scholarly journals Citizens and Citizenship

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-48
Author(s):  
Dana Rem ◽  
Des Gasper

The past generation has seen a switch to restrictive policies and language in the governance of migrants living in the Netherlands. Beginning in 2010, a new government with right-wing populist backing went further, declaring the centrality of proposed characteristic historic Dutch values. In this article, we investigate a key policy document to characterize and understand this policy change. Discourse analysis as an exploration of language choices, including use of ideas from rhetoric, helps us apply and test ideas from governmentality studies of migration and from discourse studies as social theorizing. We trace the chosen problem formulation; the delineation, naming, and predication of population categories; the understanding of citizenship, community, and integration; and the overall rhetoric, including chosen metaphors and nuancing of emphases, that links the elements into a meaning-rich world picture. A “neoliberal communitarian” conception of citizenship has emerged that could unfortunately subject many immigrants to marginalization and exclusion.

Author(s):  
Elisabeth Ivarsflaten ◽  
Scott Blinder ◽  
Lise Bjånesøy

The “populist radical right” is a contested concept in scholarly work for good reason. This chapter begins by explaining that the political parties usually grouped together under this label are not a party family in a conventional sense and do not self-identify with this category. It goes on to show how political science scholarship has established that in Europe during the past thirty or so years we have seen the rise of a set of parties that share a common ideological feature—nativism. The nativist political parties experiencing most electoral support have combined their nativist agenda with some other legitimate ideological companion, which provides deniability—a shield against charges that the nativist agenda makes the parties and their supporters right-wing extremist and undemocratic. The chapter goes on to explain that in order to make progress on our understanding of how and why the populist radical right persuades citizens, we need to recognize: first, that nativism is the only necessary ingredient without which the populist radical right loses its force; and second, that nativism in contemporary established democracies has tended not to persuade a large share of voters without an ideological companion.


Author(s):  
Richard McKirahan

David Sedley recently complained that despite the enormous amount of work on Parmenides in the past generation, the details of Parmenides' arguments have received insufficient attention. It is universally recognized that Parmenides' introduction of argument into philosophy was a move of paramount importance. It is also recognized that the arguments of fragment B8 are closely related. At the beginning of B8, Parmenides asserts that what-is has several attributes; he offers a series of proofs that what-is indeed has those attributes. This article undertakes a close analysis of fragment B8, teasing out the structure of the arguments, and showing what parts of the traditional and new interpretations of Parmenides those arguments do (or do not) support. It presents some surprising conclusions and opens up spaces for new interpretations.


2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (3) ◽  
pp. 337-362
Author(s):  
Myungji Yang

Through the case of the New Right movement in South Korea in the early 2000s, this article explores how history has become a battleground on which the Right tried to regain its political legitimacy in the postauthoritarian context. Analyzing disputes over historiography in recent decades, this article argues that conservative intellectuals—academics, journalists, and writers—play a pivotal role in constructing conservative historical narratives and building an identity for right-wing movements. By contesting what they viewed as “distorted” leftist views and promoting national pride, New Right intellectuals positioned themselves as the guardians of “liberal democracy” in the Republic of Korea. Existing studies of the Far Right pay little attention to intellectual circles and their engagement in civil society. By examining how right-wing intellectuals appropriated the past and shaped triumphalist national imagery, this study aims to better understand the dynamics of ideational contestation and knowledge production in Far Right activism.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-14
Author(s):  
Mathew Alexander ◽  
Lynn Unruh ◽  
Andriy Koval ◽  
William Belanger

Abstract As of November 2020, the United States leads the world in confirmed coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) cases and deaths. Over the past 10 months, the United States has experienced three peaks in new cases, with the most recent spike in November setting new records. Inaction and the lack of a scientifically informed, unified response have contributed to the sustained spread of COVID-19 in the United States. This paper describes major events and findings from the domestic response to COVID-19 from January to November 2020, including on preventing transmission, COVID-19 testing and contact tracing, ensuring sufficient physical infrastructure and healthcare workforce, paying for services, and governance. We further reflect on the public health response to-date and analyse the link between key policy decisions (e.g. closing, reopening) and COVID-19 cases in three states that are representative of the broader regions that have experienced spikes in cases. Finally, as we approach the winter months and undergo a change in national leadership, we highlight some considerations for the ongoing COVID-19 response and the broader United States healthcare system. These findings describe why the United States has failed to contain COVID-19 effectively to-date and can serve as a reference in the continued response to COVID-19 and future pandemics.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-28
Author(s):  
Guillaume Lancereau

This article examines late nineteenth and early twentieth-century historiographical practices and convictions in Third Republic France. It shifts the focus from the question of whether French academic historians were nationalists to the issue of how they were nationalists. If republican academic historians took a critical stance on nationalist distortions of the past, they nevertheless associated the teaching of history with patriotism and opposed historiographical “pan-Germanism” in ways favorable to French cultural and territorial claims. Meanwhile, the growing internationalization of the field stimulated scholarly competition across the West and spurred reflections about nationals’ epistemological privilege over national histories, methodological nationalism, and the invention of national historiographical traditions. Uncovering the anxieties of continual debate with foreign historians and the nationalist right wing, this article offers a prehistory of present-day dilemmas over global, national, and nationalist histories in an international field characterized by structural inequalities and academic competition.


2017 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 947-968 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joshua C Gordon

AbstractOver the past 25 years, Sweden has gone from having one of the most generous unemployment benefit systems among the rich democracies to one of the least. This article advances a multi-causal explanation for this unexpected outcome. It shows how the benefit system became a target of successive right-wing governments due to its role in fostering social democratic hegemony. Employer groups, radicalized by the turbulent 1970s more profoundly than elsewhere, sought to undermine the system, and their abandonment of corporatism in the early 1990s limited unions’ capacity to restrain right-wing governments in retrenchment initiatives. Two further developments help to explain the surprising political resilience of the cuts: the emergence of a private (supplementary) insurance regime and a realignment of working-class voters from the Social Democrats to parties of the right, especially the nativist Sweden Democrats, in the context of a liberal refugee/asylum policy.


Daedalus ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 148 (1) ◽  
pp. 19-29 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lincoln Caplan

Understanding is sparse about the lives of people who are poor and struggling economically and who need help in solving a legal problem and don't get it. Politics over the past half-century has made them largely invisible. In that period, attacks of the right on the provision of access to justice have rested on the triumph of laissez-faire views: the fresh embrace of markets and the free-enterprise system. The upshot has been the winner-take-all economy of the past generation, in which improved access to justice is largely a nonissue. For access to become a priority of a national movement, it needs champions in national politics, not just in the legal profession. It needs powerful champions who advocate for greatly increased and improved access to justice as a primary American commitment.


2021 ◽  
pp. 172-193
Author(s):  
William V. Trollinger

For the past century, the bulk of white evangelicalism has been tightly linked to very conservative politics. But in response to social and cultural changes in the 1960s and 1970s, conservative white evangelicalism organized itself into the Christian Right, in the process attaching itself to and making itself indispensable to the Republican Party. While the Christian Right has enjoyed significant political success, its fusion of evangelicalism/Christianity with right-wing politics—which includes white nationalism, hostility to immigrants, unfettered capitalism, and intense homophobia—has driven many Americans (particularly, young Americans) to disaffiliate from religion altogether. In fact, the quantitative and qualitative evidence make it clear that the Christian Right has been a (perhaps the) primary reason for the remarkable rise of the religious “nones” in the past three decades. More than this, the Christian Right is, in itself, a sign of secularization.


2017 ◽  
Vol 15 (3/4) ◽  
pp. 477-485 ◽  
Author(s):  
Midori Ogasawara

Japan’s ultra-right wing government, led by Prime Minister Shinzo Abe since 2012, has been enforcing a number of controversial laws, such as the Secrecy Act and Security Act, which have enhanced surveillance and militarism. Without changing the Constitution, these laws allow the government to undermine the constitutional rights for individuals. The Conspiracy Law, Abe’s next attempt, focuses on placing people’s everyday communications under scrutiny. Against the modern principal of criminal justice, this law criminalizes the communications regarding crimes, without any criminal actions. Due to its extensively invasive character, the bill has been cancelled three times in the Diet in the past decade, but Abe insists that it is necessary for a successful running of 2020 Olympic in Tokyo as an anti-terror measure. While the Olympic gives the authoritarian government the best opportunity to incite nationalism and stabilize the rule, as the Nazi performed in 1936, surveillance comes forth to eliminate both public and private communications that question, criticize or counter the legitimacy of state power.


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