scholarly journals Socjalizm, świeckość, wolny rynek i hindutwa. Indyjska narracja o państwie i jego ideologii w perspektywie historycznej

2019 ◽  
Vol 72 (3) ◽  
pp. 91-113
Author(s):  
Piotr Kłodkowski

The Republic of India, as probably the most culturally and religiously diverse country in the world, has built a very unique socio-political system which is based on cross-cultural compromises between various  communities. The ideological foundations of secularism and socialist development were implemented by Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru. For almost half a century, they symbolised the identity of the state and constituted the essential elements of every official narrative by the Indian National Congress. Nehru was also the maker of India’s main foreign policy vectors, which were generally approved by subsequent  governments. Although the ideology of socialist development was eventually replaced with a free market economy, the concept of secularism remained relevant in the public sphere. The author presents the gradual process of socio-economic transformation and describes the international context of building the image of the country in the 20th century. With the Bharatiya Janata Party coming to power in 2014, the old philosophy of Nehruvian secularism is gradually being undermined by the followers of Hindutva, Hindu fundamentalists. The author analyses the three-layered narratives constructed by the ruling coalition and widely promoted both at home and abroad. The third layer, being most radical, is directed against the Muslim community which is the biggest religious minority in India. The Hindutva ideology, although not always clearly postulated by the current government, may contribute to communal polarisations and the eruption of interfaith violence in the years to come.

2021 ◽  
pp. 088832542098015
Author(s):  
Veronika Pehe

This article analyses how economic change after 1989 was perceived and rooted in society through cultural representations, specifically in the film production of Poland and Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic and Slovakia). The starting premise of this investigation is that popular commercial films, alongside the media and discourse of politicians and other key actors of the systemic transformation, also informed ideas about the free market circulating in the public sphere. Filmmakers, faced with the new realities brought about initially by the gradual liberalization of the economy in the late 1980s and later the systemic change of the economic transformation in both countries, immediately turned to capturing and fictionalizing the changes surrounding them. They presented audiences with role models of what it means to be a capitalist, but also tales of warning. This article investigates the “transformation cinema” of the 1990s, focusing on the figure of the entrepreneur and private enterprise. It examines how filmmakers searched for a visual language to critique or affirm the new social order, but also continued to work with inherited modes from the late socialist era. The article asserts that while the economic expectations conveyed through cinema focused largely on structuring the imagination of a new middle class in Poland, Czech(oslovak) cinema adopted a more sceptical outlook, suggesting that the promises of the free market were not available to “ordinary” working people.


2013 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
pp. 29-49
Author(s):  
Anna Krzynówek-Arndt

In the concept of revolution there are two essential elements of political life. The first one is the fragility and sensitivity of the world of things created by human beings, lack of durability and strong support of the political order. The other element is the human ability to create and build a new order with hope for its survival. However, a more adequate approach to understand these elements is conceptualization of politics and political actions that anticipate the opening of the public sphere to the traditional and religious arguments (desecularization of religion as an impress of the postmodern epoch), and also to the problems of dignity of human work. What is also important is the awareness that it requires redefinition of the  anthropological assumptions and a radical broadening of understanding how humans act according to what Hannah Arendt proposes. Moreover, it is important to understand that the redefinition means something more than just retouching as it is defined by  Habermas, who believes in “laic communicative power” even in spite of mentioning “complementary learning process” of religion and secular outlook from yourself.


2021 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 16-21
Author(s):  
Aparna Tarc

The thought of breath grips the world as climate change, racial injustice and a global pandemic converge to suck oxygen, the lifeforce, out of the earth. The visibility of breath, its critical significance to existence, I argue, is made evident by poets. To speak of breath is to lodge ourselves between birth and death and requires sustained, meditative, attentive study to an everyday yet taken for granted practice. Like breathing, reading is also a practice that many took for granted until the pandemic. My paper will engage the affective and/or poetic dimensions of reading left out of theories of literacy that render it instrumental and divorced from the life of the reader (Freire, 1978). I will suggest that scholars of literacy, in every language, begin to engage a poetics of literacy as attending to the existential significance of language in carrying our personhood and lives. I will also argue that our diminishing capacities to read imaginatively and creatively have led to the rise of populist ideologies that infect public discourse and an increasingly anti-intellectual and depressed social sphere. Despite this decline in the practice and teaching of reading, it is reported that more than any other activity, reading sustained the lives of individuals and communities’ during a global pandemic. Teachers and scholars might take advantage of the renewed interested in reading to redeliver poetry and literary language to the public sphere to teach affective reading. Poetry harkens back to ancient practices of reading inherent in all traditions of reading. It enacts a pedagogy of breath, I argue, one that observes its significance in our capacity to exist through the exchange of air in words, an exchange of vital textual meanings we have taken for granted as we continue to infect our social and political world and earth with social hatred, toxins, and death. In this paper I engage fragments of poetry by poets of our time (last century onward) that teaches us to breathe and relearn the divine and primal stance that reading poetry attends to and demands. More than any other form, “poetry,” Ada Limon claims, “has breath built into it”. As such, reading poetry helps us to breathe when the world bears down and makes it hard for us to come up for air.


2019 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 141-146 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vladislav Krastev ◽  
Blagovesta Koyundzhiyska-Davidkova ◽  
Nadezhda Petkova

Abstract In 2000, the global policy against the phenomenon of “corruption“ was launched by the United Nations, and in 2003 the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) was adopted, which Bulgaria ratified three years later. Two months after the adoption of this international convention, Bulgaria became part of the European Union. The accession was accompanied by the creation of “specific accompanying measures” aimed at correcting identified deficiencies in various areas, including measures against corruption. As a result of the annual reports of the European Commission on Bulgaria’s progress on the Co-operation and Verification Mechanism, anti-corruption law-making has begun to develop and improve. Serious progress in this direction is the creation of legislation in the area of “conflict of interest”, which is not exactly corruption but creates prerequisites for its development, especially in the public sphere. The paper presents the result of the analysis of the created anti-corruption legislation after the accession of the Republic of Bulgaria to the EU. Particular attention is paid to the law adopted in 2018 regulating anti-corruption measures, as well as the terms and procedure for the seizure of illegally acquired property for the benefit of the state.


2012 ◽  
Vol 59 (4) ◽  
pp. 570-587 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mar Griera

Religious diversity is posing new and urgent challenges to local authorities and there is no solid foundation of expertise in dealing with this issue at the local level. In some European cities, interfaith platforms are providing local authorities with new governance tools to cope with the challenges of religious diversity and are generating new ways of framing and representing religion in the public sphere. The author takes the city of Barcelona as a case study with the aim of exploring the emergence of a new model for dealing with religious minority issues that goes beyond State–Church relations and the political legacies in this area.


2015 ◽  
Vol 114 (776) ◽  
pp. 331-336 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marc Lynch

“Arab politics will be torn for many years to come between the restless, critical power of the public sphere and the determined efforts of regimes, states, and old elites to maintain their domination.” Third in a series on public spheres around the world.


2020 ◽  
pp. 224-228
Author(s):  
Emmanuel Taïeb

This concluding chapter summarizes the key points of the book. The year 1939, when executions moved behind prison walls and thus definitively exited the public stage, marked the beginning of remote governance, a new stage in the transformation of the public sphere: power no longer had to manifest itself directly, but could instead use various media platforms to assert itself. The disappearance of public executions also signaled the advent of the civilizing process, which sought to conceal anything that might provoke anxiety or negative emotions. The criticism levied at, and the final disappearance of, public executions illustrates a historical moment when a technology of power was gradually modified, eliminated, and concealed thanks to the efforts of the elites as well as, most likely, to the efforts of executionary spectators, because the emotions that executions unleashed were in contradiction with society's desire to reject violence. The elimination of publicity did not resolve the problem of violence in the Republic nor immediately solve the issue of the death penalty, which would drag on for another four decades, but it did demonstrate that people were no longer willing to tolerate a certain kind of state violence. It also revealed a phase in the evolution of the psychological landscape in which self-control came to be determined by the authorities and their instruments.


Ethnicities ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 344-362 ◽  
Author(s):  
Arnfinn H Midtbøen

This article employs theories of ethnic boundary-making to explore when and under what conditions ethnicity and religious background shape minorities' experiences when participating in the public sphere in Norway. Drawing on in-depth interviews with elite individuals with various ethnic and religious minority backgrounds, the analysis calls into question interpretations made in other studies, which tend to imply an all-encompassing significance of race, ethnicity or religion. Although the analysis support previous findings in that negative comments and harassment do occur, the interviews demonstrate a variety of experiences and positions and that several individuals are able to strategically cross existing ethnic boundaries. Overall, the findings suggest that important changes are occurring in Norway's mediated public sphere. The question is whether these changes point to broader, societal processes of boundary-blurring or rather are opportunities offered to exceptional individuals while the existing hierarchy of ethnic categories stays intact.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document