scholarly journals Deserving victimhood: kinship, emotions and morality in contemporary politics

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
Author(s):  
Virginia Vecchioli
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Family Values ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
The State ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
Space Setting ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Kinship Relations

Abstract This paper is about the place of family values, kinship relations and feelings of compassion for victims in national public space. Setting out from a description of various public affairs concerning the relatives of disappeared in Argentina, I show the key role played by blood ties and family values in forming a legitimate political representation. While the claim of blood ties with victims had been instituted as a legitimate form of political representation ever since the return to democracy, over the last decade or so sentiments towards victims have become incorporated into the State, enabling the latter to be imagined as a victim too. Here I explore diverse assessments of these affective dispositions, the critical place attributed to suffering in forging forms of governmentality, and the significant role played by the State in the unequal distribution of feelings of compassion.

scholarly journals Growth coalitions and the control of public space

2018 ◽  
Vol 30 (4) ◽  
pp. 124-140 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lajos Boros
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Local Development ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The State ◽  
State Legislation ◽  
Economic Changes ◽  
Contested Spaces ◽  
Growth Coalitions ◽  
Civil Sector

Public spaces are contested spaces; various groups compete for their control and to (re)present themselves there to the public. The political and economic changes and global competition transformed the mechanisms of production of spaces in post-socialist countries. New interests and new actors emerged in urban development with strong influence on the processes. They often form formal and informal alliances; growth coalitions to support their interests. This study examines how growth coalitions are related to public spaces in Hungarian cities. These coalitions work differently then those in the US – usually, the state has a more significant role in the European growth coalitions. That is the case in Hungary as well; the state plays a significant role in the formation and operation of pro-growth regimes through legislation and national policies. Furthermore, the paper suggests that post-socialist social conditions are favourable to the emergence of growth coalitions mainly because of the weak civil sector. This means that the power relations between the actors of the local development are highly unbalanced. Global capital and local pro-growth actors are the most influential stakeholders in local policymaking. Local and state legislation and policies are not capable to compensate the ambitions of the investors – moreover, often they support them.

Neoliberalism and the Future of Democracy

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (2) ◽  
pp. 627-650 ◽  
Author(s):  
Travis Holloway ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
The State ◽  
Way Of Life ◽  
Philosophical Work ◽  
Constituent Power ◽  
Form Of Life ◽  
Current State ◽  
Equal Concern

This paper describes neoliberalism and summarizes new works on democracy in Continental philosophy. Unlike laissez-faire or liberal economic theory—a “leave us alone” strategy in which the state does not interfere with private enterprise—neoliberal governments use the resources of the state to assist the market directly and employ the market to direct or oversee the resources of the state. Alongside neoliberal government, and in its wake, is a society in which the guiding axioms for each human being are self-entrepreneurship and competition. Over the last decade, however, a new body of philosophical work has been dissociating democracy from neoliberal government, critiquing a failed system of political representation, and considering to what extent democracy must take place beyond or outside of the current state. Of equal concern to these philosophers is how to take flight from a way of life that is characterized by self-entrepreneurship and competition. For some, the start of a political future beyond neoliberalism hinges upon a recent distinction between constituent and destituent forms of power. Whereas constituent power attempts to reform one’s government through demonstrations in public space, destituent power abandons the project of reforming one’s government momentarily or even completely in order to experience another form of life entirely.

Female Christian prose today: A failed search for new women’s subjectivity?

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (1) ◽  
pp. 132-149
Author(s):  
E. Chelpanova
Keyword(s):  
Social Context ◽  
Social System ◽  
Family Values ◽  
The State ◽  
Current Work ◽  
Conservative Approach ◽  
Female Subjectivity ◽  
Female Characters ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of

In her analysis of books by Maya Kucherskaya, Olesya Nikolaeva, and Yulia Voznesenskaya, the author investigates the history of female Christian prose from the 1990s until the present day. According to the author, it was in the 1990s, the period of crisis and transformation of the social system, that female Christian writers were more vocal, than today, on the issues of the new post-Soviet female subjectivity, drawing on folklore imagery and contrasting the folk, pagan philosophy with the Christian one, defined by an established set of rules and limitations for the principal female roles. Thus, the folklore elements in Kucherskaya’s early works are considered as an attempt to represent female subjectivity. However, the author argues that, in their current work, Kucherskaya and other representatives of the so-called female Christian prose tend to choose different, objectivizing methods to represent female characters. This new and conservative approach may have come from a wider social context, including the state-imposed ‘family values’ program.

Fragmentation as a Challenge: Tribal and Sectrarian Identities in the Middle East

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-85
Author(s):  
Kleanthis Kyriakidis
Keyword(s):  
Middle East ◽  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Significant Role ◽  
Arabian Gulf ◽  
The State ◽  
Islamic Revolution ◽  
Direct Response ◽  
Tribal Identity ◽  
Gulf States ◽  
The Ideal

In the Arabian Gulf two identities can be really considered almost as important as the national one: the tribal and the sectarian ones. Someone should expect that the reinforcement of these identities is a direct response to inequality and processes of exclusion. Furthermore, parochial tribalism is expected to arise as the protector of cultural heritage, especially in a region where the ex-pats vastly outnumber the locals. Nonetheless, both statements are far from truth. In this paper we will analyze how in the Gulf, sectarian identity came to play a significant role only after the 1979 Islamic revolution in Iran and it keeps on surviving through mainly instigations and Iranian propaganda, provocations and support. It should be noted that Sunni identity has been allegedly subjugated in other Middle East States (mainly in Syria and Iraq) but in the Gulf the sectarian challenge stems from the Shia communities, openly supported by Tehran. Strangely enough, the tribal identity does not pose that much of a challenge, since tribes are more the friend than the enemy of all Gulf States. Actually, these countries could not have survived without the loyalty and commitment of the tribes not only to the Royal families but also to the idea of the State and the ideal of the Nation – and Gulf Nations do protect their cultural heritage. Keywords: Gulf, Globalization, Fragmentation, Sectarianism, Tribalism

Geoecological analysis of the Russian Federation regions representation in the state program “Environmental Protection”

2020 ◽  
Vol 957 (3) ◽  
pp. 47-53
Author(s):  
E.A. Kravets
Keyword(s):  
Endangered Species ◽  
Environmental Protection ◽  
Russian Federation ◽  
The State ◽  
Volga River ◽  
Unequal Distribution ◽  
State Program ◽  
Rare And Endangered Species ◽  
Rare And Endangered ◽  
The Russian Federation

The author offers mapping and geoecological analysis of the Russian Federation regions presence in the state program “Environmental Protection”. The unequal distribution of the program’s targets and activities in different regions is revealed. A considerable number of relevant environmental problems for several mentioned regions have not been reflected in the program. It is important to increase the area of specially protected natural areas for a significant number of subjects of the Russian Federation. The status “part of the territory occupied by specially protected natural territories of Federal value in the total area of the subject of the Russian Federation” is recommended to be assigned all regions of Russia. Identification and elimination of objects of accumulated environmental damage that threat to the Volga river is relevant, at least for all the regions in which the Volga flows. Not all regions with a high level of air pollution and/or large masses of air pollutants have the indicator “reduction of total emissions for the reporting year”. It is necessary to increase the Program of measures for the protection of rare and endangered species of plants and to expand the list of regions in which it is planned to protect rare and endangered species of animals.

‘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.

Content and framing in radio news bulletins in urban and rural Hungary

2020 ◽  
pp. 026732312096683
Author(s):  
Henrik Hargitai
Keyword(s):  
European Union ◽  
Detailed Analysis ◽  
Union Member ◽  
Public Affairs ◽  
The State ◽  
News Production ◽  
News Broadcasts ◽  
Ecosystem Diversity ◽  
Rural Media ◽  
Radio News

This analysis provides a detailed snapshot of the radio news landscape in Hungary, a European-Union-member ‘illiberal state’ in mid-April 2018, a few weeks after the general election. In this study, we wished to quantitatively characterize radio news broadcasts. This is the first study that provides a detailed analysis of contemporary radio news output across all formats, target audiences, owners and regions in Hungary. The study uses several quantitative and geographic indicators that include objective elements such as news ecosystem diversity, local news production, news about local issues, sound bites, credited political press, news sections and more subjective news framing and a framing-based bias indicator. Our results show that the ideological diversity of radio news was far the highest in the Budapest region. MTVA, the state media provider had significantly more politically biased news than other stations. Local radios never criticized local public affairs. A few stations in Budapest did broadcast balanced, pro-opposition and critical news, but they were in minority over pro-government news items that dominated the rural media landscape with significantly less choice.

When decentralisation undermines representation: ethnic exclusion and state ownership in DR Congo's new provinces

2021 ◽  
Vol 59 (2) ◽  
pp. 131-157
Author(s):  
Alma Bezares Calderon ◽  
Pierre Englebert ◽  
Lisa Jené
Keyword(s):  
Ethnic Group ◽  
Empirical Evidence ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Representation ◽  
State Ownership ◽  
The State ◽  
Dr Congo ◽  
Ethnic Representation ◽  
Ethnic Exclusion

AbstractAfrican regimes commonly use strategies of balanced ethnic representation to build support. Decentralisation reforms, often promoted in order to improve political representation and state access, can undermine such strategies. In this article we use the example of the DR Congo to show the extent to which the multiplication of decentralised provinces is upending a political system largely based until now upon collective ethnic representation in the state. Not only are Congo's new provinces more ethnically homogeneous than their predecessors, but many of them have also witnessed political takeover and monopolisation by the province's dominant ethnic group. In addition, the increased number of Congolese who now find themselves non-autochthonous to their province of residence heightens their vulnerability and the potential for local conflict. Decentralisation, whose intent was proximity to governance, might well end up excluding more Congolese from the benefits of political representation. The article uses original empirical evidence on provincial ethnic distributions to support its claims.

National Historical Myth as an Element of the Baltic States’ Strategic Cultures: Examining Postage Stamps

Istoriya ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 12 (7 (105)) ◽  
pp. 0
Author(s):  
Vladislav Vorotnikov
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Historical Narrative ◽  
Baltic States ◽  
Political Class ◽  
Semiotic Model ◽  
Contemporary Politics ◽  
Postage Stamps ◽  
Relative Proximity ◽  
The One ◽  
The Baltic

The article examines the structure of national historical mythology of the Baltic states (Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania) with an emphasis on the foreign policy dimension based on the analysis of their issues of the postage stamps. Since issuing of the postage stamps is a product of consensus between the state and civil society, their topics and images presented on them, on the one hand, may be considered as a part of the semiotic model of the state image, thus reflecting its stance on processes, events, phenomena or personalities of the past and the present and, accordingly, shaping, transforming or supporting a certain nation-forming mythology or state ideology; on the other hand, they reflect mass perceptions of the dominant national historical narrative, and often the priorities of contemporary politics. Due to the specifics of the Baltic states’ history and the dominant values and ideology of their political class, the mainstream historical narrative is inevitably turned outward, that makes the analysis of its main elements extremely operational in the study of their strategic cultures. The article proposes the author's attitude to categorizing and highlighting the main chronological and thematic elements of the arrays of postage stamps of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia from 1990 to 2020. On the basis of discourse and selective iconographic analysis, the key elements of national historical narratives and their coherence with the foreign political positioning and strategies of the Baltic states are identified and analyzed. A comparative analysis of the three country cases allows us to pinpoint their relative proximity as well as some specific features.

The community strike: From precarity to militant organizing

2018 ◽  
Vol 61 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 159-177
Author(s):  
Marcel Paret
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Public Services ◽  
Informal Settlements ◽  
The State ◽  
A Site ◽  
Collective Actor

How do insecure layers of the working class resist when they lack access to power and organization at the workplace? The community strike represents one possible approach. Whereas traditional workplace strikes target employers and exercise power by withholding labor, community strikes focus on the sphere of reproduction, target the state, and build power through moral appeals and disruptions of public space. Drawing on ethnography and interviews in the impoverished Black townships and informal settlements around Johannesburg, I illustrate this approach by examining widespread local protests in South Africa. Insecurely employed and unemployed residents implemented community strikes by demanding public services, barricading roads and destroying property, and boycotting activities such as work and school. Within these local revolts, community represented both a site of struggle and a collective actor. While community strikes enabled economically insecure groups to mobilize and make demands, they also confronted significant limits, including tensions between protesters and workers.

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