scholarly journals Who is the Diaspora? The Negotiation of Diasporic Identities in the Romanian Online Political Discourse

2021 ◽  
Vol 14 (3 (41)) ◽  
pp. 5-22
Author(s):  
Florența TOADER ◽  

Drawing on an interdisciplinary framework based on critical and pragmatic discourse analysis, this study investigates the way Romanian politicians negotiate the identity of the Romanian diaspora on their Facebook pages. It also points out to the way discourse is used to introduce and (de)legitimize political decisions and actions. The topic is analyzed in different political and social contexts: the presidential elections in 2014 and 2019, the Euro-parliamentary elections in 2019, and the crisis generated by the comeback of the Romanians abroad as a result of the corona-virus pandemics in 2020. The results of the study show that the diaspora is part of the political discourse as a topic mainly during electoral periods, which are more heavily stake driven. The subject of the diaspora was approached by political actors in a strategic manner, starting from their communication project and the political outcome they were aiming for. The paper contributes to the growing body of knowledge on strategies of constructing diasporic identities in the political discourse. The paper also illustrates spe-cific and emergent strategies of diasporic identity construction in different political and social contexts in a social media environment.

Author(s):  
Roland Lami

In this article, ideological confusion is explained based on the structural-functionalist perspective. Analysis of the phenomenon in question focuses mainly on the interdependence created between the “deeply-social” factors of and political discourse. This analysis is undertaken to better understand the circumstances that condition political parties on representing social categories in different social contexts and on showing the implications of political identity building based on the type of discourse used by the political actors.


2017 ◽  
Vol 24 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-45
Author(s):  
Akihiko Shimizu

This essay explores the discourse of law that constitutes the controversial apprehension of Cicero's issuing of the ultimate decree of the Senate (senatus consultum ultimum) in Catiline. The play juxtaposes the struggle of Cicero, whose moral character and legitimacy are at stake in regards to the extra-legal uses of espionage, with the supposedly mischievous Catilinarians who appear to observe legal procedures more carefully throughout their plot. To mitigate this ambivalence, the play defends Cicero's actions by depicting the way in which Cicero establishes the rhetoric of public counsel to convince the citizens of his legitimacy in his unprecedented dealing with Catiline. To understand the contemporaneousness of Catiline, I will explore the way the play integrates the early modern discourses of counsel and the legal maxim of ‘better to suffer an inconvenience than mischief,’ suggesting Jonson's subtle sensibility towards King James's legal reformation which aimed to establish and deploy monarchical authority in the state of emergency (such as the Gunpowder Plot of 1605). The play's climactic trial scene highlights the display of the collected evidence, such as hand-written letters and the testimonies obtained through Cicero's spies, the Allbroges, as proof of Catiline's mischievous character. I argue that the tactical negotiating skills of the virtuous and vicious characters rely heavily on the effective use of rhetoric exemplified by both the political discourse of classical Rome and the legal discourse of Tudor and Jacobean England.


Author(s):  
Hazel Gray

This chapter contrasts the way that the political settlement in both countries shaped the pattern of redistribution, reform, and corruption within public finance and the implications that this had for economic transformation. Differences in the impact of corruption on economic transformation can be explained by the way that their political settlements generated distinct patterns of competition and collaboration between economic and political actors. In Vietnam corrupt activities led to investments that were frequently not productive; however, the greater financial discipline imposed by lower-level organizations led to a higher degree of investment overall in Vietnam that supported a more rapid economic transformation under liberalization than in Tanzania. Individuals or small factional networks within the VCP at the local level were, therefore, probably less able to engage in forms of corruption that simply led to capital flight as happened in Tanzania, where local level organizations were significantly weaker.


2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 163-184 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gaia Delpino

AbstractThis essay analyzes the political dynamics involved in the construction of belonging in the case of African Americans’ “return” from the diaspora generated by the Atlantic slave trade to a town in Southern Ghana. Given the articulated belief of common ancestral origins, such arrival was initially welcomed by all the three groups of actors involved: thereturnees, the local authorities, divided by a chieftaincy dispute, and the Ghanaian government that was supporting homecoming policies. The concepts of origins and kinship and the way to validate them, though, were differently conceived by the various political actors; furthermore each of them held dissimilar reasons and had different expectations behind this return. All these differences created a mutual, mutable and dynamic relation between the actors who were involved in the arrival and aimed to assert their authority.


2021 ◽  
pp. 095269512110344
Author(s):  
David Garland

This article traces the emergence of the term welfare state in British political discourse and describes competing efforts to define its meaning. It presents a genealogy of the concept's emergence and its subsequent integration into various political scripts, tracing the struggles that sought to name, define, and narrate what welfare state would be taken to mean. It shows that the concept emerged only after the core programmes to which it referred had already been enacted into law and that the referents and meaning of the concept were never generally agreed upon – not even at the moment of its formation in the late 1940s. During the 1950s, the welfare state concept was being framed in three distinct senses: (a) the welfare state as a set of social security programmes; (b) the welfare state as a socio-economic system; and (c) the welfare state as a new kind of state. Each of these usages was deployed by opposing political actors – though with different scope, meaning, value, and implication. The article argues that the welfare state concept did not operate as a representation reflecting a separate, already-constituted reality. Rather, the use of the concept in the political and economic arguments of the period – and in later disputes about the nature of the Labour government's post-war achievements – was always thoroughly rhetorical and constitutive, its users aiming to shape the transformations and outcomes that they claimed merely to describe.


Author(s):  
Simon J. G. Burton

Samuel Rutherford’s Lex Rex remains a source of perennial fascination for historians of political thought. Written in 1644 in the heat of the Civil Wars it constitutes an intellectual and theological justification of the entire Covenanting movement and a landmark in the development of Protestant political theory. Rutherford’s argument in the Lex Rex was deeply indebted to scholastic and Conciliarist sources, and this chapter examines the way he deployed these, especially the political philosophy of John Mair and Jacques Almain, in order to construct a covenantal model of kingship undergirded by an interwoven framework of individual and communal rights. In doing so it shows the ongoing influence of the Conciliarist tradition on Scottish political discourse and also highlights unexpected connections between Rutherford’s Covenanting and his Augustinian and Scotistic theology of grace and freedom.


Author(s):  
Orlando Coutinho ◽  
◽  

The way in which an unknown virus has moved from a local to a global case, taking on a pandemic outline, has caused significant changes in the lives of all human beings. Firstly, for that reason, it is unknown, then because behind the ignorance comes mistrust and fear. Nowadays, these ingredients are - in the political-social space - substance for the biggest factors of action and decision of the actors of the power. Have we been in a war context, as some have said? Was confinement, global and so prolonged, really necessary? Was decreeing a state of emergency essential? Were the exception measures proportional? And are they reversible? This article aims, in the way of the ideas of several authors that thinking about the political philosophical role of health contexts, of exception state, and of political control of the State, in face of public health issues and not only, understand the “state of the art” in the way of governing western democracies, in the firstly, but flying over other geographies and systems as the virus has assumed global contours. And, by means of the concrete measures, politically adopted, by the different political actors, what real impacts they had on the life and the institutions working, and on the psychology of the persons individually or socially considered.


2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-63
Author(s):  
Ivor Altaras Penda ◽  
Marin Zekaj

AbstractBased on the previously published researches of the phenomenon of populism and its presence in the Republic of Croatia, and using methodological contents analyis matrix, which has been developed by B. Šalaj and M. Grbeša Zenzerović, this paper deals with the research of the presence of populism in the early Parliamentary election held in 2016. The researches of the phenomenon of populism have been intensified on both local and global level, and populism, as a concept, is becoming increasingly present in social and political discourse. However, everyone and everything is then easily classified as populistic. In the context of the Republic of Croatia, which has been through numerous state orders throughout its political history, this paper is going to examine if there was populism, as an aspect of political action, in the 2016 elections, and it is going to potentially identify the political actors, who have been using populistic features in their political careers. Furthermore, it is going to examine which kind of populism it is.


2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 95-107
Author(s):  
Paul Dumouchel

Focusing on existing ‘autonomous’ weapons systems and their uses replaces speculations about future developments and about what robots will or will not be able to do, with attention to the way these weapons are changing and have already changed warfare. The aspects of these transformations that will interest me in this paper are some of the political, organizational and social consequences of the introduction and deployment of various automatic and autonomous weapons systems. Beyond the questions of responsibility and legality, I want to look at the ways in which these weapons change countries’ ability to project power, on how they affect the composition of armed forces, the power relationships within them, and their relations with other major political actors.


2020 ◽  
Vol 22 (37) ◽  
pp. 171-190
Author(s):  
Anna Kowalcze-Pawlik

This paper provides a brief outline of the reception history of Othello in Poland, focusing on the way the character of the Moor of Venice is constructed on the page, in the first-published nineteenth-century translation by Józef Paszkowski, and on the stage, in two twentieth-century theatrical adaptations that provide contrasting images of Othello: 1981/1984 televised Othello, dir. Andrzej Chrzanowski and the 2011 production of African Tales Based on Shakespeare, in which Othello’s part is played by Adam Ferency (dir. Krzysztof Warlikowski). The paper details the political and social contexts of each of these stage adaptations, as both of them employ brownface and blackface to visualise Othello’s “political colour.” The function of blackface and brownface is radically different in these two productions: in the 1981/1984 Othello brownface works to underline Othello’s overall sense of alienation, while strengthening the existing stereotypes surrounding black as a skin colour, while the 2011 staging makes the use of blackface as an artificial trick of the actor’s trade, potentially unmasking the constructedness of racial prejudices, while confronting the audience with their own pernicious racial stereotypes.


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