TEOLOGÍA DE LA REPRODUCCIÓN. ALEGORÍA MORAL, ELEGÍA ARTÍSTICA Y SÁTIRA DEL POPULISMO EN LA AUTORA DE LAS MENINAS, DE ERENESTO CABALLERO (2017)

La autora de Las Meninas, de Ernesto Caballero (2017), presenta un escenario improbable pero verosímil: tras la llegada al poder de una coalición política, se acuerda la venta de patrimonio para hacer frente a la crisis económica. Ángela, una monja especializada en la copia de cuadros, recibe el encargo de elaborar la réplica de Las Meninas que se expondrá en el Prado tras la venta del original. Este argumento le permite al autor plantear una honda reflexión no exenta de ironía y mordacidad. Este artículo explora cómo el dramaturgo conjuga las tres matrices discursivas de la obra: por un lado, una alegoría moral sobre el pecado de la vanidad; por otro, una elegía por el arte ante los disparatados derroteros por los que hoy discurre; finalmente, una sátira sobre el populismo como proyecto político. Estos ingredientes conforman una “fábula distópica” que ha de contarse entre las mejores piezas de Caballero. Abstract: La autora de Las Meninas, by Ernesto Caballero (2017), offers an improbable but plausible future: after gaining power, a political coalition agrees to sell some cultural patrimony as a means to face an economic meltdown in the country. Ángela, a nun who is specialized in duplicating paintings, is in charge of replicating Las Meninas, which is going to be exhibited at the Prado Museum after the original has been sold. The play is, therefore, a deep, ironic and mordant reflection, and the article explores how the playwright combines the three discursive genres of this play: a moral allegory on vanity, an elegy for the ludicrous direction that art has taken nowadays, and a satire on populism as a political project. These elements produce a “dystopic fabula” which should be considered one of Caballero’s best plays.

Contesting Agricultural Markets in South Asia: Farmer Movements, Co-operatives and Alternative Visions

Recent laws for privatizing agricultural produce markets in India are just one prominent example of long-running efforts to liberalize agriculture across South Asia. These legacies of state withdrawal from agriculture and the growing role of private intermediaries in both input and output markets have precipitated simultaneous crises of reproduction and accumulation in the countryside. However, such trajectories of liberalization are both context-specific and politically contested. Drawing from two cases—the Pakistan Kissan Ittehad’s efforts to build a broad political coalition among differentiated agrarian producers to contest the place of farmers in agricultural markets and the Northern Sri Lanka co-operative movement’s autonomous initiatives for post-war rural reconstruction—this article argues that rural movements are providing new and alternative visions for how farmers can engage with liberalizing agricultural markets on more equitable terms.

The Political Economy of Xi Jinping’s Political Rollback

When Xi Jinping had just come to power in 2012, the world expected that he would continue the development trajectory of economic liberalization and political institutionalization set in motion by Deng Xiaoping. However, when the National People’s Congress abolished the presidential term limit in the Chinese Constitution in March of 2018, it suddenly became clear that Xi had chosen to “roll back” from Deng’s policy line in nearly every aspect of the Chinese Party-state system. How does one explain Xi’s sudden departure from Deng’s policy line? In comparison with the resurgence of other authoritarian regimes of the 1960s and 1970s in Latin America and East Asia, this paper argues that the cause of Xi’s political rollback lies in the exhaustion of the previous development model. More specifically, the exhaustion of export-led growth in the mid-2000s had made the existing distributive coalition unsustainable. The power struggle within the political coalition therefore intensified and finally led to Xi’s monopoly over political power. The argument of this paper will proceed through four parts. It will begin with a literature review of comparative authoritarianism with a particular focus on the impact of a development crisis on the survival of political coalitions. It is followed by an analysis of the contributions of China’s export-led growth to the sustainability of the political coalition during the eras of Jiang Zemin and Hu Jintao. Then, it will explain how the exhaustion of export-led growth led to a power struggle within the political coalition and how through a re-orientation of the development model, Xi has gradually concentrated power into his own hands. Finally, it will discuss the theoretical implications of China’s case.

The Impact of Candidates’ Profile and Campaign Decisions in Electoral Results: A Data Analytics Approach

In recent years, a wide range of techniques has been developed to predict electoral results and to measure the influence of different factors in these results. In this paper, we analyze the influence of the political profile of candidates (characterized by personal and political features) and their campaign effort (characterized by electoral expenditure and by territorial deployment strategies retrieved from social networks activity) on the electoral results. This analysis is carried out by using three of the most frequent data analyitcs algorithms in the literature. For our analysis, we consider the 2017 Parliamentary elections in Chile, which are the first elections after a major reform of the electoral system, that encompassed a transition from a binomial to a proportional system, a modification of the districts’ structure, an increase in the number of seats, and the requirement of gender parity in the lists of the different coalitions. The obtained results reveal that, regardless of the political coalition, the electoral experience of candidates, in particular in the same seat they are running for (even when the corresponding district is modified), is by large the most influential factor to explain the electoral results. However, the attained results show that the influence of other features, such as campaign expenditures, depends on the political coalition. Additionally, by means of a simulation procedure, we show how different levels of territorial deployment efforts might impact on the results of candidates. This procedure could be used by parties and coalitions when planning their campaign strategies.

The Dawn of a New Common

On Thursday, February 27, 2020, during a live broadcast on television, Minister Bruno Bruin is handed a note saying that it has just been confirmed that a patient with the coronavirus has been identified in the Netherlands. Allegedly, it concerns a man who is placed in isolation in the Elisabeth-Tweesteden hospital in Tilburg.This is where the story of our book starts. The hospital mentioned by the minister is hardly a kilometer away from our university, Tilburg University. Things now start to develop quickly. During several weeks, the region of Tilburg becomes the “Corona Capital” of the Netherlands in terms of the number of people infected. On March 18, Minister Bruno Bruins collapses due to exhaustion during a debate in the Government’s House of Representatives. The following day, he resigns and soon after is temporarily replaced by a politician of a party that is not part of the current political coalition. Two days earlier, the country had gone into a lockdown after a historical speech of Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte.

Populism, Cosmopolitanism, or Democratic Realism?

This article argues that populism, cosmopolitanism, and calls for global justice should be understood not as theoretical positions but as appeals to different segments of democratic electorates with the aim of assembling winning political coalitions. This view is called democratic realism: it considers political competition in democracies from a perspective that is realist in the sense that it focuses not first on the content of competing political claims but on the relationships among different components of the coalitions they work to mobilise in the pursuit of power. It is argued that Laclau’s populist theory offers a sort of realist critique of other populists, but that his view neglects the crucial dynamics of political coalition-building. When the relation of populism to global justice is rethought from this democratic realist angle, one can better understand the sorts of challenges each faces, and also where and how they come into conflict.

Nigeria's ruling party faces further turmoil

Significance Rival blocs had been backing Oshiomole and 'Acting National Chairman' Victor Giadom, who received the tacit endorsement of President Muhammadu Buhari. These tensions reflect attempts to control the party machinery as presidential aspirants vie to succeed Buhari in 2023. Impacts With Buhari gradually becoming a 'lame duck', he will struggle to delay outlining a preferred successor while keeping the party united. A convention to elect a new APC leadership will likely be dogged by controversy and could prompt a new round of defections. A failure by the APC to unite over the short term could result in the creation of a new political coalition ahead of the 2023 polls.

Coalitions for development: a new-developmentalist interpretation for the abandonment of industrial capitalist from PT political coalition

ABSTRACT The paper uses a socioeconomic framework to understand what is behind the dismantling of PT political coalition. First a theoretical discussion presents the interconnections between Developmental State and class coalitions. Second, PT political coalition is described by connecting the interest of different social classes with macroeconomic, industrial and social policies implemented by the government. Finally, it is provided new interpretation and evidence for the abandonment of the industrial capitalist from the dominant coalition. For that, the new-developmentalist argument of the lack of satisfactory profit rate and Furtado’s argument on development-stagnation dichotomy is presented and empirically supported.

Whose Law and What Order?

Throughout the 1950s, the Nation of Islam encountered increasing surveillance and harassment from local and state police on the streets as well as inside prisons. As Malcolm X and the Nation of Islam became a force within the Harlem community, they seemed poised to submerge their political and religious differences in the interest of forming a local Black united front. An alliance of Black Nationalists, liberals, and labor activists was forging an ambitious and sweeping political coalition in Harlem around a platform of Black unity. Though the resulting Emergency Committee would not last long, it raises lasting questions about postwar Black social movements and the development of the carceral apparatuses that suppressed them.