Belarusian Nationalism in the 2010s: a Case of Anti-Colonialism? Origins, Features and Outcomes of Ongoing ‘Soft Belarusianisation’

2020 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-50
Author(s):  
Anaïs Marin
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
The Past ◽  
New Type ◽  
Challenging Situation ◽  
Red Line

Abstract The past decade has seen the emergence of a new type of nationalism in Belarus, a process labelled as ‘soft Belarusianisation’. This trend differs from earlier, mostly top-down (elite-led) episodes of nation-building – the Belarusisation of the 1920s, the nationalists’ movement that followed perestroika, and the ‘Creole nationalism’ incarnated by A. Lukashenko since the mid-1990s. Instead, soft Belarusianisation seems to be a bottom-up process stemming mostly from civil society. It would be wrong to consider it as a traditional revivalist or genuinely grassroots phenomenon however. Yet it appears as an anti-colonialist process, one meant to avoid further assimilation of Belarusians within the Russian whole. Whereas signs of a timid national awakening appeared back in the early 2010s, two sets of factors contributed to shaping and accelerating soft Belarusianisation in recent years. First were exogenous drivers, notably Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. Among the endogenous drivers is the Belarusian authorities’ benevolence towards soft Belarusianisation. Although they can exploit the rally-around-the-flag potential that the process entails for mobilising society in support of independence, the fact that soft Belarusianisation is perceived as anti-Russian in Russia proper creates a challenging situation for them. Should Belarusian nationalism overstep a red line, the likely consequences would be to put Belarusian sovereignty and national identity under a greater threat than it already is now.

“Forward to David the Builder!” Georgia's (re)turn to language-centered nationalism

2016 ◽  
Vol 44 (4) ◽  
pp. 522-542 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christofer Berglund
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The State ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
The Past ◽  
Building Project ◽  
The Rose ◽  
State Language

After the Rose Revolution, President Saakashvili tried to move away from the exclusionary nationalism of the past, which had poisoned relations between Georgians and their Armenian and Azerbaijani compatriots. His government instead sought to foster an inclusionary nationalism, wherein belonging was contingent upon speaking the state language and all Georgian speakers, irrespective of origin, were to be equals. This article examines this nation-building project from a top-down and bottom-up lens. I first argue that state officials took rigorous steps to signal that Georgian-speaking minorities were part of the national fabric, but failed to abolish religious and historical barriers to their inclusion. I next utilize a large-scale, matched-guise experiment (n= 792) to explore if adolescent Georgians ostracize Georgian-speaking minorities or embrace them as their peers. I find that the upcoming generation of Georgians harbor attitudes in line with Saakashvili's language-centered nationalism, and that current Georgian nationalism therefore is more inclusionary than previous research, or Georgia's tumultuous past, would lead us to believe.

scholarly journals Beyond the Post-Sovereign State?: The Past, Present, and Future of Constitutional Pluralism

2019 ◽  
Vol 21 ◽  
pp. 6-23
Author(s):  
Michael WILKINSON
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Recent Decade ◽  
Popular Sovereignty ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
European State ◽  
The Past ◽  
Constitutional Pluralism

AbstractConstitutional pluralism is a theory for the post-sovereign European state. This only makes sense historically, emerging out of postwar European reconstruction through the repression of popular sovereignty and restraining of democracy, including through the project of European integration. It became unsettled at Maastricht and evolved from a series of irritants into a full-blown crisis in the recent decade, with sovereignty claims returning both from the bottom-up and the top-down, to the extent that we can legitimately ask whether we are now moving ‘beyond the post-sovereign state’? Constitutional pluralist literature fails to capture this in that evades material issues of democracy and political economy.

Contemporary Issues and Christian Models of Integration: Into the Modern/Postmodern Age

1995 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-14 ◽  
Author(s):  
John A. Ingram
Keyword(s):  
Present Article ◽  
Model Building ◽  
Social Practices ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Comprehensive View ◽  
The Past ◽  
Psychological Theories ◽  
Proposed Model ◽  
Dsm Iv

Model building in Christian psychology has gradually become increasingly outdated and unsophisticated over the past decade, particularly in light of postmodern challenges to the limitations of received modern scientific perspectives and social practices. The present article draws from Rychlak's (1993) “complementarity” model, Sperry's (1993) “bidirectional determinism” concept, and Engel's (1977) biopsychosocial formulation to develop a multiperspectival, holistic framework drawing on the strengths of both modern and postmodern approaches. The proposed model includes inferences from both top down and bottom up formulations, as well as potential for interactions between or among any of the various “groundings” for psychological theories. Such a model seems more faithful to both biblical and scientific perspectives, and thus may provide a more accurate and comprehensive view of persons to facilitate more effective research and treatment. A clinical example is provided with DSM-IV descriptive and criterion referents.

Rethinking Legitimation: Positional and Mediated Legitimation Processes for Croatian NGOs

2019 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 475-498
Author(s):  
Laura J. Heideman
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
Organizational Form ◽  
Civil Society Organizations ◽  
Archival Data ◽  
Civil Society Organization ◽  
Political Transitions ◽  
Dominant Form ◽  
The Past ◽  
Multiple Audiences ◽  
New Type

How do new forms of organizations legitimate themselves? Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) have emerged as a dominant form of civil society organization in the past 35 years, often in societies undergoing social and political transitions. This paper analyzes legitimation processes for NGOs in postwar and postcommunist Croatia using interview and archival data. Starting from a principle that legitimation is a process involving multiple audiences, I examine the mechanisms NGOs use to legitimate themselves to different audiences. I find that Croatian civil society organizations adopted the NGO organizational form to legitimate themselves to international actors, who in turn pressured the Croatian government to accept these organizations as legitimate. However, the actions NGOs took to legitimate themselves to international actors undermined their legitimacy with the Croatian public. This case demonstrates that legitimation is a challenging prospect for a new type of organization, especially given the fragile nature of mediated legitimacy and the conflicting priorities of different audiences.

National Identity and Political Legitimacy in Turkmenistan*

1999 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 271-290 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shahram Akbarzadeh
Keyword(s):  
Social Movements ◽  
National Identity ◽  
Central Asia ◽  
Public Perception ◽  
Political Legitimacy ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
State Policies ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
National Population ◽  
Political Events

This paper traces political events and modes of generating legitimacy in Turkmenistan since the Soviet collapse. The emphasis here is on state policies and social movements that relate to “nation building” for their contribution to political legitimacy. The extent of nation-building success is not an immediate subject of inquiry, for this paper is not about public perception and bottom-up response to state policies, but the reverse. It is certain that state-sponsored proclamations and nationalist ideas espoused by the intelligentsia do not always find resonance among the national population at large. However, attention given to social movements in this paper may compensate for this shortcoming in a small way. It must be stated that social movements in Turkmenistan, and Central Asia, as a whole, have been top heavy. They were principally initiated and steered by the urbanized intelligentsia. The extent of mass involvement in such movements is suspect and hard to gauge.

‘Een homo is minder verdacht dan een held’ : Literaire verbeeldingen van Michiel de Ruyter en het nationale-identiteitsdebat na 2001

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-194
Author(s):  
Marc van Zoggel
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
The United States ◽  
First Century ◽  
Terrorist Attacks ◽  
National History ◽  
Ongoing Debate ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The Past ◽  
Wide Range

Abstract Historically, the glorification of the past and the eulogizing of national heroes in art and literature have been constructive elements in the process of nation building. In the postmodern era, however, a cultivation of national history and its great men and women is often regarded outdated or even suspect and regressive. The ‘nine eleven’ terrorist attacks in the United States and the rise and assassination of Dutch politician Pim Fortuyn intensified an ongoing debate in the Netherlands about the meaning and value of a shared ‘Dutch national identity’ in a multicultural, diversified society. In this article, I argue that several novels and poems about Dutch naval hero Michiel de Ruyter (1607-1676), published in or in the wake of the ‘De Ruyter year 2007’, both reproduce and challenge a wide range of voices, viewpoints and sentiments within the hot topic of national identity in the twenty-first century.

Participation or Pathology: Contradictory Tensions in Area-Based Policy

2004 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 87-96 ◽  
Author(s):  
Pete Alcock
Keyword(s):  
Social Policy ◽  
Social Exclusion ◽  
Government Policy ◽  
Service Provision ◽  
Central Feature ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Policy Practice ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Uk

This paper discusses some of the tensions revealed in the development and implementation of recent area-based approaches to social policy in England. Such programmes are now a central feature of Government policy practice, although similar programmes have been developed in the past in the UK and other welfare capitalist countries. They reflect concerns to combat social exclusion and ‘join-up’ service provision. They are also evidence of a shift towards more agency based policy practice – from ‘top-down’ to ‘bottom-up’ planning. Thus participation of citizens is a key element in all programmes. Some of the problems of securing such participation are discussed, including in particular the tendency for expectations of participation to lead to pathological interpretations of the causes of (and solutions too) social exclusion.

scholarly journals A review of bottom-up vs. top-down control of sponges on Caribbean fore-reefs: what’s old, what’s new, and future directions

PeerJ ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 6 ◽  
pp. e4343 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Pawlik ◽  
Tse-Lynn Loh ◽  
Steven E. McMurray
Keyword(s):  
Community Structure ◽  
Past Research ◽  
Fish Predation ◽  
Sponge Species ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
Fore Reef ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Hawksbill Turtles

Interest in the ecology of sponges on coral reefs has grown in recent years with mounting evidence that sponges are becoming dominant members of reef communities, particularly in the Caribbean. New estimates of water column processing by sponge pumping activities combined with discoveries related to carbon and nutrient cycling have led to novel hypotheses about the role of sponges in reef ecosystem function. Among these developments, a debate has emerged about the relative effects of bottom-up (food availability) and top-down (predation) control on the community of sponges on Caribbean fore-reefs. In this review, we evaluate the impact of the latest findings on the debate, as well as provide new insights based on older citations. Recent studies that employed different research methods have demonstrated that dissolved organic carbon (DOC) and detritus are the principal sources of food for a growing list of sponge species, challenging the idea that the relative availability of living picoplankton is the sole proxy for sponge growth or abundance. New reports have confirmed earlier findings that reef macroalgae release labile DOC available for sponge nutrition. Evidence for top-down control of sponge community structure by fish predation is further supported by gut content studies and historical population estimates of hawksbill turtles, which likely had a much greater impact on relative sponge abundances on Caribbean reefs of the past. Implicit to investigations designed to address the bottom-up vs. top-down debate are appropriate studies of Caribbean fore-reef environments, where benthic communities are relatively homogeneous and terrestrial influences and abiotic effects are minimized. One recent study designed to test both aspects of the debate did so using experiments conducted entirely in shallow lagoonal habitats dominated by mangroves and seagrass beds. The top-down results from this study are reinterpreted as supporting past research demonstrating predator preferences for sponge species that are abundant in these lagoonal habitats, but grazed away in fore-reef habitats. We conclude that sponge communities on Caribbean fore-reefs of the past and present are largely structured by predation, and offer new directions for research, such as determining the environmental conditions under which sponges may be food-limited (e.g., deep sea, lagoonal habitats) and monitoring changes in sponge community structure as populations of hawksbill turtles rebound.

A Conceptual Tool Kit

2021 ◽  
pp. 31-86
Author(s):  
James V. Wertsch
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Narrative Analysis ◽  
Empirical Studies ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Conceptual Tool ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
National Memory ◽  
Narrative Truth ◽  
Individual Memory ◽  
The Difference

The chapter begins with a section on methods and forms of evidence that outlines the difference between top-down and bottom-up analyses of national memory and notes that the latter will be given more emphasis in this book than is the case in many studies of national identity and memory. The section also argues that by understanding how narrative tools can “co-author” individuals’ speaking and thinking, it is possible to avoid misguided notions of “primordialism” that are part of the rhetorical claims of nationalists. The next section examines the sense in which national memory is memory and argues for the need to focus on remembering individuals as members of groups. This involves a review of ideas from figures such as Maurice Halbwachs and Frederic Bartlett on collective and individual memory. This is followed by a section on “Flashbulb Memories as Memory in the Group,” which uses a body of literature in psychology to develop a conceptually grounded notion of national memory that includes the observation that Bartlett’s notion of schema underpins much of the entire discussion. The next section, on “symbolic mediation,” reviews the origins of this idea in the writings of several European and Russian scholars and goes into the case of literacy as an illustration as outlined in empirical studies by Luria and Vygotsky. It then poses an analogous line of reasoning for narratives as symbolic mediation. This includes a discussion of the “inner logic” of narrative tools, “narrative truth,” and two levels of narrative analysis (“specific narratives” and “narrative templates”).

Moderne Q’eqchi’-Maya-Identität und der antike Maya-Ort Tamarindito in Guatemala

Anthropos ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 114 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-32
Author(s):  
Markus Eberl ◽  
Santiago Cho Coc
Keyword(s):  
Classic Maya ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Top Down ◽  
Bottom Up ◽  
The Past ◽  
Tropical Lowlands ◽  
Ritual Practices

Guatemala’s Q’eqchi’-Maya employ the past to construct their identity. In modern states, leaders like Mussolini or Hitler appropriated the past to shape national identities. Unlike these top-down approaches, the Q’eqchi’ offer a bottom-up perspective. In the Guatemalan highlands, Q’eqchi’ ritual practices involve the tzuul taq’a’s, supernatural beings linked to mountains and owners of the land. Recently many Q’eqchi’ migrated into the tropical lowlands and settled among Classic Maya ruins. Through questionnaires and interviews we reconstruct the complex ways in which Q’eqchi’ transfer the tzuul taq’a’ to the lowlands and appropriate their new surroundings both ideologically and physically.

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