scholarly journals Imagining the anti-gang: the state, the father and Jean-Claude Van Damme

2021 ◽  
Vol 9s11 ◽  
pp. 41-65
Author(s):  
Maarten Hendriks
Keyword(s):  
Martial Arts ◽  
The State ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Work ◽  
The City

Empirically focusing on the so-called anti-gang, a civilian policing group in the city of Goma (DRC), this article examines the nexus between the workings of the imagination and the politics of everyday policing. Four forms of political imaginations through which the anti-gang imagine themselves as everyday policing actors are identified: political imaginations around the state, citizenship, the father, and martial arts and action movies. The article makes two main arguments. First, political imaginations are not merely fantasies. Instead, the anti-gang harness them to do political work and impose themselves as street authorities. In doing so, they in turn contribute to giving form to these political imaginations, by making them tangible and experienced as real in everyday urban life. Second, the article asserts that the political imaginations that shape and are shaped by anti-gang practices show that they do not so much propose a new political order. Instead, they seek to be included in it, escape marginalisation and become politically significant.

scholarly journals Under the bridge in Tehran: Addiction, Poverty and Capital

Ethnography ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (2) ◽  
pp. 151-175 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maziyar Ghiabi
Keyword(s):  
Drug Users ◽  
Primary Objective ◽  
The State ◽  
Ethnographic Study ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
The City ◽  
The Way

The article provides an ethnographic study of the lives of the ‘dangerous class’ of drug users based on fieldwork carried out among different drug using ‘communities’ in Tehran between 2012 and 2016. The primary objective is to articulate the presence of this category within modern Iran, its uses and its abuses in relation to the political. What drives the narration is not only the account of this lumpen, plebeian group vis à vis the state, but also the way power has affected their agency, their capacity to be present in the city, and how capital/power and the dangerous/lumpen life come to terms, to conflict, and to the production of new situations which affect urban life.

Introduction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Avner de Shalit
Keyword(s):  
Comparative Study ◽  
The State ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Political Rights ◽  
The City

Immigration should be discussed within the context of the city rather than the state because cities are now quite autonomous political entities and because nearly all immigrants settle in cities. Hence the meeting between locals and immigrants take place in the context of urban life rather than as citizens of the state. The book’s three questions are presented: should cities be in charge of deciding whether to allow immigrants to settle in the city? If yes, what local political rights should be granted to immigrants? And is there a model of integration which is superior to other models? The latter involved a comparative study of three such models, in Amsterdam, Berlin, and Jerusalem.

The State and Violence

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 293-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Human History ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Social Orders

Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge 2009) offers a theory of the evolution of the modern state and an even more ambitious framework “for interpreting recorded human history.” The book raises fundamental questions about the political structuring of violence, the functions of the rule of law, and the establishment and maintenance of political order. In doing so, it speaks to a range of political scientists from a variety of methodological and subfield perspectives. We have thus invited four prominent political science scholars of violence and politics to comment on the book: Jack Snyder, Caroline Hartzell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Larry Diamond.

Tianguis as a Possibility of Autogestion: Street Vendors Claim Rights to the City in Cancún, Mexico

2018 ◽  
Vol 21 (3) ◽  
pp. 306-321 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lorena Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
Urban Areas ◽  
Global South ◽  
The State ◽  
Urban Life ◽  
Spatial Transformation ◽  
Economic Activities ◽  
Street Vendors ◽  
Street Vending ◽  
The City ◽  
Rights To The City

During the past 20 years, street vendors in various cities in the Global South have resisted aggressive state sanctioned removals and relocation strategies by organizing for vendors’ rights, protesting, and creating street vending member organizations with flexible relationships to the local state. Through these means, street vendors claim “rights in the city,” even as the bodies they inhabit and the spaces they produce are devalued by state legitimizing systems. In this article, I present a case study of the Union de Tianguistas y Comerciantes Ambulantes del Estado de Quintana Roo, a “bottom-up” driven, flexible street vending membership organization not formalized by the state in Cancún. I argue that the Union becomes a platform for street vendors to claim rights to the city, and exemplifies vending systems that combine economic activities with leisure spaces in marginalized urban areas, and circumvent strict vending regulations without being absorbed into or directly monitored by the state. Highlighting the Union’s sustainable practices of spatial transformation, and vision of self-managed spaces of socioeconomic urban life in Cancún, illuminates how the members of the Union claim rights to the city as an example of a process of awakening toward imagining possibilities for urban futures that moves away from the state and capitalists systems, and akin to what Lefebvre termed autogestion toward resisting neoliberal ideologies that currently dominate urban planning projects in the Global South.

Provisions situation in the Tambov Governorate in the early 1918

2021 ◽  
pp. 209-215
Author(s):  
Nikita V. Averin
Keyword(s):  
Consumer Goods ◽  
The State ◽  
Economic Situation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Soviet Power ◽  
Economic Preferences ◽  
Peasant Movement ◽  
Peasant Protest ◽  
The City ◽  
Regions Of Russia

We examine the provisions situation in the early 1918 in the producing regions of Russia using materials from the Tambov Governorate. Published documents indicate a strong rise in prices for consumer goods, the population was concerned about high prices for food. The provisions problem was clearly taking on political overtones. The Bolsheviks who came to power did not only impose power, proceeding from their political and economic preferences, starting socialist transformations and fighting the remnants of the old organs of power. All this is shown in pub-lished sources on the peasant movement that swept the province, as well as in memoirs, witnesses of all those problems associated with food and the deterioration of the political and economic situation in the city and the governorate as a whole. In particular, the Soviet power immediately faced huge provisions problems, both inherited and generated by their own requisitions, as well as with the peasant protest movement. The peasant movement itself, caused by hunger and chaos, in the future will play a huge role in the policies pursued by the Bolsheviks. Documents and memoirs can serve in the study of the state of the population in the specified period.

Re-Placing the state

2011 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annabel S. Brett
Keyword(s):  
Human Agency ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Local Motion ◽  
Physical Movement ◽  
The City

This concluding chapter addresses the issue of the place of the city directly, and discusses the broader implications of place in relation to the metaphysics of human agency. As the space of physical movement, or locomotion, place is apparently depoliticized from the outset; for the political depends on the free, which, even if conceived as the voluntary and naturalized, is nevertheless contrasted with the external motion that is blocked by force. However, the casuistry concerning the local motion of citizens shows how the space of the political has to contend with the space of external movement, the same space in which animals move, which resists even as it supplements the voluntary and juridical construction of the state.

The Exile of Political Theory: The Lost Homeland of Legitimation

1995 ◽  
Vol 43 (4) ◽  
pp. 683-697 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jon Simons
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Legitimation Crisis ◽  
Implicit Definitions ◽  
Recurrent Theme

A sense of distance or exile is a recurrent theme of the literature in which the state of the political theory is either lamented or acclaimed. A review of these tales suggests that implicit definitions of the homeland of the sub-discipline as philosophical, practical or interpretive are inadequate, leading to mistaken diagnoses of the reasons for the ills or recovery of political philosophy. This paper argues that political theory has been exiled from its previous role or homeland of legitimation of political orders. Under contemporary conditions in the advanced liberal capitalist political order, in which a media-generated imagology of society as a communicative system fills the role of a legitimating discourse, political theory faces a legitimation crisis.

The developmental history of solitary and supermax confinement: toward a phenomenology of the state of exception

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
David Polizzi
Keyword(s):  
Supreme Court ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Political ◽  
Developmental History ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Attitudes And Behaviors ◽  
The Supreme Court ◽  
History Of

The phenomenology of solitary and supermax confinement reflects what Giorgio Agamben has defined as the state of exception. The state of exception is defined as the blurring of the legal and political order, which constructs a zone of indifference for those forced to endure this situation. This notion of the state of exception can be applied to the zone of indifference created by the Supreme Court, which seems unwilling to outlaw this harmful practice relative to 8th Amendment protections prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment and the political order which is all too inclined to continue use strategy. One of the central aspects of this “ecology of harm”, is the way in which the very structures of this type of confinement, helps to invite and legitimize abusive attitudes and behaviors in penitentiary staff.

scholarly journals The Return of the Sacral King

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 ◽  
pp. 51-65
Author(s):  
Paul R. DeHart ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Roman Empire ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Ancient Rome ◽  
The World ◽  
Ancient Christianity ◽  
The City

In Pagans & Christians in the City, Steven D. Smith argues that in contrast to ancient Rome, ancient Christianity, following Judaism, located the sacred outside the world, desacralizing the cosmos and everything in it—including the political order. It thereby introduced a political dualism and potentially contending allegiances. Although Smith’s argument is right so far as it goes, it underplays the role of Christianity’s immanent dimension in subverting the Roman empire and the sacral pattern of antiquity. This division of authority not only undermined the Roman empire and antique sacral political order more generally—it also subverts the modern state, which, in the work of Hobbes and Rousseau, sought to remarry what Western Christianity divorced.

The State and Violence

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 287-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Human History ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Social Orders

Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge 2009) offers a theory of the evolution of the modern state and an even more ambitious framework “for interpreting recorded human history.” The book raises fundamental questions about the political structuring of violence, the functions of the rule of law, and the establishment and maintenance of political order. In doing so, it speaks to a range of political scientists from a variety of methodological and subfield perspectives. We have thus invited four prominent political science scholars of violence and politics to comment on the book: Jack Snyder, Caroline Hartzell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Larry Diamond.

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