The Spanish indignados: A movement with two souls

2013 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 155-158 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlos Taibo

The Spanish indignados movement has forcefully erupted onto the political landscape of the country. Two different souls can be found at its core: one attached to activists from alternative social movements, the other emerging around the ‘young indignados’. In general terms, a drift can be found within the movement from merely citizenist positions towards others which are more clearly anticapitalist.

2018 ◽  
Vol 74 (4) ◽  
pp. 361-382 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Hein

In Myanmar, hostilities between the majority Burmese and the minority Rakhine people on one side and the minority Rohingya on the other side have been common, but violence has persisted and even increased during the unstable transition away from an authoritarian regime. Most Burmese citizens appear to be united behind the ruling elites on the Rohingya issue. Why is the violence assumed to be of ethnic origin and whose interests are served by the acceptance of such violent acts as routine events? The article attempts to seek answers by following Brass’s framework on Hindu–Muslim violence in India. Its purpose is to examine which actors, mechanisms and institutional developments have been dominant and significant in the re-ethnicisation of the political landscape in Myanmar and how this has consolidated the formation of a contentious and contested specific Rohingya group identity among many Arakanese Muslims.


1993 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 145-171
Author(s):  
Richard J. Arneson

Are socialists best regarded as those who are most truly and consistently committed to democracy, under modern industrial conditions? Is the underlying issue that divides liberals from socialists the degree of their wholeheartedness in affirming the ideal of a democratic society? On the liberal side, Friedrich Hayek has remarked: “It is possible for a dictator to govern in a liberal way. And it is also possible that a democracy governs with a total lack of liberalism. My personal preference is for a liberal dictator and not for a democratic government lacking in liberalism.” No doubt many socialists would wish to quibble with Hayek's free-market oriented conception of liberalism. But I am wondering whether the conceptual map implicit in Hayek's remark is apt. Hayek appears to assume that there are two independent lines of division, one marking greater and lesser commitment to liberal values, the other marking greater and lesser commitment to democratic procedures. According to the conception of socialism as democracy that I wish to examine, a better picture of the political landscape would show one line of division with gradations indicating greater and lesser commitment to democracy. On this continuum, socialists are located at the extreme pro-democratic end, those who favor autocracy at the other end, and liberals somewhere in the middle. The analyst who finds this latter conceptual picture the more illuminating of the two will say that Hayek reveals his rejection of socialism by being less than wholehearted in his support of democracy.


2020 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 121-131
Author(s):  
Joshua Clover

AbstractThis article departs from Joshua Clover’s historical and theoretical schema that locates riots and strikes within the categories of circulation and production struggles, moving from the categories of capital’s reproduction to the reproduction of the proletariat. Here it offers the commune as the exemplary form of the category of reproduction struggle. The commune is understood not as an intentional community of withdrawal but as something like counter-reproduction, able not just to reproduce itself but to strike at capital as an antagonistic force — striking at the vital exposure of an increasingly circulation-centered capitalism. Crucial examples are encampments against extractive capital such as Standing Rock or the ZAD. The article shows how political sovereignty and economic circulation are entirely entangled, pointing to the ways that social movements have looked upon them as separate domains. Therefore, the commune is a process at the crux of the political and the economic, overcoming the tendency to prefer one or the other. Finally, the article discusses the gendered aspect of the sphere of reproduction that makes possible the double confrontation of counter-reproduction.


2019 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 6
Author(s):  
Fidel Azarian

In this paper, we are interested in recovering some current reflections on the possible articulations between marxism and feminism: on one hand, from the theoretical concern for the particular forms of exploitation of women and the LGTBQ comunity within the frame of a neoliberal global hegemony that acquires a new intensity in Latin America, on the other, from the political commitment to the feminisms and activisms of sex-gender dissidence, social movements that in recent times have achieved a surprising political and social mobilization, articulating diverse demands and heterogeneous resistance practices, constituting a powerful laboratory of political experimentation. While these political and intellectual strategies could be read as particular, scattered, fragmentary or discontinuous criticisms, their power lies in their ability to update and articulate historical content and marginalized political languages, disqualified, discarded by the neoliberal-neoconservative hegemony. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and put into discussion these practices of resistance -its legacies and challenges-, not only from the political creativity that they bring to the scene, but also from their constitutive heterogeneity. Our proposal seeks to recover the diversity and complexity of political languages, politicizing ways of subjectivation, emancipatory imaginaries and resistance practices of feminist activism and sex-gender dissidence that have multiplied in Argentina in recent times.


2021 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jorge Mandl Stangl

The COVID-19 pandemic has put enormous pressure on countries around the world, exposing long-standing gaps in public health and exacerbating chronic structural inequalities that, coupled with fragile health systems, have disrupted lives and radically altered the political landscape, especially for vulnerable groups. On the other hand, measures taken to mitigate its impact have highlighted the links between public health and the quality of our environment, our income and work, transport choices, how our children learn, air quality and social justice.


2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-166
Author(s):  
Soula Marinoudi

This article examines the lives of queer people as performed in the biographies of ten interlocutors who participated in the queer political scene during the decade 2000–10. In recent years, a wide range of queer/feminist subjectivities, groups and spaces have emerged within collective social movements in Greece. These new approaches to radical feminism and queer life-forms often convey a sense of discontinuity with the recent past, as queer voices have been marginalized in the anti-authoritarian and the radical leftist political scene until recently. I argue that the anti-authoritarian and leftist political space in and around the various social grassroots movements constituted – in their own right – disciplinary fields as well as gender-constructing mechanisms. Gendered subjectivities, either entirely excluded or included on restrictive terms, exposed the limits of the political body. In this article, I explore how these new queer contexts can work through the traumas out of which they have emerged, and I argue that the emergence of a queer political scene in Greece signals a shift from passionate attachments to new modes of relationality. These new modes of relating expose vulnerabilities and emerge as negotiations of intimacy between the self and the other.


2021 ◽  
pp. 003232922199990
Author(s):  
Areej Sabbagh-Khoury

Knowledge is inextricably bound to power in the context of settler colonialism where apprehension of the Other is a tool of domination. Tracing the development of the “settler colonial” paradigm, this article deconstructs Zionist and Israeli dispossession of Palestinian land and sovereignty, applying the sociology of knowledge production to the study of the Israeli-Palestinian case. The settler colonial paradigm, linked to Israeli critical sociology, post-Zionism, and postcolonialism, reemerged following changes in the political landscape from the mid-1990s that reframed the history of the Nakba as enduring, challenged the Jewish definition of the state, and legitimated Palestinians as agents of history. Palestinian scholars in Israel lead the paradigm’s reformulation. This article offers a phenomenology of Palestinian positionality, a critical potential for decolonizing the settler colonial structure and exclusive Jewish sovereignty, to consolidate a field of study that shapes not only research into the Israeli-Palestinian case but approaches to decolonization and liberation.


2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 36-61 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hrishikesh Joshi

The American political landscape exhibits significant polarization. People’s political beliefs cluster around two main camps. However, many of the issues with respect to which these two camps disagree seem to be rationally orthogonal. This feature raises an epistemic challenge for the political partisan. If she is justified in consistently adopting the party line, it must be true that her side is reliable on the issues that are the subject of disagreements. It would then follow that the other side is anti-reliable with respect to a host of orthogonal political issues. Yet, it is difficult to find a psychologically plausible explanation for why one side would get things reliably wrong with respect to a wide range of orthogonal issues. While this project’s empirical discussion focuses on the US context, the argument generalizes to any situation where political polarization exists on a sufficiently large number of orthogonal claims.


Author(s):  
John Sides ◽  
Michael Tesler ◽  
Lynn Vavreck

As 2015 got underway, most Americans were poised for another Bush vs. Clinton presidential election, but by the middle of the year it was clear something unexpected was unfolding in the race for the White House. In this article, we illuminate the political landscape heading into the 2016 election, paying special attention to the public’s mood, their assessments of government, their attitudes about race and members of the other party, and the health of the nation’s economy. Fundamental predictors of election outcomes did not clearly favor either side, but an increasing ethnic diversity in the electorate, alongside a racially polarized electorate, was favorable to Democrats. Ultimately, an ambivalent electorate divided by party and race set the stage for a presidential primary that played directly on these divisions, and for a general election whose outcome initially appeared far from certain.


2012 ◽  
Vol 7 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 137-155
Author(s):  
Wai-Yip Ho

The key concept of this article is that while the predominant focus of the rise of cyber Islamic environments (CIEs) has been on the Middle East and the West, there exists a neglected but emerging trend of the Chinese-speaking Islamic websites in the midst of growing autonomy of civil social movements as well as the state surveillance. Among the ten Muslim nationalities in China, I first surveys the general situations of the cyber environments in China, in which the Hui Islamic websites embedded, and then go on to explore the development and features of some representative Hui Islamic websites. This article illustrates the challenge for Chinese CIEs is to resolve the identity politics, on the one hand demonstrating the political loyalty to the sovereign power of People’s Republic of China (PRC) and identifying the global ummah in terms of transborder religious solidarity on the other hand.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document