Beyond the nation state: the role of local and pan-national identities in defining post-colonial African citizenship

2018 ◽  
pp. 120-136
Author(s):  
Gemma Bird
Keyword(s):  
National Identities ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Post Colonial

The Dissemination of Development

1998 ◽  
Vol 16 (5) ◽  
pp. 577-598 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcus Power
Keyword(s):  
Focal Point ◽  
Writing Development ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Specific Reference ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Development Discourse ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Postcolonial Africa

In this paper I consider the ways in which discourses of development enframe postcolonial Africa. The dissemination of development is discussed in three principal ways. First, constructions of national identities and of the nation-state and their dissemination through development discourse is considered. Second, the textual dissemination of meaning through the process of writing development is explored with specific reference to Hegel's writings on the principle of development. Third, the dissemination of historical and geographical worlds through discourses of development is considered with the continued durability of the idea of three worlds as the key focal point of discussion. I formulate an antidevelopment incite which attempts to disrupt the enframing of postcolonial Africa through ‘Western’ discourses of development. The paper concludes with a discussion of how the worlds of development have proven so persistent, and of the implications for a more radical ‘post-colonial’ development geography.

scholarly journals Gender representations in politics of belonging: An analysis of Swiss immigration regulation from the 19th century until today

Ethnicities ◽  
2016 ◽  
Vol 17 (4) ◽  
pp. 445-468 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolin Fischer ◽  
Janine Dahinden
Keyword(s):  
19Th Century ◽  
Direct Democracy ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Gender Representations ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Gender Culture ◽  
Critical Case Study ◽  
The 19Th Century

The literature increasingly recognises the importance of gender in defining the boundaries between national societies and migrants. But little is still known about the history and changes of mechanisms that shape the role of gender as category of difference. Based on a critical case study of Switzerland, this article examines how gender is implicated in the politics of migrant admission and incorporation and underlying notions of ‘the other’. Drawing on theories of boundary work, we show that gendered representations of migrants are mobilised by different actors to advance their claims and calls for certain forms of immigration control and migrant integration. Since the late 19th century, gendered representations of Swiss nationals and migrant others shift from classical gender ideas to culturalised post-colonial interpretations of gender roles and, most recently, to normative ideas of gender equality. As part of these changes, migrant women moved from the periphery to the core of public and political attention. Concomitantly, categories of difference shift from the intersection of gender and social class to an intersection of gender, culture and ethnicity. Local particularities of Switzerland – the idea of ‘overforeignisation’ and the system of direct democracy – play a significant role in shaping categories. But Switzerland’s embeddedness in transnational fields emerges as equally important. The article expands on recent research and illuminates how changing dynamics of categorisation and othering facilitate the construction of nations and national identities in a transnationalised world.

scholarly journals Queering Justice: States as Machines of Oppression

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (Summer) ◽  
pp. 48-59
Author(s):  
Nour Abu-Assab ◽  
Nof Eddin
Keyword(s):  
Civil Society ◽  
The State ◽  
Arab State ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sovereign State ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Nation States ◽  
Recent Attention ◽  
Shed Light

In light of the recent attention to the incarceration, surveillance, and policing of non-normative people in the Middle East and North Africa, this article does not seek to offer alternatives to systems of justice. Instead, our argument revolves around the need to turn the concept of justice on its head, by demonstrating that justice within the context of the nation-state is in its essence a de facto and de jure mechanism of policing and surveillance. To do so, this article draws on Michael Foucault’s notion of state-phobia from a de-colonial perspective, intersectional feminist theory, and Hisham Sharabi’s conceptualisation of the Arab-state as neo-patriarchal. This article highlights the need to move away from the post-colonial benevolent imaginary of the state, as a result of people’s desire for self-determination, to a more realistic de-colonial conceptualisation of nation-states that emerged post-colonisation, as sites of oppression. This article will also shed light on the role of civil society in reinforcing the unjust justice sought within nation-state frameworks by drawing on the examples of the recent crackdown on non-normative people in Egypt, and the example of non-normative Palestinians living under occupation. The Egyptian and Palestinian cases are, respectively, one of an allegedly sovereign state that overtly restricts gender and sexual freedom, and another of an occupying state that nominally guarantees gender and sexual rights. These examples are used to demonstrate the theoretical underpinnings of this article, through which we seek to problematise and break binaries of justice versus injustice, and the state versus civil society, in an attempt to queer the concept of justice.

scholarly journals Olympic Diplomacy and the Emerging States: Striving for Influence in the Multipolar World

2017 ◽  
Vol 23 (79) ◽  
pp. 73-102 ◽  
Author(s):  
Đana Luša
Keyword(s):  
Soft Power ◽  
Olympic Games ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sporting Events ◽  
International Affairs ◽  
National Interests ◽  
The World ◽  
The Olympic Games

AbstractThe world of sports is a reflection of the world of politics. It is becoming increasingly multipolar with the emerging states hosting mega sporting events. Firstly, the article problematizes the concept of multipolarity and, secondly, globalisation by questioning whether the Olympic Games reinforce national identities and promote national interests by using Olympic diplomacy as a soft power tool. In doing so, the article explores the correlation between the changes in international affairs and the hosting of and participation at the Olympic Games by emerging states such as Brazil, China and Russia. The analysis distinguishes globalisation from the role of the nation-state, by highlighting the evident differences between emerging states in terms of hosting the Games, but also takes into consideration geopolitical and geo-economic parameters.

scholarly journals Samisk kunst og norsk kunsthistorie. Delvise forbindelser

10.16993/bbm ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Monica Grini
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
Nation Building ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Disciplinary Boundaries ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The 19Th Century

Sápmi, the Sámi area, is transnational; it transcends four nation states, Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. Art and art history has been considered natural parts of a nation state’s inventory at least since the 19th century and has contributed to the production and maintenance of national identities and narratives. What is the role of the nation state in art history, and how has the national paradigm affected the presentation of Sámi art, historically and today? Focusing on the discipline of art history in Norway, the volume exposes the prevailing representation of Sámi art, duodji, and dáidda as ethnographic material and relates it to the politics of nation building in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. The book examines the representation of Sámi art, artefacts, practices, materialites, actors, concepts, and themes in Norwegian Art History, to uncover some of the established disciplinary mechanisms and narratives. The central method is historiography in combination with fieldwork in archives and museums, aimed at doing art historiography in the expanded field – to move beyond the traditional textual focus and question naturalized institutional and disciplinary boundaries. This is one of very few historiographical studies of the art historical discipline in Norway, and the only one that does this by centring on Sámi traditions, items, actors, and conceptualizations.

scholarly journals Virtual States and Symbolic Markets of Identity

2020 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 116-124
Author(s):  
Maksim V. Kirchanov
Keyword(s):  
Identity Development ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Alternative Form ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Common Definition ◽  
The One ◽  
Economic Functioning ◽  
The 19Th Century ◽  
Modern Era

The author analyzes virtual states in the contexts of identity markets. There is assumed that virtual states can play the role of both subjects and objects of modern symbolic exchange. The article shows that virtual states do not have a common definition, and those who study them offer different approaches ranging from economic to cultural, from social to anthropological. On the one hand, virtual states can sell their identities. The author presumes that markets can be defined as cultures, and cultures as markets. On the other hand, the virtual states’ “products” that actualize their identity can also be goods. There is assumed that the processes of globalization and virtualization significantly changed the vectors and trajectories of identities development, turning them into a part of the market economy. The article assumes that the nation-state is gradually losing its monopoly right to represent the identity of the nation, and new actors are trying to challenge this right by proposing their own projects for identity development.The author believes that the emergence of virtual states in identity markets was the result of a performative turn and a craft revolution, for virtual states appeared as the consequences of economy craftivization, offering various mechanisms to monetize identities and turn them into sacred and symbolic political products. The author believes that the virtual state was caused by the craftivization of the serial mass identities proposed in the 19th century as in the age of nationalism. There is assumed that the virtual states were the attempts to challenge the regular state’s monopoly inherited from the modern era to construct national identities. Therefore, the article analyzes the virtual states as attempts to revise the modern nation-state in the contexts of a cultural turn in the economy, which turned it into a sphere of production of meanings and identities. In general, the author considers virtual states as a new and alternative form of economic functioning, where the sense-making and meaning-generating constructs that invent and imagine new types and forms of identities become goods.

scholarly journals Etos dworu i „ludzi dobrze wychowanych”: epitafium dla inteligencji

2018 ◽  
Vol 62 (1) ◽  
pp. 47-70
Author(s):  
Antoni Z. Kamiński
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Civil Society ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Civic Culture ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Global Order ◽  
Constitutional Order ◽  
Nation States ◽  
The Impact

The article is devoted to a critical analysis of current controversies concerning the Polish national identity, and the interpretation of the impact of nobles’ democracy on the demise of the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth. It considers the role of national identity as a factor influencing civic culture and, therefore, determining its usefulness in assuring the proper functioning of the constitutional order. The analysis assumes that (1) the current global order is the product of the emergence of nation-states; (2) that a nation-state cannot exist without civil society grounded in the concept of national identity and patriotism. Patriotism is opposed here to nationalism; similarly, cosmopolitism is opposed to internationalism. Patriotism and cosmopolitism are compatible and imply an open-minded, inclusive attitude to different national identities. Both nationalism with its focus on superiority of one’s own nation, and internationalism — rejection of the nation-state in the name of an imaginary global, stateless community — are exclusive. These both exclusive postures present a threat to civil society.

Prohibitionist Protests by Women in India’s Northeast

2016 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 159-168 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kaustubh Deka
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Other ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Women's Groups ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Peace Negotiations ◽  
Women’S Groups ◽  
Alcohol Prohibition

The body of women in India’s northeast is both racialized and gendered as the region continues to be constructed through the binaries of post-colonial sate-society conflicts and often treated as the ‘other’ of the nation state. A conflict centric approach however has mostly focused on women’s interventions in the society from the perspective of their ‘peace making’ capacities and thus obscuring some other significant roles performed historically by organized women power in the region: activities that predate and, in fact, in some crucial ways influence their gradual mobilization towards the role of peace making. Some of the prominent women led social movements that began in the decades of 1970s and 1980s around the issue of alcohol prohibition had gradually transformed into movements taking up issues of human rights violations and peace negotiations besides others. In this context it is interesting to look into the instances of anti-alcohol or prohibitionist protests undertaken by women in India’s northeast, specially focusing on prominent women’s groups in the states of Manipur and Nagaland, that points at the complex roles played by women’s groups in crafting a public space for the women to articulate their opinion in these societies even when they face challenges from within and without and come to terms with the dilemmas of having to take some difficult position both against the state and the community.

scholarly journals Opting for opt outs? - Untangling the role of identity in shaping support for differentiated integration

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martin Moland
Keyword(s):  
Public Opinion ◽  
European Integration ◽  
Survey Data ◽  
Public Perceptions ◽  
National Identities ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Eu Membership ◽  
Differentiated Integration ◽  
The Eu

A large literature investigates support for European integration. However, only recently have public opinion scholars turned their focus to public perceptions of differentiated modes of integration. This article contributes to this growing literature by investigating whether exclusively national identities lead to a demand for more differentiated integration at the EU level, regardless of individual views of the question of EU membership. Using survey data from 2020, I show that solely identifying with one’s nation-state does not increase support for temporally or functionally differentiated European integration in any substantive way. However, it appears to be a key motivator of support for differentiation among those opposing EU membership. This suggests that those most concerned with sovereignty are no more likely than others to support a more differentiated EU. It also suggests that a more differentiated future EU may not be enough to stem constraining dissensus at the popular level.

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