CHAPTER SEVEN. IN SEARCH OF ANCIENT AUTHORITY: THE APPEAL TO PLATO AT CRITICAL JUNCTURES IN HALEVI’S CUZARI AND MAIMONIDES’ GUIDE

2021 ◽  
pp. 143-166
Keyword(s):  
Author(s):  
Jonathan Laurence

This book traces how governments across Western Europe have responded to the growing presence of Muslim immigrants in their countries over the past fifty years. Drawing on hundreds of in-depth interviews with government officials and religious leaders in France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Morocco, and Turkey, the book challenges the widespread notion that Europe's Muslim minorities represent a threat to liberal democracy. The book documents how European governments in the 1970s and 1980s excluded Islam from domestic institutions, instead inviting foreign powers like Saudi Arabia, Algeria, and Turkey to oversee the practice of Islam among immigrants in European host societies. But since the 1990s, amid rising integration problems and fears about terrorism, governments have aggressively stepped up efforts to reach out to their Muslim communities and incorporate them into the institutional, political, and cultural fabrics of European democracy. The book places these efforts—particularly the government-led creation of Islamic councils—within a broader theoretical context and gleans insights from government interactions with groups such as trade unions and Jewish communities at previous critical junctures in European state-building. By examining how state–mosque relations in Europe are linked to the ongoing struggle for religious and political authority in the Muslim-majority world, the book sheds light on the geopolitical implications of a religious minority's transition from outsiders to citizens. This book offers a much-needed reassessment that foresees the continuing integration of Muslims into European civil society and politics in the coming decades.


Author(s):  
Eugénia C. Heldt

Time plays a central role in international organizations (IOs). Interactions among actors are embedded in a temporal dimension, and actors use formal and informal time rules, time discourses, and time pressure to obtain concessions from their counterparts. By the same token, legacies and innovations within and outside IOs can be examined as a dynamic process evolving over time. Against this background, this chapter has a twofold aim. First, it examines how actors use time in IOs with a particular focus on multilateral negotiations to justify their actions. Drawing on international relations studies and negotiation analysis, this piece explores six different dimensions of time in the multilateral system: time pressure, time discourse, time rules, time costs, time horizons, and time as a resource. Second, this chapter delineates the evolution of IOs over time with the focus on innovations that emerge to adapt their institutional system to new political and economic circumstances. This piece looks particularly at endogenous and exogenous changes in IOs, recurring to central concepts used by historical institutionalism, including path dependence, critical junctures, and sequencing. This allows us to map patterns of incremental change, such as displacement, conversion, drift, and layering.


2021 ◽  
pp. 002190962110258
Author(s):  
Nila Mohanan

From a feminist institutionalist perspective, this article engages in a comparative analysis of South Africa, one of the only post-transition democracies where women organized as a distinct interest group representing gender interests were able to negotiate and gain access to political power, and India, where women’s participation was predominantly as ‘nationalist women’. It argues that constitution drafting is a decisive critical juncture when descriptive representation can be translated very effectively into the substantive representation of women as equal citizens, provided women qua women and as gender-conscious agents are able to intervene to promote the cause of their effective political participation.


2021 ◽  
pp. 001458582110215
Author(s):  
Glenn A Steinberg

Much recent commentary on Dante’s Commedia focuses on Dante’s truth claims in the poem. Indeed, Teodolinda Barolini has proposed that “the fundamental question for all readers of Dante’s poem” is “How are we to respond to the poet’s insistence that he is telling us the truth?” I propose that the poem itself gives us guidance as to the seriousness of its claims to literal truth. It does so by actively deconstructing its own meaning at critical junctures. I look at several such moments of deconstruction, but I argue that the first few cantos of the Paradiso in particular provide a reflection on the difference between reality and fiction. Early in the Paradiso, Dante draws attention to the metaphoric nature of his poem and reminds his reader, through his character’s own actions, that metaphor is not reality. In this way, Dante implies that we should not take the narrative particulars of his poem too literally but should treat metaphor as metaphor rather than as mimesis.


Author(s):  
Stephanie Scott ◽  
Mathew Hughes ◽  
Domingo Ribeiro-Soriano

AbstractWe conceptualize entrepreneurial ecosystems as fundamentally reliant on networks and explore how and under what conditions inter-organizational networks lead an entrepreneurial ecosystem to form and evolve. It is widely accepted that entrepreneurial ecosystems possess a variety of symbiotic relationships. Research has focused considerable efforts in refining the structure and content of resources found within these networked relationships. However, merely focusing on actor-level characterizations dilutes the notion that social relationships change and are complex. There has been little conceptual treatment of the behavioral and governance factors that underpin how quality interactions composing an entrepreneurial ecosystem develop and change over time. In response, we provide a longitudinal ethnographic study examining how ecosystems are managed and evolve in their relational configurations and governance at critical junctures. Using mixed methods and data collected over 3 years, we reveal a cyclical process of relational development central to the initiation, development, and maintenance phases of a valuable entrepreneurial ecosystem. We contribute to a conceptualization of effective ecosystems as reliant on networks, we reveal the behavior and governance characteristics at play in the entrepreneurial ecosystem during each phase of its evolution.


2021 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
David Anderson Hooker ◽  
Elizabeth W. Corrie ◽  
Itihari Toure

Abstract Seeking justice, understanding what makes for peace and pursuing it, these are integral aspects of the pursuit of the Good Life. In this chapter three youth and community development experts make the case that 1) a vital aspect of development is empowering adolescents with a faith-informed, community-focused, critical consciousness; 2) young people are formed in community and joy cannot be fully experienced except communally and in the pursuit of JustPeace; and 3) the church has opportunities to intervene at critical junctures in youth formation to help them see the importance of pursuing communal JustPeace for their own ability to live the Good Life. In support of these claims, a framework of radical Identity is postulated and two practices—the Eight Bowls of Life Ceremony for generational identity marking and the Game of Life, part of a three-week intentional community of the Youth Theological Initiative (yti) – are presented. Each practice contributes to formation of justice-seeking identities in adolescents as integral aspects of preparation for the life-long pursuit of God’s joy, God’s good life, and even God’s salvation.


Author(s):  
Vidmantas Tūtlys ◽  
Daiva Bukantaitė ◽  
Sergii Melnyk ◽  
Aivaras Anužis

The paper compares the institutional development of skills formation in Lithuania and Ukraine by focusing on the implications of the post-communist transition and Europeanization and exploring the role of policy transfer. The research follows the theoretical approach of historical institutionalism and skills formation ecosystems. Despite similar critical junctures typical for the institutional development of skills formation in Lithuania and Ukraine within this timeframe, the existing differences of these development pathways can be explained by the different policy choices and different impacts of the institutional legacy. The main implication of integration with the EU for skills formation in Lithuania and Ukraine is related with enabling holistic and strategic institutional development of skills formation institutions. The paper concludes that policy transfer was one of the key driving forces and capacity-building sources in the development of skills formation institutions in both countries.


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