scholarly journals No One is Illegal Between City and Nation

2011 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 127-143 ◽  
Author(s):  
Peter Nyers
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Movements ◽  
Community Belonging ◽  
The City

By challenging the state's prerogative to distinguish between insiders and outsiders, citizens and non-citizens, political movements by and in support of migrants and refugees are forcing questions about what criteria, if any, can and should be used to determine who can claim membership in the political community. To illustrate the complexity of this politics this article analyzes the major demand that underscores every campaign undertaken by non-status refugees and migrants in Canada: a program that would allow them to "regularize" their status. Notably, these campaigns are being directed at both the state and city levels of governance. Together, these are two sites in which claims and counter-claims about community, belonging, and citizenship are being made by, for, and against non-status immigrants. In each case, migrant political agency is asserted in places meant to deny, limit, or repress it. The article argues that the significance of these sites is that they allow for non-status refugees and migrants themselves to act as mediators or translators between the city and nation, between polis and cosmopolis.

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.

Provisions situation in the Tambov Governorate in the early 1918

2021 ◽  
pp. 209-215
Author(s):  
Nikita V. Averin
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Goods ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Situation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Soviet Power ◽  
Economic Preferences ◽  
Peasant Movement ◽  
Peasant Protest ◽  
The City ◽  
Regions Of Russia

We examine the provisions situation in the early 1918 in the producing regions of Russia using materials from the Tambov Governorate. Published documents indicate a strong rise in prices for consumer goods, the population was concerned about high prices for food. The provisions problem was clearly taking on political overtones. The Bolsheviks who came to power did not only impose power, proceeding from their political and economic preferences, starting socialist transformations and fighting the remnants of the old organs of power. All this is shown in pub-lished sources on the peasant movement that swept the province, as well as in memoirs, witnesses of all those problems associated with food and the deterioration of the political and economic situation in the city and the governorate as a whole. In particular, the Soviet power immediately faced huge provisions problems, both inherited and generated by their own requisitions, as well as with the peasant protest movement. The peasant movement itself, caused by hunger and chaos, in the future will play a huge role in the policies pursued by the Bolsheviks. Documents and memoirs can serve in the study of the state of the population in the specified period.

Re-Placing the state

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Human Agency ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Local Motion ◽  
Physical Movement ◽  
The City

This concluding chapter addresses the issue of the place of the city directly, and discusses the broader implications of place in relation to the metaphysics of human agency. As the space of physical movement, or locomotion, place is apparently depoliticized from the outset; for the political depends on the free, which, even if conceived as the voluntary and naturalized, is nevertheless contrasted with the external motion that is blocked by force. However, the casuistry concerning the local motion of citizens shows how the space of the political has to contend with the space of external movement, the same space in which animals move, which resists even as it supplements the voluntary and juridical construction of the state.

Concluding Remarks to Part 3

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Preminger
Keyword(s):  
Government Policy ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Individual Responsibility ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Third ◽  
Third Sphere ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Chapter 15 summarizes the chapters which addressed the third sphere, the relationship of labor to the political community. It reiterates that since Israel was established, the labor market’s borders have become ever more porous, while the borders of the national (Jewish) political community have remained firm: the Jewish nationalism which guides government policy is as strong as ever. NGOs, drawing on a discourse of human rights, are able to assist some non-citizens but this discourse also resonates with the idea of individual responsibility: the State is no longer willing to support “non-productive” populations, who are now being shoehorned into a labor market which offers few opportunities for meaningful employment, and is saturated by cheaper labor intentionally imported by the State in response to powerful employer lobbies. These trends suggest a partial reorientation of organized labor’s “battlefront”, from a face-off with capital to an appeal to the public and state.

Cities of Refuge, Rebel Cities, and the City to Come

2019 ◽  
pp. 253-271
Author(s):  
Giovanna Borradori
Keyword(s):  
Critical Reflection ◽  
Symbolic Capital ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Shared Experience ◽  
The Core ◽  
Political Transformations ◽  
Urban Contexts ◽  
To Come ◽  
The City

As the processes of globalization transform cities into nodes of accumulation of financial and symbolic capital, it is fair to assume that urban contexts have never been more vulnerable to the systemic imperatives of the market. It is thus surprising that cities continue to be the site where the deepest social and political transformations come to the surface. What, then, preserves the city as a space of dissent? The claim of this chapter is that a critical reflection on the political agency of Northern and Southern cities has to start from asking what it means today to occupy the pavement of their streets. The argument explored here is that, in this age of molecular neoliberal encroachment and restructuring, it is a certain experience of dispossession, rather than the quest for identification and recognition, that makes the city the core of a shared experience of refuge and resistance.

Continuity with Deficiencies: The New Basic Law of Hungary

2013 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 102-138 ◽  
Author(s):  
András Jakab ◽  
Pál Sonnevend
Keyword(s):  
Constitutional Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Fundamental Rights ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Basic Law ◽  
The Government ◽  
Democratic Constitution ◽  
Legal Procedures

Hungarian constitutional law – New Basic Law – Continuity with the previous democratic Constitution – Vision of the political community embedded in the new Basic Law – The level of protection of fundamental rights – Continuity and lack of foreseeability in the organisation of the state – European legal procedures against or about Hungary – The life prospects of the new Basic Law – Danger of constitutional crisis whenever the government does not hold a constitution-amending majority

scholarly journals The Real Western War of Religion

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 17-29
Author(s):  
Kenneth L. Grasso ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Essential Role ◽  
Culture Wars ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Real ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Religious Dimension ◽  
The World ◽  
The City

Steven D. Smith’s Pagans and Christians in the City takes its place alongside James Davison Hunter’s Culture Wars as one of the two truly indispensable books on today’s Culture Wars. It advances our understanding of today’s conflict by situating it historically and focusing our attention on its religious dimension. Smith argues that today’s conflict is the latest episode in a longstanding conflict between immanent forms of religiosity which locate the sacred in the world of space and time, and transcendent forms of religiosity which locate the divine beyond space and time. As compelling as it is, the volume’s argument would have been strengthened by a more sustained treatment of the nature of the political community and the essential role played within it by the truths held in common by the members concerning God, man, nature, and history.

Transnational Migrants' Negotiations of Formal and Cultural Citizenship

2011 ◽  
Vol 19 (2) ◽  
pp. 27-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
Siobhán Ní Chatháin
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Citizenship ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Spatial Mobility ◽  
Substantial Role ◽  
Irish Immigration ◽  
Transnational Migrants ◽  
The Ideal

This article highlights the substantial role of Irish state governmentalities in structuring migrants' ‘possible fields of action’ (Foucault 1982: 790), while taking account of the agency of migrant subjects, albeit constrained, in negotiating Irish immigration regulation. It is based on data gathered from eighteen migrant mothers of Irish citizens and argues that it is important to recognise the political agency of migrants in generating new transnational modes of belonging despite the ways in which the state circumscribes their capacities to engage in transnational practices and maintain transnational relationships. This group of migrants simultaneously endeavoured to maintain transnational practices and relationships while cultivating local identifications. Although they had complex and contradictory attitudes to citizenship, the unifying theme was that social and spatial mobility are not inimical to local belonging. However, their local and transnational practices were impeded by prevailing discourses and regulations drawing on exclusionary configurations of citizenship which combined racialised notions of Irishness with neoliberalised concepts of the ideal citizen.

Reading Hobbes’s Sovereign into a Burmese Narrative of Police Torture

2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 199-211
Author(s):  
Nick Cheesman
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Order ◽  
The Moment ◽  
Relationship Of ◽  
The Relationship

Throughout February 2012, a court sitting at Myanmar’s central prison recorded a defendant’s narrative of torture by policemen to have him confess to a bombing two years prior. How was this record made possible? What does the narrative reveal about the relationship of police torturers to the political community giving them authority to act? Working from Agamben’s intuition that in the moment of violence the policeman occupies an area symmetrical to the sovereign, inasmuch as his use of violence is justified in the name of public order, I suggest the account of police torture in this case can be explained in terms of Hobbes’s theory of attributed action. Like Hobbes’s sovereign, the Burmese policemen had the prerogative to decide when and how to use violence against the detained subject on behalf of the state. That the defendant could later recount to a judge the torture done to him was only because he lacked standing to lay claims against sovereign police, who he himself, as a member of the political community, had authorised. Ironically, the record of his narrative was possible precisely because his claims were without efficacy.

scholarly journals Under the bridge in Tehran: Addiction, Poverty and Capital

Ethnography ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maziyar Ghiabi
Keyword(s):  
Drug Users ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

The article provides an ethnographic study of the lives of the ‘dangerous class’ of drug users based on fieldwork carried out among different drug using ‘communities’ in Tehran between 2012 and 2016. The primary objective is to articulate the presence of this category within modern Iran, its uses and its abuses in relation to the political. What drives the narration is not only the account of this lumpen, plebeian group vis à vis the state, but also the way power has affected their agency, their capacity to be present in the city, and how capital/power and the dangerous/lumpen life come to terms, to conflict, and to the production of new situations which affect urban life.

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