Saving the Canadian Fur Industry’s Hide: Government’s strategic use of private authority to constrain radical activism

2019 ◽  
Vol 40 (8) ◽  
pp. 1241-1267 ◽  
Author(s):  
Johnny Boghossian ◽  
José Carlos Marques
Keyword(s):  
Regulatory Authority ◽  
Standard Setting ◽  
The Political ◽  
International Debate ◽  
Political Opportunities ◽  
Private Authority ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
Multi Stakeholder ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Radical Activism

We examine the relationship between private and public regulatory authority in contexts characterized by radical transnational activist contestation against industry practices. Employing a comparative case design, we study government responses to similar activist campaigns calling for a trade ban on Canada’s sealing and fur industries. Relying on conventional public authority, the Canadian government was unable to prevent a European ban on seal skin products, leading to the collapse of its sealing industry. In contrast, its response to anti-fur trapping activists successfully employed private authority in the form of a standard-setting multi-stakeholder initiative (MSI). Doing so not only averted a ban but effectively shut down international debate over restrictions concerning the sale of products using trapped fur. Drawing from social movement theory on activist heterogeneity and political opportunity structure, we introduce a novel conceptualization of standard-setting MSIs as strategic instruments employed by governments to constrain the political opportunities for radical transnational activists. Our findings contribute to the literatures examining interactions between private and public regulatory authority, instruments of government repression and the political dynamics surrounding MSIs.

The ‘Lyric I’

2021 ◽  
pp. 52-80
Author(s):  
Carmen Bugan
Keyword(s):  
Personal Identity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Artistic Process ◽  
The Family ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
The Voice

There are two aspects of personal identity that often clash in the artistic process originating in oppression; they destabilize the voice of the ‘lyric I’. This chapter raises several questions about the relationship between personal biography and the construction of a lyric speaker, and explores the notion of a poetics that insists on healing the damage that politics does to the family; it discusses what happens when private and public identities become conflated because of politics, and how poetry ‘acts’ on the sense of family as a social microcosm where the conflict between the sense of the political self and the private self takes place.

Women, Economic Dependency and Citizenship

1990 ◽  
Vol 19 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-467 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Lister
Keyword(s):  
Division Of Labour ◽  
Policy Implications ◽  
The Political ◽  
Domestic Life ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
Sexual Division ◽  
Economic Dependency ◽  
Paid Employment ◽  
Private And Public ◽  
The Relationship

ABSTRACTCitizenship is, once again, on the political and academic agenda. This article explores some of its meanings for women. It examines some of the contradictions raised by notions of dependence and independence and the relationship between ‘private’ and ‘public’ forms of dependence. It then considers the implications of financial dependence and of the sexual division of labour and of time for women's rights and obligations as social, political and ‘active’ citizens. It concludes by drawing out briefly some policy implications, arguing that radical changes are needed in domestic life and in the organisation of paid employment and state provisions, if women are to be full citizens. This will require changing both our conceptions of Citizenship and the structures which fashion citizenship rights. Ultimately, neither the question of dependency nor of citizenship can be divorced from that of power.

Structuring power: business and authority beyond the nation state

2015 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 527-552 ◽  
Author(s):  
Henry Farrell ◽  
Abraham L. Newman
Keyword(s):  
International Political Economy ◽  
Global Markets ◽  
The Political ◽  
Privacy Regulation ◽  
Structural Power ◽  
Political Opportunities ◽  
Mobile Capital ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Exit Options ◽  
Exploratory Case Studies

What is the relationship between globalization and the political power of business? Much of the existing literature focuses on the ability of mobile capital to threaten exit in order to press for more business friendly rules. In this article, we refine arguments about exit options in global markets by arguing that the relative exit options available to business and other actors are neither fixed, nor exogenous consequences of some generically conceived process of globalization. Instead, they themselves are the result of struggles between actors with different interests and political opportunities. Since exit options play a crucial role in determining the relative structural power of business vis-à-vis other actors, we dub the power to shape exit optionsstructuring power, distinguishing it from structural power, and argue that it is crucial to explaining it. We identify two channels through which actors can shape exit options – extending jurisdictional reach and reshaping the rules of other jurisdictions – and the factors that will make regulators and business more or less capable of exercising structuring power. We then use two exploratory case studies – one involving privacy regulation, the other accountancy standards – to illustrate how structuring power can work to shape exit options, and thus structural power. We conclude by considering the relationship between structuring power, structural power, and the existing literature in comparative and international political economy.

“On the Social-Economic Front”: The Polemics of Shtetl Research during the Stalin Revolution

2007 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 239-301 ◽  
Author(s):  
Deborah Yalen
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Old Regime ◽  
International Debate ◽  
Statistical Knowledge ◽  
Small Market ◽  
Jewish Settlement ◽  
The Social ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
Socioeconomic Data ◽  
The Relationship

ArgumentThis article explores the relationship between ideology and statistical knowledge in Soviet Yiddish scholarship during the first Five-Year Plan and Cultural Revolution. Specifically, it examines the political status of Yiddish-language socioeconomic research as a tool of state building in the shtetls (small market towns) of the former Pale of Jewish Settlement. Historically, many Jewish inhabitants of the shtetl worked as economic middlemen between city and countryside, a function that became politically untenable after 1917. The Soviet regime sponsored Yiddish socioeconomic data collection in order to monitor its efforts to transform the occupational structure of shtetl Jewry. Accordingly, this data was expected to demonstrate the steady self-disintegration of the shtetl as an obsolete artifact of the old regime. In fact, these Soviet Yiddish narratives inadvertently highlighted the endurance of the shtetl in Soviet life at both the concrete and discursive levels. A close reading of these sources provides insight into how a segment of the Soviet Jewish intelligentsia attempted to align itself within the new state's scientific establishment by fusing modern Jewish social scientific knowledge with Marxist-Leninist principles. In the polemics of the “shtetl problem” we find an example of how Soviet yidishe visnshaft registered the constantly shifting perceptions of ideological orthodoxy and deviation among Jewish Communists, and provoked international debate among Jewish demographers and economists as to the political use and abuse of statistics.

Kämpfe um Bergbau und die Möglichkeiten demokratischer Transformation

2017 ◽  
Vol 47 (189) ◽  
Author(s):  
Kristina Dietz
Keyword(s):  
Direct Democracy ◽  
Social Power ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
The Political ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Political Effects ◽  
Mining Project ◽  
National Governments ◽  
The Relationship

The article explores the political effects of popular consultations as a means of direct democracy in struggles over mining. Building on concepts from participatory and materialist democracy theory, it shows the transformative potentials of processes of direct democracy towards democratization and emancipation under, and beyond, capitalist and liberal democratic conditions. Empirically the analysis is based on a case study on the protests against the La Colosa gold mining project in Colombia. The analysis reveals that although processes of direct democracy in conflicts over mining cannot transform existing class inequalities and social power relations fundamentally, they can nevertheless alter elements thereof. These are for example the relationship between local and national governments, changes of the political agenda of mining and the opening of new spaces for political participation, where previously there were none. It is here where it’s emancipatory potential can be found.

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emma Simone
Keyword(s):  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cartesian Dualism ◽  
Self And Other ◽  
The World ◽  
Binary Oppositions ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Existential Perspective

Virginia Woolf and Being-in-the-world: A Heideggerian Study explores Woolf’s treatment of the relationship between self and world from a phenomenological-existential perspective. This study presents a timely and compelling interpretation of Virginia Woolf’s textual treatment of the relationship between self and world from the perspective of the philosophy of Martin Heidegger. Drawing on Woolf’s novels, essays, reviews, letters, diary entries, short stories, and memoirs, the book explores the political and the ontological, as the individual’s connection to the world comes to be defined by an involvement and engagement that is always already situated within a particular physical, societal, and historical context. Emma Simone argues that at the heart of what it means to be an individual making his or her way in the world, the perspectives of Woolf and Heidegger are founded upon certain shared concerns, including the sustained critique of Cartesian dualism, particularly the resultant binary oppositions of subject and object, and self and Other; the understanding that the individual is a temporal being; an emphasis upon intersubjective relations insofar as Being-in-the-world is defined by Being-with-Others; and a consistent emphasis upon average everydayness as both determinative and representative of the individual’s relationship to and with the world.

Imagining the Sudan in British Film, 1925–53

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (3) ◽  
pp. 334-354
Author(s):  
Zach Bates
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Popular Literature ◽  
The Political ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
The Relationship

Due to its status as a territory under the joint rule of Egypt and Britain, the Sudan occupied an awkward place in the British Empire. Because of this, it has not received much attention from scholars. In theory, it was not a colony, but, in practice, the Sudan was ruled primarily by British administrators and was the site of several developmental schemes, most of which concerned cotton-growing and harnessing the waters of the Nile. It was also the site of popular literature, travelogues and the most well-known of Alexander Korda's empire films. This article focuses on five British films –  Cotton Growing in the Sudan (c.1925), Stark Nature (1930), Stampede (1930), The Four Feathers (1939) and They Planted a Stone (1953) – that take the Sudan as their subject. It argues that each of these films shows an evolving and related discourse of the region that embraced several motifs: cooperation as the foundation of the relationship between the Sudanese and the British; Sudanese peoples in conflict with a sometimes hostile landscape and environment that the British could ‘tame’; and the British being in the Sudan in order to improve it and its people before leaving them to self-government. However, some of the films, especially The Four Feathers, subtly questioned and subverted the British presence in the Sudan and engaged with a number of the political questions not overtly mentioned in documentaries. The article, therefore, argues for a nuanced and complex picture of representations of the Sudan in British film from 1925 to 1953.

On Metaphysics and the Political: A Polemics of Reading Baudelaire in the 1930s

2019 ◽  
Vol 58 (2) ◽  
pp. 249-259
Author(s):  
Joseph Acquisto
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Crisis ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern Poetry ◽  
Progressive Politics ◽  
The World ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Insight Into

This essay examines a polemic between two Baudelaire critics of the 1930s, Jean Cassou and Benjamin Fondane, which centered on the relationship of poetry to progressive politics and metaphysics. I argue that a return to Baudelaire's poetry can yield insight into what seems like an impasse in Cassou and Fondane. Baudelaire provides the possibility of realigning metaphysics and politics so that poetry has the potential to become the space in which we can begin to think the two of them together, as opposed to seeing them in unresolvable tension. Or rather, the tension that Baudelaire animates between the two allows us a new way of thinking about the role of esthetics in moments of political crisis. We can in some ways see Baudelaire as responding, avant la lettre, to two of his early twentieth-century readers who correctly perceived his work as the space that breathes a new urgency into the questions of how modern poetry relates to the world from which it springs and in which it intervenes.

Risk, Desire and Adaptation: The Paradox of Queer Solidarity and the Political Possibility of Death Under Neoliberalism and Homonationalism

Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 185-200
Author(s):  
Natalie Kouri-Towe
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Political Activism ◽  
State Violence ◽  
The Political ◽  
Sexual Rights ◽  
Political Strategy ◽  
Rights Discourse ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Strategy I

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.

The Fragmentation of the Palestinian Political Field

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 189-216
Author(s):  
Jamil Hilal
Keyword(s):  
Women Workers ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Field ◽  
Cultural Field ◽  
National Representation ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Palestinian National Movement ◽  
The Relationship

The mid-1960s saw the beginnings of the construction of a Palestinian political field after it collapsed in 1948, when, with the British government’s support of the Zionist movement, which succeeded in establishing the state of Israel, the Palestinian national movement was crushed. This article focuses mainly on the Palestinian political field as it developed in the 1960s and 1970s, the beginnings of its fragmentation in the 1990s, and its almost complete collapse in the first decade of this century. It was developed on a structure characterized by the dominance of a center where the political leadership functioned. The center, however, was established outside historic Palestine. This paper examines the components and dynamics of the relationship between the center and the peripheries, and the causes of the decline of this center and its eventual disappearance, leaving the constituents of the Palestinian people under local political leadership following the collapse of the national representation institutions, that is, the political, organizational, military, cultural institutions and sectorial organizations (women, workers, students, etc.) that made up the PLO and its frameworks. The paper suggests that the decline of the political field as a national field does not mean the disintegration of the cultural field. There are, in fact, indications that the cultural field has a new vitality that deserves much more attention than it is currently assigned.

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