Jayaprakash Narayan and Indira Gandhi, 1966–74: Before the Rivalry

When the Gandhian Jayaprakash Narayan (JP) gave the clarion call of Total Revolution, Prime Minister Indira Gandhi responded heavy-handedly by imposing the Emergency in India in 1974–5. This all-encompassing duel has dominated politics and political scholarship since. Their domestic clash has established many analytical prisms for the contemporary public sphere in India, particularly personality politics versus people’s power, single party versus coalition grouping, electoral democracy versus authoritarian dictatorship, and student/youth movements versus generational status quo. Simultaneously, it has also highlighted their differences in a way that has served to bury their affinities and agreements—not only on obscure matters. This article seeks to soften this dichotomy on the basis of their correspondence, and complemented by other primary material, to sketch their consensus in an earlier period. It shows that before their break, the socialist JP and the statist Indira Gandhi exhibited complementary stands on national issues regarding Nagaland, Kashmir and Bangladesh. This national nearness complicates their later adversarial politics on domestic issues, adds dimension to our understanding of the mid-1960s and mid-1970s, and contributes to contemporary understandings of their respective places in narratives of the state against society in India.

Hypermnesia and Amnesia: Remembering (with) the Body and Post-Conflict Memorials and Architectures

The article consists of two parts. The first part (§§ 1–2) investigates the indiscriminate and absolute remembering and forgetting of everything, hypermnesia and amnesia as the extreme terms that research has used and uses for the different phenomena of memory, both in individuals and in social and political forms. In the face of these shifts it is thus indispensable to re-establish a critique of the paradoxical effects of memory aids and, at the same time, to seek new forms of remembrance that by mixing an experiential dimension and public sphere refocus the attention on the connection between latency, tension and experiential triggers of involuntary memory and on the ability to break through the fictions of collective memory. On this basis, the second part of the article (§§ 3–4) analyses how the experience of political and racial deportation during World War II drastically changed the idea of memorial architecture. More specifically, the analysis deals with a kind of memorial device that must represent and memorialise persons whose bodies have been deliberately cancelled. The aim is to present and analyse the artistic and architectonic efforts to refer to those forgotten bodies, on the one hand, and on the other hand to point out how for these new kind of memorials the body of the visitor is asked to participate, both physically and emotionally, in this somehow paradoxical search for lost bodies, offering oneself as a substitute.

At the Digital Margins? A Theoretical Examination of Social Media Engagement Using Intersectional Feminism

This article applies an intersectional feminist lens to social media engagement with European politics. Disproportionately targeted at already marginalised people, the problem of online abuse/harassment has come to increasing public awareness. At the same time, movements such as #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo have demonstrated the value of social media in facilitating global grassroots activism that challenges dominant structures of power. While the literature on social media engagement with European politics has offered important insights into the extent to which social media facilitates democratic participation, it has not to date sufficiently accounted for patterns of intersectional activism and online inequalities. Using Nancy Fraser’s feminist critique of Habermas’ public sphere theory and Kimberlé Crenshaw’s theory of intersectionality, this article explores patterns of gender and racial inequalities in the digital public space. By analysing both the role of racist and misogynistic online abuse targeted at women, nonbinary, agender, and gender-variant people in public life, as well as the opportunities for marginalised groups to mobilise transnationally through subaltern counter-publics, I argue that social media engagement is inextricably linked with offline inequalities. To fully understand the impact of social media on European democracy, we need to pay attention to gendered and racialised dynamics of power within the digital public sphere that have unequal consequences for democratic participation. This will involve expanding our methodological repertoire and employing tools underpinned by a critical feminist epistemology.

Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s Notion of Political Adab

This paper extends the emphasis on contingency and context in Islamic ethical traditions into the distinctly modern context of late 19th century Khedival Egypt. I draw attention to the way Muḥammad ʿAbduh’s engagement with Islamic ethical traditions was shaped by his practice in addressing the broad social and political questions of his context to do with nation-building and political journalism. As a bureaucrat and state publicist, he took pre-modern Islamic ethical concepts into the emerging discursive field of the modern state and the public sphere in Egypt. Looking at a series of newspaper articles for the state newspaper, al-Waqāʾiʿ al-miṣriyya, I show how he articulated an ethics of citizenship by defining a modern civic notion of adab that he called “political adab.” He conceived of this adab as the answer to the problem of how a unified nation emerges from the condition of “freedom” by which journalists and the reading public at the time were conceptualizing the politics of the ʿUrābī revolution in late 1881. This was a “freedom” of the public sphere that allowed for free speech and the power of public opinion to shape governance. ‘Political adab’ would be the virtue or situational skill, internalized in each participant in the public sphere, that would regulate this freedom, ensuring that it produces unity rather than anarchy. I argue that adab here enshrined ʿAbduh’s holistic approach to nation-building; Egypt with political rights would be a nation in which the very idea of the nation is comprehensively embedded—through adab—in people’s lives, animating their “souls”. This was a politics conceived not as a self-standing domain, but as growing out of society, becoming thereby an authentic unity and self-regulating “life”. In developing this vision, ʿAbduh was amplifying pre-modern meanings of adab implying wide breadth of knowledge, good taste, and the virtues, labelled in the paper as ‘comprehensivness,’ ‘consensus’ and ‘habitus.’ Keywords: Muḥammad ʿAbduh, Adab, Freedom, Nation, Politics, Egypt

The analysis of the hashtag #Jokowi404NotFound on Twitter in protesting mural removal in the public sphere

The removal of mural looking like President Joko Widodo's face with the words 404 Not Found triggered a wide range of reactions from the public, including some on Twitter, who saw the action as an anti-critical form of government. As a result, the hashtag #Jokowi404notfound became a popular topic and was used over 11,000 times on August 14, 2021. The purpose of this study is to look at how people use the hashtag #Jokowi404notfound on Twitter to protest the removal of murals. In August 2021, this study takes a qualitative approach, collecting data in the form of observation of media texts on Twitter's public timeline. According to the findings of this study, the hashtag #Jokowi404notfound was used to protest the government's anti-critical decision to remove murals as a form of suppression of individual freedom. When the public interest is at stake and the movement is mobilized by Twitter activists with large social media followings, the hashtag activism movement has the potential to drive and influence government policy. Messages to the government are also conveyed using various styles of language.

Sistem Demokrasi Negara Indonesia Di Era Pandemi Covid-19

Indonesia adalah Negara demokrasi.Demokrasi yang saat ini dipahami di Indonesia merupakan bagian dari pengaruh konsep demokrasi modern.Demokrasi adalah suatu sistem pemerintahan dalam suatu negara dimana warga negara memiliki hak,kewajiban,kedudukan, dan kekuasaan yang dalam menjalankan kehidupannya maupun dalam berpartisipasi terhadap kekuasaan negara.Karena itu rakyat berhak untuk ikut serta dalam menjalankan negara atau mengawasi jalannya kekuasaan baik secara langsung misalnya melalui ruang publik (public sphere) maupun melalui wakil-wakilnya yang telah dipilih secara adil dan jujur dengan pemerintahan yang dijalankan semata-mata untuk kepentingan rakyat.Sehingga tercipta sistem pemerintahan dalam negara yang berasal dari rakyat, dijalankan oleh rakyat, untuk kepentingan rakyat.Demokrasi pasca-pandemi nampaknya tidak akan pulih dalam waktu dekat apabila tidak ada terobosan politik yang berarti.Ini dapat kita lihat dari situasi politik yang tengah berjalan saat pandemi dimana melahirkan berbagai regulasi yang bernuansa sentralisasi kekuasaan.Untuk membangun pemerintahan yang demokratis sangatlah penting ada jaminan satu akses yang memungkinkan keterlibatan dan keikutsertaan masyarakat dalam proses-proses pembuatan keputusan.

Going transnational? Candidates' transnational linkages on Twitter during the 2019 European Parliament elections

How transnational are European Parliament (EP) campaigns? Building on research on the Euro-pean public sphere and the politicisation of the EU, this study investigates to what extent the 2019 EP campaign was transnational and which factors were associated with ‘going transna-tional’. It conceptualises Twitter linkages of EP candidates as constitutive elements of a transna-tional campaign arena distinguishing interactions with EP candidates from other countries (hori-zontal transnationalisation) and interactions with the supranational European party families and lead candidates (vertical transnationalisation). The analysis of tweets sent by EP candidates from all 28 member states reveals that most linkages remain national. Despite this evidence for the second-order logic, there are still relevant variations contingent on EU positions of parties, the adoption of the Spitzenkandidaten system and socialisation in the EP. The findings have impli-cations for debates on the European public sphere and institutional reform proposals such as transnational party lists that might mitigate the EU’s democratic deficit.