Mourning the death of a state to enliven it: Notes on the ‘weak’ Yemeni state

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (2) ◽  
pp. 227-244
Author(s):  
Kamilia Al-Eriani
Keyword(s):  
Gulf Cooperation Council ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Weak State ◽  
Social Disintegration ◽  
Alternative Approach

Observers interested in Yemen often worry about the near collapse of the Yemeni state. Such worries assume that the death of the state will lead to a complete social disintegration. With a brief reflection on the 2011 Gulf Cooperation Council Initiative, the recent US–Saudi-led intervention, this article argues that thinking about the Yemeni state through public worry is an exercise in symbolic violence. This violence articulates itself through the erasure of Yemenis’ communitarian culture; an erasure that becomes the condition for perpetuating the life of the discursively produced ‘weak’ state, and the domination of regional-international powers. This article proposes an alternative approach towards rethinking the ‘weak’ Yemeni state. It suggests that rethinking the Yemeni state through mourning its death could possibly give birth to a novel form of political community. It is through acts of mourning the injury and (imagined) death of the weak Yemeni state that the promise of the state as a unifying apparatus is reclaimed.

‘Party in the street’: The partisan politics of space

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
David Jenkins ◽  
Lipin Ram
Keyword(s):  
Public Sphere ◽  
Public Space ◽  
State Power ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Legitimacy ◽  
Partisan Politics ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Public Sphere

Public space is often understood as an important ‘node’ of the public sphere. Typically, theorists of public space argue that it is through the trust, civility and openness to others which citizens cultivate within a democracy’s public spaces, that they learn how to relate to one another as fellow members of a shared polity. However, such theorizing fails to articulate how these democratic comportments learned within public spaces relate to the public sphere’s purported role in holding state power to account. In this paper, we examine the ways in which what we call ‘partisan interventions’ into public space can correct for this gap. Using the example of the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), we argue that the ways in which CPIM partisans actively cultivate sites of historical regional importance – such as in the village of Kayyur – should be understood as an aspect of the party’s more general concern to present itself to citizens as an agent both capable and worthy of wielding state power. Drawing on histories of supreme partisan contribution and sacrifice, the party influences the ideational background – in competition with other parties – against which it stakes its claims to democratic legitimacy. In contrast to those theorizations of public space that celebrate its separateness from the institutions of formal democratic politics and the state more broadly, the CPIM’s partisan interventions demonstrate how parties’ locations at the intersections of the state and civil society can connect the public sphere to its task of holding state power to account, thereby bringing the explicitly political questions of democratic legitimacy into the everyday spaces of a political community.

War without Citizens

2018 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 18-38
Author(s):  
Stephen J. Rosow
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Consumer Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Democratic Citizenship ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
Liberal Democratic ◽  
Advanced Technologies

Contestation over war memorialization can help democratic theory respond to the current attenuation of citizenship in war in liberal democratic states, especially the United States. As war involves more advanced technologies and fewer soldiers, the relation of citizenship to war changes. In this context war memorialization plays a particular role in refiguring the relation. Current practices of remembering and memorializing war in contemporary neoliberal states respond to a dilemma: the state needs to justify and garner support for continual wars while distancing citizenship from participation. The result is a consumer culture of memorialization that seeks to effect a unity of the political community while it fights wars with few citizens and devalues the public. Neoliberal wars fought with few soldiers and an economic logic reveals the vulnerability to otherness that leads to more active and critical democratic citizenship.

Reversal of Fortunes: Transformations in State-NGO Relations in Bangladesh

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4-5) ◽  
pp. 579-594 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lamia Karim
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Present Condition ◽  
Nobel Peace Prize ◽  
Grameen Bank ◽  
Authoritarian Rule ◽  
Weak State ◽  
The Government ◽  
Relationship Of

In 2011, the government of Bangladesh began an investigation into the financial dealings of the Grameen Bank that won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. This disciplining of a world-renowned institution and its founder by the state reconfigures the altered relationship between the state and NGOs in Bangladesh. This article investigates this about-face between the state and NGOs from the 1990s, when their relationship was characterized as ‘partners in development’, to the late 2000s when the state saw the leading NGOs and their leaders as potential political adversaries. In Bangladesh, the former relationship of a weak state vis-à-vis the powerful, western-funded NGO has been recalibrated. Under the present condition of authoritarian rule, the state is willing to accept the role of the NGO as a development actor but not as a political contender. This article examines this shifting relationship between the state and NGOs.

scholarly journals Territoriality Beyond the State: The EU’s Territorial Claims and the Search for Their Legitimacy

2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 650-672
Author(s):  
Josef Weinzierl
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Other ◽  
Main Question ◽  
Eu Law ◽  
European Level ◽  
Territorial Claims ◽  
The One ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Eu

AbstractQuite a few recent ECJ judgments touch on various elements of territorial rule. Thereby, they raise the profile of the main question this Article asks: Which territorial claims does the EU make? To provide an answer, the present Article discusses and categorizes the individual elements of territoriality in the EU’s architecture. The influence of EU law on national territorial rule on the one hand and the emergence of territorial governance elements at the European level on the other provide the main pillars of the inquiry. Once combined, these features not only help to improve our understanding of the EU’s distinctly supranational conception of territoriality. What is more, the discussion raises several important legitimacy questions. As a consequence, the Article calls for the development of a theoretical model to evaluate and justify territoriality in a political community beyond the state.

Présence évangélique au Liban, enjeux socio-politiques et culturels d’un engagement multiforme

2013 ◽  
Vol 60 (2) ◽  
pp. 204-217
Author(s):  
Fatiha Kaouès
Keyword(s):  
Social Ties ◽  
The State ◽  
Religious Communities ◽  
Public Order ◽  
Development Projects ◽  
Weak State ◽  
Definition Of

Fatiha Kaouès focuses on evangelical activities in Lebanon, where religious communities are the foundation of public order rather than the State and each denomination has its own social and economic network. This raises the question as to the definition of citizenship and the construction of social ties in the context of a strong religious communitarianism and a weak state. This paper considers a few development projects supported by evangelical movements and the various frameworks, limits and challenges of their activities in Lebanon.

Sexual Ontology and Group Marriage

Philosophy ◽  
1983 ◽  
Vol 58 (224) ◽  
pp. 215-227 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen R. L. Clark
Keyword(s):  
Social Institutions ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Other ◽  
Unmarried Mother ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
The One

Philosophers of earlier ages have usually spent time in considering thenature of marital, and in general familial, duty. Paley devotes an entire book to those ‘relative duties which result from the constitution of the sexes’,1 a book notable on the one hand for its humanity and on the other for Paley‘s strange refusal to acknowledge that the evils for which he condemns any breach of pure monogamy are in large part the result of the fact that such breaches are generally condemned. In a society where an unmarried mother is ruined no decent male should put a woman in such danger: but why precisely should social feeling be so severe? Marriage, the monogamist would say, must be defended at all costs, for it is a centrally important institution of our society. Political community was, in the past, understood as emerging from or imposed upon families, or similar associations. The struggle to establish the state was a struggle against families, clans and clubs; the state, once established, rested upon the social institutions to which it gave legal backing.

scholarly journals Between Ideology and Utopia: Honneth and Ricoeur on Symbolic Violence, Marginalization and Recognition

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 84-109 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marianne Moyaert
Keyword(s):  
Critical Theory ◽  
Social Order ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
Symbolic Order ◽  
Counter Narratives ◽  
Axel Honneth ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Cultural Minorities ◽  
Struggle For Recognition ◽  
Vital Resource

This article focuses on multiculturalism in the context of present-day societies and the need to incorporate minorities within a reframed social order. In his critical theory, Axel Honneth rightly draws attention to the idea of the moral grammar of struggles for recognition.  Analyzing his theory in depth, the article shows that Honneth underestimates the violent power of ideological discourse in marginalizing and excluding society’s others, e.g. cultural minorities. It then puts forward an alternative approach based on Ricœur’s creative and original reflections on ideology and utopia. For the incorporation of cultural minorities to occur, the symbolic order of society needs to be critiqued, transformed and expanded. From this perspective, the author highlights the subversive and transformative strength of utopian counter-narratives. The latter form a vital resource for cultural minorities in their struggle for recognition.

scholarly journals The Jewish Paramilitary Organizations in Palestine before the Creation of the State of Israel in 1948

2016 ◽  
pp. 45-57
Author(s):  
А. Krylov
Keyword(s):  
Arab Countries ◽  
The State ◽  
Weak State ◽  
British Mandate ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Arab Israeli Conflict ◽  
State Of Israel

The article takes a look at the history and origin of the main Jewish paramilitary organizations in the British Mandate of Palestine (1921–1948). One of the myths often used in Western and Israeli propagandistic literature describes Israel as a very weak state that after obtaining its sovereignty became extremely vulnerable to the heavily armed Arab hordes that invaded it immediately after the declaration of the Israeli State. However, the analysis above shows that the first Arab-Israeli conflict in 1948–1949 was not a battle between young David against the giant Goliath. By the time of the creation of Israel all the Jewish paramilitary organizations operating in Yishuv – “Haganah”, “Irgun” and LEHI – united creating the IDF. The national army of the newborn State met all the requirements of its time, was much better equipped, trained, mobilized and armed than the soldiers of all the neighboring Arab countries, which objectively predetermined their crushing defeat.

Pierre Bourdieu and the Unthought Colonial State

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Franck Poupeau
Keyword(s):  
Physical Violence ◽  
Pierre Bourdieu ◽  
The State ◽  
Symbolic Violence ◽  
French Army ◽  
Colonial State ◽  
Early Experiences ◽  
Northern Algeria

Chapter abstract This chapter considers how Bourdieu’s early experiences in French-occupied Algeria influenced his later development of a theory of the state. Bourdieu was conscripted into the French army, but stayed for many years to do advocacy and research on behalf of the Algerian people. In particular, he lived and studied among the Kabyle, a Berber people in northern Algeria. Poupeau argues that no understanding of Bourdieu’s theory of the state is complete without considering Bourdieu’s research during France’s occupation of Algeria. This “unthought colonial state,” grounded as it was in physical violence, shaped Bourdieu’s later elaboration of a state whose power derives from its monopoly of symbolic violence.

Transnational interaction of educational institutions and libraries of Central Asia in the field of training and retraining of library personnel

Infolib ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 26 (2) ◽  
pp. 43-45
Author(s):  
Nurila Davletyarova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Central Asia ◽  
The State ◽  
Educational Institutions ◽  
Educational Standards ◽  
Personnel Training ◽  
Traditional System ◽  
Asian Region ◽  
Central Asian ◽  
Alternative Approach ◽  
Library And Information Education

This article examines the state and prospects of library personnel training in Central Asia. The article focuses on the creation of a new, alternative approach to training librarians, taking into account modern requirements, which ensures the maximum approximation of the traditional system of training specialists to international educational standards. At the same time, special attention is paid to the process of internationalization of library and information education in the Central Asian region.

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