Political engagement of Latin Americans in the UK

Focaal ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 2008 (51) ◽  
pp. 73-90 ◽  
Author(s):  
Davide Però
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Long Distance ◽  
Latin Americans ◽  
The Public ◽  
Alternative Approaches ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Collective Engagement

This article examines the political engagement of Latin Americans in the UK in the context of a mounting neo-assimilationist and anti-multicultural offensive in the public debate on integration. Assuming that migrants should have a say about their own integration in society, the article explores the extent to which the public debate is sensitive to migrants' own collective concerns. It is from this empirically informed perspective that the article criticizes assimilationist and multi-culturalist attitudes for their disregard of the exploitation and lack of social and cultural recognition that afflicts newly arrived migrants. The article helps to rebalance the prevailing trend in policy and academic circles to treat migrants as objects of policies and ignore their political agency and active collective engagement in the improvement of their conditions. It also offers a corrective to emerging alternative approaches that tend to reduce migrants' politics to their role in sustaining long-distance diasporic communities.

scholarly journals Politics of Exception and Unease: Immigration, Asylum and Terrorism in Parliamentary Debates in the UK

2008 ◽  
Vol 56 (4) ◽  
pp. 766-788 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jef Huysmans ◽  
Alessandra Buonfino
Keyword(s):  
Public Debate ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
Parliamentary Debates ◽  
The Public ◽  
Counter Terrorism ◽  
The Uk

This article analyses how the British political elite has securitised migration and asylum since 9/11 by looking at when and how parliamentary debates linked counter-terrorism to immigration and/or asylum. The findings suggest that there is considerable reluctance within the political elite to introduce or especially sustain the connection between migration and terrorism too intensely in public debate. The parliamentary debates also show that for understanding the securitising of migration and asylum one cannot focus exclusively on the main security framing that is found in counter-terrorism debates, which we name ‘the politics of exception’. There is at least one other format, which we call ‘the politics of unease’, that is central to how the British political elite securitises migration and asylum, and contests it, in the public realm.

Is political engagement by constitutional monarchs compatible with democracy?

2021 ◽  
pp. 205789112199169
Author(s):  
Kana Inata
Keyword(s):  
Political Engagement ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Involvement ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Preferences ◽  
Public Approval ◽  
Do So

Constitutional monarchies have proved to be resilient, and some have made substantive political interventions even though their positions are mostly hereditary, without granted constitutional channels to do so. This article examines how constitutional monarchs can influence political affairs and what impact royal intervention can have on politics. I argue that constitutional monarchs affect politics indirectly by influencing the preferences of the public who have de jure power to influence political leaders. The analyses herein show that constitutional monarchs do not indiscriminately intervene in politics, but their decisions to intervene reflect the public’s preferences. First, constitutional monarchs with little public approval become self-restraining and do not attempt to assert their political preferences. Second, they are more likely to intervene in politics when the public is less satisfied about the incumbent government. These findings are illustrated with historical narratives regarding the political involvement of King Bhumibol Adulyadej of Thailand in the 2000s.

scholarly journals (In)coherent subjects? The politics of conceptualising resistance in the UK asylum system

2021 ◽  
pp. 239965442110338
Author(s):  
Sarah M Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Political Action ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Ethnographic Research ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Subject Formation ◽  
Grounding Resistance ◽  
Migration Control ◽  
The Uk

Many accounts of resistance within systems of migration control pivot upon a coherent migrant subject, one that is imbued with political agency and posited as oppositional to particular forms of sovereign power. Drawing upon ethnographic research into the role of creativity within the UK asylum system, I argue that grounding resistance with a stable, coherent and agentic subject, aligns with oppositional narratives (of power vs resistance), and thereby risks negating the entangled politics of the (in)coherence of subject formation, and how this can contain the potential to disrupt, disturb or interrupt the practices and premise of the UK asylum system. I suggest that charity groups and subjects should not be written out of narratives of resistance apriori because they engage with ‘the state’: firstly, because to argue that there is a particular form that resistance should take is to place limits around what counts as the political; and secondly, because to ‘remain oppositional’ is at odds with an (in)coherent subject. I show how accounts which highlight a messy and ambiguous subjectivity, could be bought into understandings of resistance. This is important because as academics, we too participate in the delineation of the political and what counts as resistance. In predetermining what subjects, and forms of political action count as resistance we risk denying recognition to those within this system.

scholarly journals Between New Terrains and Old Dichotomies: Peacebuilding and the Gangs’ Truce in El Salvador

2017 ◽  
Vol 39 (3) ◽  
pp. 499-520 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sílvia Roque
Keyword(s):  
El Salvador ◽  
Potential Application ◽  
Peace Process ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Political ◽  
Crucial Importance ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
The Public ◽  
Structural Roots ◽  
Post War

Abstract This article intends to challenge the dominant assumptions that undermine the potential application of peacebuilding frameworks beyond formal post-war contexts. It analyses the gangs’ truce that recently took place in El Salvador as a privileged laboratory to rethink hegemonic understandings and practices of peacebuilding by specifically addressing the importance of overcoming dichotomised categories such ‘war and peace’, ‘criminal and political’, and ‘success and failure’. It is claimed that while the truce fostered a discourse pointing towards an ongoing peace process and enlarged the public debate on the failings of post-war policies and on the structural roots of violence, it was also decisively undermined by the inability to surmount the dichotomy that juxtaposes the criminal and the political domains. It is argued that a peacebuilding framework, inspired by a set of critical perspectives on war and peace and on the nature of ‘the political’, may thus be of crucial importance for the future of policies aimed at curbing violence in El Salvador and elsewhere.

Rethinking Kant as a public intellectual

2016 ◽  
Vol 16 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-108
Author(s):  
Sofie Møller
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Moral Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Political ◽  
Middle Ground ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past

In Kant’s Politics in Context, Reidar Maliks offers a compelling account of Kant’s political philosophy as part of a public debate on rights, citizenship, and revolution in the wake of the French Revolution. Maliks argues that Kant’s political thought was developed as a moderate middle ground between radical and conservative political interpretations of his moral philosophy. The book’s central thesis is that the key to understanding Kant’s legal and political thought lies in the public debate among Kant’s followers and that in this debate we find the political challenges which Kant’s political philosophy is designed to solve. Kant’s Politics in Context raises crucial questions about how to understand political thinkers of the past and is proof that our understanding of the past will remain fragmented if we limit our studies to the great men of the established canon.

Participatory Design Practices in Mental Health in the UK: Rebutting the Optimism

Design Issues ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 34 (4) ◽  
pp. 25-36 ◽  
Author(s):  
Paola Pierri
Keyword(s):  
Professional Practice ◽  
Participatory Design ◽  
Complex Dynamics ◽  
Community Organizations ◽  
Political Engagement ◽  
Public Realm ◽  
The Public ◽  
Design Practices ◽  
The Uk

In what has been defined as an “era of participation,” design practices have become very central to the process of making publics and in bringing to life the dream of developing new ways of political engagement. By reflecting on my professional practice, I highlight the overly optimistic attitude that—most of the time—over-simplifies the role of design, especially when applied in public and community organizations. I illustrate participation as a paradox in itself, by problematizing the role and meaning of participatory encounters, and revealing some complex dynamics of exclusion and self-exclusion that are at play in the public realm.

Conclusion

2020 ◽  
pp. 201-206
Author(s):  
Lucy Atkinson ◽  
Andrew Blick ◽  
Matt Qvortrup
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Natural Extension ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
The People ◽  
Popular Government ◽  
Political Spectrum ◽  
Device Use ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Working Device

The referendum came onto the agenda in the UK in the final quarter of the nineteenth century, and it has never entirely disappeared from it, either as a proposition or a working device. Use of the referendum in the UK was conceived of and presented both as a natural extension of the principle of democracy that was then taking hold, and as a means of offsetting perceived defects with the representative variant of popular government that had developed. In particular, it was seen as a safeguard against the manipulative impact of parties that might lead the parliamentary system to serve the ends of factions within the elite above the people. It might enable the public to vote for a particular party with which they were broadly sympathetic without needing to endorse their entire programme; and would mean that a government could not implement measures of major significance to which a majority objected. It was largely envisaged as likely to have a conservative impact, creating a new and final means by which change might be blocked. Yet its appeal spread across the political spectrum; as did opposition to it....

scholarly journals The performance of power and citizenship: David Cameron meets the people

2019 ◽  
Vol 22 (5) ◽  
pp. 678-690
Author(s):  
Peter Lunt
Keyword(s):  
Prime Minister ◽  
Political Agency ◽  
David Cameron ◽  
Political Autonomy ◽  
The Public ◽  
Mainstream Media ◽  
The People ◽  
Key Issues ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Television Studio

How do citizens respond to and engage with the performance of political power in the context of mainstream media? Through an analysis of two television programmes aired during the UK Brexit referendum campaign of 2016, a picture emerges of citizenship as the performative disruption of the performance of power. In the programmes the then UK prime minister, David Cameron, met members of the public for a mediated discussion of key issues in the Brexit referendum. Their interactions are analysed here as a confrontation between the performance of citizenship and power reflecting activist modalities of disruptive citizenship played out in the television studio. The article ends with reflections on questions about political agency as individualistic forms of disruptive political autonomy.

scholarly journals Entre el hogar y la calle. La movilización política de mujeres católicas durante el Sexenio Democrático = Between home and the street. The political mobilisation of Catholic women during the Sexenio

2020 ◽  
pp. 419
Author(s):  
Raúl Mínguez Blasco
Keyword(s):  
Catholic Church ◽  
Public Debate ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern History ◽  
The Public ◽  
Stable Position ◽  
Catholic Women ◽  
History Of ◽  
Las Mujeres ◽  
The Government

Resumen: El Sexenio Democrático (1868-1874) fue un periodo convulso de la historia contemporánea española en el que la posición estable que la Iglesia española había alcanzado tras el Concordato de 1851 quedó en entredicho. Como consecuencia del proceso de feminización religiosa iniciado en las décadas anteriores, el debate público sobre la religión tuvo un importante componente de género. A pesar de las críticas de revolucionarios y secularistas, algunas mujeres que se presentaron a sí mismas como esposas y madres católicas se opusieron públicamente a las medidas gubernamentales que fueron en contra de los intereses eclesiásticos. Este artículo pretende reflexionar en torno a la agencia o capacidad de acción de las mujeres católicas y analiza la manera en que el antiliberalismo concibió la relación entre la esfera pública y la privada.Palabras clave: Sexenio Democrático, género, religión, secularismo, antiliberalismo, agencia.Abstract: The Sexenio Democrático (1868-1874) was a troubled period of the modern history of Spain in which the stable position achieved by the Catholic Church after the Concordat of 1851 was widely questioned. Due to the feminisation of Catholicism during the previous decades, the public debate about religion had an important gendered component. Despite the criticisms of revolutionaries and secularists, some women who presented themselves as Catholic wives and mothers publicly opposed the Government measures against the Church’s interests. This paper reflects on the capacity of agency of Catholic women and analyses how anti-liberalism conceived the link between the public and the private realm.Keywords: Sexenio Democrático, gender, religion, secularism, anti-liberalism, agency.

Public concerns will slow EU and UK privatisation

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Service Quality ◽  
Private Sector ◽  
Labour Party ◽  
The Political ◽  
Content Type ◽  
The Public ◽  
Political Cost ◽  
Current Leadership ◽  
The Uk ◽  
Public Concerns

Subject Privatisation moves. Significance The UK Labour Party reaffirmed its objective of renationalising several privatised utilities and taking over projects funded by public-private partnerships at its September 24-27 annual party conference. The plan to shift back to public ownership has proved contentious with business as indicative of hostility to the private sector but popular with the public which associates privatisation with higher prices and poorer service quality. Impacts Renationalisation would be likely to use up much of a future Labour government’s political capital. The political cost would be regarded by Labour’s current leadership and its supporters as a price worth paying to honour a defining pledge. While renationalisation would be symbolic, the fortunes of such a government would depend more on its handling of the economy.

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