Mediating shame and pride: countermedia coverage of Independence Day in Poland and the US

This article adopts a comparative qualitative approach to studying the rhetoric of injured pride in the coverage of Independence Day celebrations by the right-wing countermedia in Poland (wPolityce.pl) and the US (Breitbart News) from 2012 to 2018. In both countries, the number of countermedia articles on Independence Day proliferated in the aftermath of the election of the Law and Justice party (2015) and Donald Trump (2016). Based on the analysis of the narrative strategy for affective polarisation, we argue that the countermedia mobilise support from an electorate of ‘the disenfranchised’ by strategically invoking emotions of shame and pride. By positioning the radical right as a political force that shields ‘patriots’ from the leftist ‘pedagogy of shame’, the outlets instrumentalise the mobilising potential of shame by transforming it into righteous anger and pride. This strategy results in a mediated ‘emotional regime’ that offers guidelines for an acceptable emotional repertoire for the members of the nationally bound in-group.

Middle Castes Against Hill High Caste Political Domination in Nepal: Can Indian Experience Be A Lesson?

This study examines the problems and prospects of middle caste politics in Nepal based on similar political developments in north India. It investigates the processes of middle caste and class formation in the two countries and goes on to examine demography and upper-caste political strategies. Taking the Federal Socialist Forum Nepal (FSFN) and its trajectory as an example of middle caste political formation, it shows that the middle castes are at a disadvantage in Nepal than their brethren have been in north India. FSFN’s new merger with two political parties recently further shows the difficulty of mobilizing a middle caste political force and mounting a sustained challenge against the political domination of the hill upper castes. This paper also analyzes emerging caste relations in contemporary Nepal.

S.N. Behrman, Comedy, and the Extermination of the Jews: Broadway, Christmas Eve, 1934

S.N. Behrman’s Rain from Heaven premiered on Broadway on Christmas Eve, 1934. In the play, Hugo Willens, a refugee from Nazi Germany, describes a pamphlet he had written in Germany that led to his exile: the satirical pamphlet narrates the extermination of all the Jews but one. Tracking Behrman’s wide reading, which he recorded in his diaries, shows that anticipation of genocide was widely shared by writers in the public sphere to which he belonged. Behrman intended the story of the last Jew as a joke, as some of his audience understood, but it was a joke with political force. The fictional comic pamphlet was part of a larger project of remaking the comedy of manners for the purposes of anti-Nazi resistance.

Displacing Political Islam in Indonesia

ABSTRACT This article investigates the narrative of Islamic nationalism in twentieth-century Indonesia, focussing on the experience of, and discourse surrounding, the self-identified Islamist Darul Islam movement and its leader, S. M. Kartosuwiryo (1905–1962). I offer a narrative of the independence struggle that counters the one advanced by Indonesia's Pancasila state, and allows us to capture subtleties that old discussions of separatism—with their assumption of fixed centres and peripheries—cannot illuminate. The article unfolds three historical threads connected to ideas of exile and displacement (physical and intellectual), and the reconstitution (successful or failed) that followed from those processes. Starting from the political circumstances under which Kartosuwiryo retreated to West Java after the Dutch reinvasion of 1947—in a form of physical exile and political displacement from the centre of politics to the periphery, from a position of political centrality to one of marginality and opposition—I then transition to an elaboration of Kartosuwiryo's ideology. His political strategy emerges as a form of voluntary intellectual displacement that bounced between local visions of authority, nationalist projects, and transregional imaginations in order to establish the political platform he envisioned for postcolonial Indonesia. Lastly, I argue that the elision of Islam from the reconstructed narrative of Kartosuwiryo's intentions, characterised as separatist and anti-nationalist, was a key aspect of Indonesia's nation-building process. It is my final contention that official Indonesian history's displacement of Kartosuwiryo's goals away from Islam and into the realm of separatism allowed for two reconstitutive processes, one pertaining to political Islam as a negative political force, and the other to Kartosuwiryo as a martyr for Islam.

The Syrian Crisis (2011–2021): Development of Conflict

The author analyses the course of the conflict, the composition and the actions of the armed opposition. The methods of the media war against the Syrian Arab Republic are examined. The role of Russia in the suppression of ISIS and the political solution of the Syrian crisis is demonstrated. The academic novelty of the author’s approach is its focus on the new stage of the Syrian crisis in the years 2018–2021, i. e. after the downfall of ISIS. The internal situation in SAR, the activity of the Constitutional Committee, the Presidential elections in 2021 are examined and analyzed. The author concludes that after the defeat of ISIS and its affiliated radical Islamist groupings, the main factors of the conflict continuation are the external actors illegitimately presented in SAR and the armed groups under their control, as well as the Kurdish factor. The author maintains that the polit-ical solution of the Syrian crisis is possible after the transformation of the armed groups of the moderate opposition into a political force and under the condition of the territorial integrity and sover-eignty of Syria that would guarantee the free creed of all its confessions.

Democratic Aesthetics: Scenes of Political Violence and Anxiety in Nari Ward and Ocean Vuong

By attending to art and writing that interrogates US citizenship and state violence, this essay foregrounds the structural antagonism between democracy as an instituted form of rule, which depends on inegalitarian hierarchies, and democracy’s egalitarian drive. It argues that the realization of democracy as a form of governance (consensus democracy) occurs by substituting the rule of a part for the whole, which violently forces democracy’s constitutive figures to conform to and negotiate its organizing logics. Nari Ward’s We the People (2011) allegorizes this inherent tension in democracy as one between synecdoche and metonymy. The article then theorizes a new form of democratic politics through an engagement with Jacques Rancière before turning to Ocean Vuong’s “Notebook Fragments” (2016) and “Self-Portrait as Exit Wounds” (2016) as articulations of a democratic aesthetics constituted by figures—including metonymy, irony, and catachresis—that interrupt the substitutions of synecdoche. Vuong’s poetry foregrounds the violence enacted by state fantasies and insists on the democratic equality disavowed by consensus democracy. Together, Ward and Vuong locate the political force of aesthetics not in reassuring visions of inclusion but in operations that disturb and resist any form of hierarchy.

Perspectives of public administration’s development: International experience

The purpose of this article is to reveal the urgent state of affairs in the sphere of public administration in Ukraine and the world. The most relevant problematic issues in regard to the functioning of public administration area have been also studied. The current prospects for the development of public administration are characterized. In particular, successful examples of international experience in this field are analyzed. Methods of public administration in a number of developed countries are also compared. The meaning of the terms "public administration", "implementation of public administration" and "development of public administration" is revealed. It is noted that the importance of understanding exactly how to carry out public administration within a particular state or a particular region or municipality is a key factor in the success and effectiveness of a political program of any political force. The importance of active cooperation of state authorities of Ukraine, as well as the public, with Ukraine's international allies and partners is emphasized. After all, it is fruitful interaction with such states that will help Ukraine to develop faster and acquire the useful qualities and properties that it must possess in order to effectively carry out public administration.

“A Land for a People, Not a People for a Land”

Territorialist ideology emerged together with Zionist ideology. From the moment Leon Pinsker wrote in his Auto-Emancipation that “the goal of our present endeavors must be not the Holy Land, but a land of our own,” there were those in Jewish society who clung to the idea of “a land of our own” and wanted to set up some independent autonomous entity outside of the Land of Israel. This chapter traces territorial ideology from its ideational beginnings in the 1880s, through its conversion into an organized ideology and a political force in the Jewish world of the early twentieth century to its decline in the 1950s.