Europe and Agenda Setting

Author(s):  
Simon Reich ◽  
Richard Ned Lebow

This chapter examines Europe's efforts at agenda setting. It demonstrates the importance of persuasion as a form of influence. Robert Kagan, a noted American realist, argues that Europeans recognize complexity and rely on diplomacy because they are weak and lack America's material power. The chapter disputes this claim. Europeans could easily spend more on their military but choose not to do so. This is an effective policy if their goal is to exercise influence. The norms of regional and international systems are undergoing significant shifts that deprive military power of much of its political utility while enhancing other forms of influence. To sustain this argument, the chapter offers case studies of successful European efforts to manage globalization and bring about a treaty that bans landmines. European initiatives on both fronts were opposed by the economically and militarily more powerful United States.

2021 ◽  
pp. 233-248
Author(s):  
Prerna Banati

This chapter summarises findings from the case studies, highlighting key policy lessons as well as successes and failures in research uptake. It discusses the features of an effective policy evaluation model, including what gaps exist and key elements that could be included in such a model. And it explores the future direction for cohorts, with a view to supporting agenda setting for longitudinal research in the coming years.


The pioneering and hugely influential work of Mikhail Bakhtin has led scholars in recent decades to see all discourse and social life as inherently “dialogical.” No speaker speaks alone because our words are always partly shaped by our interactions with others, past and future. Moreover, we never fashion ourselves entirely by ourselves but always do so in concert with others. Bakhtin thus decisively reshaped modern understandings of language and subjectivity. And yet, the contributors to this volume argue that something is potentially overlooked with too close a focus on dialogism: many speakers, especially in charged political and religious contexts, work energetically at crafting monologues, single-voiced statements to which the only expected response is agreement or faithful replication. Drawing on ethnographic case studies from the United States, Iran, Cuba, Indonesia, Algeria, and Papua New Guinea, the authors argue that a focus on “the monologic imagination” gives us new insights into languages’ political design and religious force, and deepens our understandings of the necessary interplay between monological and dialogical tendencies.


2019 ◽  
pp. 24-42
Author(s):  
David Myles ◽  
Kelly Lewis

In this paper, we investigate the role that mourning and commemoration practices play in contemporary trans rights activism. Drawing from visual politics, digital activist culture, as well as media and communication, we analyse how trans rights movements construct injustice symbols that are used for sociopolitical mobilisation and expression. We contend that these symbols are constructed through shared communicative practices, which produce and circulate visuals that possess important memetic qualities (pictures, slogans, hashtags, graffiti, posters, etc.). To do so, we analyse three case studies where the unjust death of a trans person was collectively mobilised for political purposes: Jennifer Laude (Philippines, 1988-2014), Hande Kader (Turkey, 1993-2016), and Marsha P. Johnson (United States of America, 1945-1992). While each case study points to local or national specificities, our comparative analysis also underlines transnational trends in the production of posthumous visuals within contemporary trans rights activism. We conclude by addressing the contentions over the construction of trans symbols who inherently possess intersectional identities.


Author(s):  
Jennifer J. Smith

Coherence of place often exists alongside irregularities in time in cycles, and chapter three turns to cycles linked by temporal markers. Ray Bradbury’s The Martian Chronicles (1950) follows a linear chronology and describes the exploration, conquest, and repopulation of Mars by humans. Conversely, Louise Erdrich’s Love Medicine (1984) jumps back and forth across time to narrate the lives of interconnected families in the western United States. Bradbury’s cycle invokes a confluence of historical forces—time as value-laden, work as a calling, and travel as necessitating standardized time—and contextualizes them in relation to anxieties about the space race. Erdrich’s cycle invokes broader, oppositional conceptions of time—as recursive and arbitrary and as causal and meaningful—to depict time as implicated in an entire system of measurement that made possible the destruction and exploitation of the Chippewa people. Both volumes understand the United States to be preoccupied with imperialist impulses. Even as they critique such projects, they also point to the tenacity with which individuals encounter these systems, and they do so by creating “interstitial temporalities,” which allow them to navigate time at the crossroads of language and culture.


Somatechnics ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 74-94 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rae Rosenberg

This paper explores trans temporalities through the experiences of incarcerated trans feminine persons in the United States. The Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) has received increased attention for its disproportionate containment of trans feminine persons, notably trans women of colour. As a system of domination and control, the PIC uses disciplinary and heteronormative time to dominate the bodies and identities of transgender prisoners by limiting the ways in which they can express and experience their identified and embodied genders. By analyzing three case studies from my research with incarcerated trans feminine persons, this paper illustrates how temporality is complexly woven through trans feminine prisoners' experiences of transitioning in the PIC. For incarcerated trans feminine persons, the interruption, refusal, or permission of transitioning in the PIC invites several gendered pasts into a body's present and places these temporalities in conversation with varying futures as the body's potential. Analyzing trans temporalities reveals time as layered through gender, inviting multiple pasts and futures to circulate around and through the body's present in ways that can be both harmful to, and necessary for, the assertion and survival of trans feminine identities in the PIC.


2020 ◽  
Vol 119 (820) ◽  
pp. 303-309
Author(s):  
J. Nicholas Ziegler

Comparing the virus responses in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States shows that in order for scientific expertise to result in effective policy, rational political leadership is required. Each of these three countries is known for advanced biomedical research, yet their experiences in the COVID-19 pandemic diverged widely. Germany’s political leadership carefully followed scientific advice and organized public–private partnerships to scale up testing, resulting in relatively low infection levels. The UK and US political responses were far more erratic and less informed by scientific advice—and proved much less effective.


Author(s):  
Jonathan Holslag

The chapter argues that India has a strong interest to balance China and that the two Asian giants will not be able grow together without conflict. However, India will not be able to balance China’s rise. The chapter argues that India remains stuck between nonalignment and nonperformance. On the one hand, it resists the prospect of a new coalition that balances China from the maritime fringes of Eurasia, especially if that coalition is led by the United States. On the other hand, it has failed to strengthen its own capabilities. Its military power lags behind China’s, its efforts to reach out to both East and Central Asia have ended in disappointment, and its economic reforms have gone nowhere. As a result of that economic underachievement, India finds itself also torn between emotional nationalism and paralyzing political fragmentation, which, in turn, will further complicate its role as a regional power.


Author(s):  
E. Douglas Bomberger

On 2 April 1917, President Woodrow Wilson urged Congress to enter the European war, and Congress voted to do so on Friday, 6 April. On the 15th of that month, Victor released the Original Dixieland Jazz Band’s record of “Livery Stable Blues” and “Dixieland Jass Band One-Step”; it caused an immediate nationwide sensation. James Reese Europe travelled to Puerto Rico in search of woodwind players for the Fifteenth New York Regiment Band, and the Creole Band ended its vaudeville career when it missed the train to Portland, Maine. German musicians in the United States came under increased scrutiny in the weeks after the declaration of war, as the country prepared to adopt new laws and regulations for wartime.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document