina ◽  

The article presents the results of a theoretical analysis of the political worldview as part of the subjective space of politics in a network society and its empirical verification. The author shows that the integration of phenomenology and the network approach allows researchers to advance their understanding of content and parameters of the political worldview of network communities as part of the subjective space of modern public policy. The analysis of the discourse of network communities makes it possible to identify, describe and analyze the features of their political worldview. The author presents an original methodology, created within the framework of the RFBR research project "Subjective Space of Politics: Opportunities and Challenges of a Network Society", for studying the political world view of network communities and the empirical results obtained with its usage. In particular, the typology of political worldviews existing in network communities is described. It reflects the structural and substantive components of the political worldview in the discourse of network communities: the core of the political worldview (reflecting the ontological level of the political worldview, including images of the Motherland, state, power), political roles, political institutions (the last two clusters reflect the basic level of the political worldview elements), political participation (reflects the instrumental level of the political worldview), socio-political problems). The typology of political worldviews of network communities identified (zero, horizontal, non-political, activity and political world view of active resistance) requires verification in further research. An important result of the empirical analysis is the identification of two political worldview profiles (closed and open) and their connection with the dominant type of participant socio-political activity in network communities. Further study in this direction will improve analytical and predictive tools for research and practical work with network communities.


2020 ◽  
Vol 15 (5) ◽  
pp. 155-156
Author(s):  
O.G. SHCHENINA ◽  

The purpose of the article is to study the concept of a political person in the context of the anthropo-humanistic turn, which is carried out in social and humanitarian knowledge. The political science perspective of studying a person in the political space of a network society presupposes an analysis of the features of his political participation, political behavior, political activity in the context of a new social reality. The main content of the article is the study of a number of approaches of the concept under consideration in political science and the identification of the main characteristics of a political person in a network society. The author is based on the methods of content analysis, discourse analysis, a systematic approach, the results of opinion polls about the attitude of citizens to politics, their trust in socio-political institutions. The analysis showed that in a network society there are changes in the forms and types of former political practices, the participation of a modern political person in them, where, under the influence of information flows, their consciousness and worldview change. At the same time, in the context of informatization, digitalization, network, humanization of society, the role of a person in the political process will also change.


Philosophy ◽  
1963 ◽  
Vol 38 (144) ◽  
pp. 117-135
Author(s):  
P. H. Partridge

In recent years, political scientists have talked a great deal about the proper definition of their subject, and of how the ‘field’ of the political scientist is best distinguished from that of other social scientists. One proposal that is frequently made is that political science might quite properly be defined as the study of power, its forms, its sources, its distribution, its modes of exercise, its effects. The general justification for this proposal is, of course, that political activity itself appears to be connected very intimately with power: it is often said that political activity is a struggle for power; that constitutions and other political institutions are methods of defining and regularising the distribution and the exercise of power, and so on. Since there seems to be some sense in which one can say that, within the wider area of social life, the political field is that which has some special connection with power, it may seem plausible then to suggest that the study of politics focusses upon the study of power.


1998 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-264 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip Pajakowski

The most important historical works of today are those that take the past of a single nation and state as their subject, for the nation and the state are the highest natural, independently developing organism that humanity has yet achieved.Like most nineteenth-century historians, Michal Bobrzyński directed his research to the study of his nation's past and especially to the development of political institutions. History, for him, served to enhance a sense of nationhood among his readers by deriving lessons from the experience of the national community and providing a basis for present political activity. As a politically engaged historian, Bobrzyński faced serious issues of the need to reorient Polish national identity and to refashion the historical imagination to meet the needs of his people in the face of the political situation in the last three decades of the nineteenth century.


2018 ◽  
Vol 53 (3) ◽  
pp. 1101-1133 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jared Stanfield ◽  
Robert Tumarkin

Whereas corporate political connections are known to enhance equity values, we demonstrate that union political activity can have the opposite effect. We examine the consequences of a recent Australian state law that restricts union political activity but does not change collective bargaining rights. In the wake of this law, the equity values of affected unionized firms significantly increase, and consistent with this market reaction, these firms are able to bargain for more favorable labor contracts than their unionized peers in other states. The evidence strongly suggests that unions use political activism to extract rents from shareholders and benefit their members.


2016 ◽  
Vol 9 ◽  
pp. 4-36
Author(s):  
Ihar Bortnik

The article is devoted to the analysis of the special character of the political culture in Polotsk Voivodship at the end of the 16th and the beginning of the 17th century. The research of these phenomena is based on the instructions for local parliaments (sejmiks) as a source base and provides for a distinction between three aspects: the attitude of the gentry towards the existing political system and its institutions; social and political values and norms of the gentry; the gentry’s response to decisions made by political institutions as well as its requirements and wishes towards the political system. The author has come to the conclusion that the political culture of the Polotsk gentry at the turn of the 16th and 17th century is characterized by high level of political activity.


Author(s):  
Christian Gilliam

Christian Gilliam argues that a philosophy of ‘pure’ immanence is integral to the development of an alternative understanding of ‘the political’; one that re-orients our understanding of the self toward the concept of an unconscious or ‘micropolitical’ life of desire. He argues that here, in this ‘life’, is where the power relations integral to the continuation of post-industrial capitalism are most present and most at stake. Through proving its philosophical context, lineage and political import, Gilliam ultimately justifies the conceptual necessity of immanence in understanding politics and resistance, thereby challenging the claim that ontologies of ‘pure’ immanence are either apolitical or politically incoherent.


Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Natalie Kouri-Towe

In 2015, Queers Against Israeli Apartheid Toronto (QuAIA Toronto) announced that it was retiring. This article examines the challenges of queer solidarity through a reflection on the dynamics between desire, attachment and adaptation in political activism. Tracing the origins and sites of contestation over QuAIA Toronto's participation in the Toronto Pride parade, I ask: what does it mean for a group to fashion its own end? Throughout, I interrogate how gestures of solidarity risk reinforcing the very systems that activists desire to resist. I begin by situating contemporary queer activism in the ideological and temporal frameworks of neoliberalism and homonationalism. Next, I turn to the attempts to ban QuAIA Toronto and the term ‘Israeli apartheid’ from the Pride parade to examine the relationship between nationalism and sexual citizenship. Lastly, I examine how the terms of sexual rights discourse require visible sexual subjects to make individual rights claims, and weighing this risk against political strategy, I highlight how queer solidarities are caught in a paradox symptomatic of our times: neoliberalism has commodified human rights discourses and instrumentalised sexualities to serve the interests of hegemonic power and obfuscate state violence. Thinking through the strategies that worked and failed in QuAIA Toronto's seven years of organising, I frame the paper though a proposal to consider political death as a productive possibility for social movement survival in the 21stcentury.


2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ирина Юдина ◽  
Irina Yudina

This work is an attempt to explain the political roots from which banking systems have evolved in different countries and how they have evolved at different times. For this purpose, materials and analysis tools from three different disciplines were used: economic history, political science and Economics. The main idea that is set out in this paper is the statement that the strength and weakness of the banking system is a consequence of the Great political game and that the rules of this game are written by the main political institutions.


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan G. Voelkel ◽  
Dongning Ren ◽  
Mark John Brandt

The political divide is characterized by liberals and conservatives who hold strong prejudice against each other. Here we introduce one possible strategy for reducing political prejudice: political inclusion. We define political inclusion as receiving a fair chance to voice one’s opinions in a discussion of political topics with political outgroup members. This strategy may reduce political prejudice by inducing perceptions of the political outgroup as fair and respectful; however, such a strategy may also highlight conflicting attitudes and worldviews, thereby further exacerbating prejudice. In three preregistered studies (total N = 799), we test if political inclusion reduces or increases prejudice toward the political outgroup. Specifically, political inclusion was manipulated with either an imagined scenario (Study 1) or a concurrent experience in an ostensible online political discussion (Studies 2 & 3). Across all studies, participants who were politically included by political outgroup members reported reduced prejudice toward their outgroup compared to participants in a neutral control condition (Cohen’s d [-0.27, -0.50]). This effect was mediated by perceptions of the political outgroup as fairer and less dissimilar in their worldviews. Our results indicate that political discussions that are politically inclusive do not cause additional prejudice via worldview conflict, but instead give others a feeling of being heard. It is a promising strategy to reduce political prejudice.


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