The Remaking of the Media-Military-State Relationships in the Early Twenty-First Century

Author(s):  
Bilge Yesil

This chapter focuses on the transformation of the Turkish media field as a result of the shifts in media ownership, the cultivation of AKP-friendly media conglomerates, the consequent upsurge in partisanship, and the decline in press freedoms. It traces the connections between these developments and the broader political economic forces, such as the economic crisis of 2001, the AKP's electoral hegemony, the decline of military tutelage, the entrenchment of Muslim bourgeoisie, and the new Islamist cadres in governmental and administrative structures. It argues that in Turkey's contemporary media landscape, commercial outlets have been simultaneously independent of the state and dependent on it. They are not formally owned, operated, or dominated by the state, yet their survival depends on their informal ties with the ruling elite, high bureaucracy, and judiciary. While this dependency on the state is not a new development, it has nonetheless revealed itself in astounding ways under the AKP's single-party rule.

Author(s):  
Bilge Yesil

This chapter examines Turkey's political history, specifically the country's main pillars of statism, nationalism, and secularism. These pillars emerged in unique forms in the aftermath of the establishment of the Republic in 1923 and became subject to divergent processes of transformation during the 1980s and 1990s, and then again in the first decade of the twenty-first century. The chapter illustrates how statism, nationalism, and secularism have suffused both the Turkish public sphere and its media culture. It also provides background for the ensuing examination of Turkey's contemporary media system, especially in regard to the development of political economic alliances between media proprietors and the state.


Author(s):  
Mark Rush

This article discusses the evolution of U.S. civil rights and civil liberties through the lens of Supreme Court decisions. It traces the evolution of negative rights against the state and positive liberties from nineteenth-century property rights decisions through early-twenty-first century decisions regarding same-sex marriage. It also traces the shift in the Court’s approach to rights cases from one in which the state is regarded as a threat to individual rights to one in which the state plays a complex role of balancing rights claims. As well, the article demonstrates that rights claims and cases have become more complex as notions of the “public interest” become more contested when the pursuit of general interests has a disproportionate effect on the interests of particular social groups.


2018 ◽  
Vol 14 (3) ◽  
pp. 304-326
Author(s):  
Rob Coley

The formerly dissident status of the essay film has, in recent years, been exchanged for a great deal of favorable attention both inside and outside academia. In the more overly moralistic commentary on the form, the contemporary essay film is submitted as a tactical response to a surfeit of audiovisual media, to an era in which most of us have become both consumers and producers of a digital deluge. The work of Adam Curtis is notably absent from these ongoing debates. Yet Curtis is far from an underground figure—he has been making essayistic films for the BBC for more than twenty years and was the first to produce work directly for the iPlayer platform. Using archival images to examine the present, his films produce counterintuitive connections and abrupt collisions that supplant the authority of narrative causality for a precarious network of associations and linkages. This article treats Curtis’s recent body of work diagnostically. It argues that, quite apart from any promise of escape or deliverance, the aesthetic form of his work actively inhabits the rhythms and vectors of contemporary media. For Curtis, the media-technological conditions of the twenty-first century provoke a crisis that is both political and epistemological, one in which sensemaking can no longer claim to take place at a distance from the infrastructure that mediates such processes but is instead thoroughly and inescapably immanent to it, a situation that prevents contact with the outside. His films are about what he calls “destabilized perception,” but importantly they are also a function of this condition, one that in turn demands a shift in how we conceive the essay film in the twenty-first century.


The concluding chapter summarizes the four main findings of the volume. The first concerns a certain retreat from global governance despite the multilateral and unstable nature of the world order in the early twenty-first century. Second, contributions to this volume highlight the power but also the problems that a regional perspective yields in our efforts to decentralize and pluralize our understanding of global governance. Third, that our critical approach to global governance has to cultivate an element of self-reflexivity. Just as we question the western-centric domination in discussions on global governance, when adopting decentralized, regional views we need to keep this element of self-reflexivity and plurality alive. This is no simple enterprise. And fourth, that the agent of global governance remains elusive. Doing away with the state leaves us with a rather fuzzy constellation of different types of institutions with different levels of aspiration and capacity to govern transnationally.


Author(s):  
Richard S. Katz ◽  
Peter Mair

Most conventional conceptions of what democracy is and of how it should be organized imply particular characteristics and functions for parties and party systems, and particular kinds of relationships among parties, citizens, and the state. Our contention is that the party government model so conceived, while quite powerful prescriptively, has only a marginal connection to the way parties and party system really work in the early twenty-first century. Our basic argument is that at the level of party systems, the mainstream parties, and most minor parties as well, have effectively formed a cartel. While the appearance of competition is preserved, in terms of political substance it has become spectacle—a show for the audience of audience democracy.


2010 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-10 ◽  
Author(s):  
Scott Vrecko

In line with their vast expansion over the last few decades, the brain sciences — including neurobiology, psychopharmacology, biological psychiatry, and brain imaging — are becoming increasingly prominent in a variety of cultural formations, from self-help guides and the arts to advertising and public health programmes. This article, which introduces the special issue of History of the Human Science on ‘Neuroscience, Power and Culture’, considers the ways that social and historical research can, through empirical investigations grounded in the observation of what is actually happening and has already happened in the sciences of mind and brain, complement speculative discussions of the possible social implications of neuroscience that now appear regularly in the media and in philosophical bioethics. It suggests that the neurosciences are best understood in terms of their lineage within the ‘psy’-disciplines, and that, accordingly, our analyses of them will be strengthened by drawing on existing literatures on the history and politics of psychology — particularly those that analyze formations of knowledge, power and subjectivity associated with the discipline and its practical applications. Additionally, it argues against taking today’s neuroscientific facts and brain-targetting technologies as starting points for analysis, and for greater recognition of the ways that these are shaped by historical, cultural and political-economic forces.


2012 ◽  
Vol 26 (1) ◽  
pp. 33-42 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Rodin

We are one humanity, but seven billion humans. This is the essential challenge of global ethics: how to accommodate the tension between our universal and particular natures. This tension is, of course, age-old and runs through all moral and political philosophy. But in the world of the early twenty-first century it plays out in distinctive new ways. Ethics has always engaged twin capacities inherent in every human: the capacity to harm and the capacity to help. But the profound set of transformations commonly referred to as globalization—the increasing mobility of goods, labor, and capital; the increasing interconnectedness of political, economic, and financial systems; and the radical empowerment of groups and individuals through technology—have enabled us to harm and to help others in ways that our forebears could not have imagined. What we require from a global ethic is shaped by these transformative forces; and global ethics—the success or failure of that project—will substantially shape the course of the twenty-first century.


Glimpse ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 22 (1) ◽  
pp. 87-94
Author(s):  
Dragan Prole ◽  

This article discusses fundamental contradictions regarding the social role of the new media. Avantgarde identifies the emergence of the new media with the possibilities of liberating the man and achieving true individuality, while dystopia qualifies it as the suffocation of individuality, as ballast that levels out and averages a man, as a threat to human freedom. The media technology is for the avant-garde the embodiment of the enriched self and expanded capacities of selfhood, while for dystopia, the media technology is directed against selfhood, since its effects start and end with the creation of alienation, with the distortion of selfhood directed against the fundamental attributes of humanity. On the contrary, for the avant-garde, the breach of media background awareness of the artistic expression has marked the definite parting with the age of alienated artistic practice. According to their most profound beliefs, staggering in the chains of figurative and narrative expressions, art has always served a different purpose, religion, pedagogy, politics, and ideology. Hence, the turn towards the demands and logic of the self-serving media marked the rise from the state of alienation to the state of true achievement, to the emancipation of artists and the art.


Significance The government's tightening grip on the media is part of efforts by the ruling elite to prepare for elections in spring or summer 2022. Recent media market entrant Euronews is only notionally independent: its franchise operation in Serbia is a joint venture with the state telecoms company. Meanwhile, pressures have increased on CNN-affiliated news programme N1. Impacts Neutralising independent media outlets gives room to government-linked tabloids and private TVs to spread misinformation. Telekom Srbija’s involvement with Euronews may contravene a legal ban on state ownership of the media. Under increased pressure in the region, UG may diversify its operations further afield, having bid for RTL Lux in Luxembourg. Serbia's EU accession bid, already on hold, will be further hampered by increasing government media capture and state capture more widely.


Author(s):  
Elana Levine

This introductory chapter briefly tackles the broad scope of scholarly literature on feminized popular culture, and also provides an overview of this area in the twenty-first century. Its focus is on forms of early-twenty-first-century popular culture that are strongly associated with femininity—the social and economic forces that create such culture, the ways these cultural products speak to and about feminine identity, and the ways that audiences, readers, and users engage with and experience this culture. In addition, the chapter details in brief the influences, both current and historic, which inform the central themes of this volume, as well as the aims and specific lines of inquiry that this volume seeks to pursue.


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