Entanglements of art and memory activism in Hungary’s illiberal democracy

This paper explores how art contributes to the articulation of memories that counter the official historical narrative of Hungary’s self-proclaimed political and ideological system, illiberal democracy. Amid deepening polarization between Europe’s post-colonialist and post-socialist countries, the Hungarian government promotes a Christian conservative national identity against the “liberal” values of Western Europe. Systematic appropriation of historical traumas is at the core of such efforts, which largely manifests in removing, erecting and reinstating memorials, as well as in the re-signification of trauma sites. Insufficient civic involvement in rewriting histories generates new ways of resistance, which I demonstrate through the case study of a protest-performance organized by the Living Memorial activist group as a response to the government’s decision to displace the memorial of Imre Nagy in 2018. I seek to understand the dynamics between top-down memory politics, civil resistance and art within the conceptual apparatus of the “memory activism nexus” (Rigney 2018, 2020) and “multidirectional memories” (Rothberg 2009). I argue that artistic memory activism has limited potential to transform the dynamics of memory in a context where a national conservative political force has gradually taken control over historical narratives, triggering inevitably polarizing responses in the society. Although profoundly embedded in local histories, the case-study may offer new ways of negotiating traumatic heritages through the entanglement of art and memory activism.

The Failure on Our Governance: Reaksi Masyarakat Sipil terhadap Kebijakan Publik di Masa Pandemi

Tulisan ini berusaha memberikan elaborasi mengenai faktor-faktor apa saja yang berperan dalam kegagalan pemerintah atas kebijakannya di masa pandemi hingga memunculkan reaksi dari masyarakat sipil. Mulai dari minimnya preparedness, perbedaan sense of urgency, broken linkage, hingga rendahnya sense of belonging menjadi bahasan yang disajikan secara lebih lanjut dalam tulisan ini. Bagaimana pemerintah akhirnya mengakomodasi hadirnya komunitas sebagai bentuk resistensi yang mewujudkan terciptanya self-governing community. Yang mana keberadaannya juga mendorong berjalannya suatu demokratisasi. Melihat bahwa pergerakan dan polarisasi perlawanan sipil yang semakin tumbuh menjamur sebagai bentuk gerak komunal di masa pandemi. Indonesia menjadi salah satu negara yang turut meningkatkan resistensi. Melalui realita serta sumber-sumber sekunder, tulisan ini menjelaskan apa yang menyebabkan pemerintah gagap dalam penanganan pandemi hingga memicu kemunculan masyarakat sipil. Hingga akhirnya, civil society menjadi solusi (mobilizing for action) dalam tata kelola pemerintahan. Kata kunci: civil society, broken linkage, network governance, self-governing community, civil resistance, social contract

Teaching Collective Action: Strategies for Fostering Racial and Social Justice

Universities teach students about social problems but provide few concrete tools for acting to promote social change. Teaching about challenges but not about possible solutions can be potentially disempowering and may reduce civic agency. This chapter discusses the development of a required class on community organizing and civil resistance that provides students with specific strategies for engaging in collective action. The author explores a range of tensions involved in teaching this class: making it experiential without forcing students to work on issues or take steps they might not agree with, providing multiple traditions of social action so they do not get the sense that there is one “right” way, working with students whose perspectives might differ from ones he sees as legitimate, and teaching a class that some outside the institution might see as beyond the purview of a university. Ultimately, he argues that it is incumbent upon universities to provide concrete skills for social action, because failing to do so restricts their capacity to become effective civic actors in our democracy.

Emergence of Protests During The COVID-19 Pandemic: Quantitative Models To Explore The Contributions of Societal Conditions

The outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic has led to a resurgence of protests. Various societal conditions of social systems, such as economic stability, demographic ageing, and political elites, are often associated to the emergence of civil resistance movements. Several qualitative and quantitative models have been developed to analyse the relationship between societal conditions and the emergence of protests. The existing models use the underlying assumptions that these conditions operate in similar time-scales. However, the analysis of social systems also shows the importance of considering explicitly the inherent time-scales particularly slow-fast dynamics. The sudden and dramatic disruptive force of the pandemic has yield fine-grained data sets that can be used to better grasp the different dynamics of this social phenom. This paper proposes an integrated approach to explore the relationship between societal conditions and the emergence of protests in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. First, a literature based causal-loop-diagram is constructed to conceptualise the emergence of civil resistance as a result of intertwined dynamics. Based on the derived factors in the literature study, a data set is constructed to enable this analysis. Furthermore, by means of statistical and computational modelling we conduct a quantitative analysis in which we compare the emergence of protests for 27 countries during the pandemic. Also based on the factors found in literature we have constructed a system dynamics model that explicitly models the development of societal strains and social mobilisation in order to provide a better quantitative explanation of the emergence of protests. We found that while fast-changing factors are better estimators for ‘when’ civil resistance emerges, slow-changing factors are better estimators of ‘how’ civil resistance manifests itself in terms of the relative intensity of the protests in specific countries.

Gendered Violence and Neoliberal Desaparecidos in Luis Cano’s Socavón

This article situates Socavón (1999), a monologue by leading Argentine playwright Luis Cano, in terms of former Argentine President Carlos Menem’s (1989–99) economic policies in post-dictatorship Argentina, demonstrating how neoliberalism can be understood through the gendered shame and violence it produces. Shunted aside in Buenos Aires and haunted by its legions of desaparecidos, protagonist Ulisito desperately seeks throughout Socavón to regain his masculinity – as well as his personhood and his visibility – through aggression. I argue that Ulisito’s violence is a form of civil resistance, a reaction against a dehumanizing economic regime, as well as a critique of unresolved human rights issues haunting democratic Argentina. Cano draws on numerous dramatic and literary antecedents, including a play that is foundational to dramatic modernity, Georg Büchner’s Woyzeck, as blueprints for a contemporary crisis. Socavón suggests that unless a more equitable society is created, women in particular will continue to be the victims of a collapsed masculinity trying to reassert itself.

The Primacy of Intention and the Duty to Truth: A Gandhi-Inspired Argument for Retranslating Hiṃsā and Ahiṃsā, with Connections to History, Ethics, and Civil Resistance

The words "violence" and "nonviolence" are increasingly misleading translations for the Sanskrit words hiṃsā and ahiṃsā -- which were used by Gandhi as the basis for his philosophy of satyāgraha. I argue for re-reading hiṃsā as “maleficence” and ahiṃsā as “beneficence.” These two more mind-referring English words – associated with religiously contextualized discourse of the past -- capture the primacy of intention implied by Gandhi’s core principles, better than “violence” and “nonviolence” do. Reflecting a political turn in moral accountability detectable through linguistic data, both the scope and the usage of the word “violence” have expanded dramatically. The expanded scope of “violence” reflects greater consciousness of the various forms that serious harm can take, but also makes it harder to convincingly characterize people and actions as “nonviolent.” New translations could clarify the distinction between hiṃsā and ahiṃsā, and thereby prevent some misunderstandings of Gandhi. Training in beneficence would reflect Gandhi’s psychological path to reducing avoidable harm: detachment from the ego, learning to love universally, and seeking truth by experiment.