Drawing Imperial Lines: Sovereignty and Tacitus’ Germanicus

This essay focuses on Germanicus’ performance of sovereign power in Tacitus’ Annales 1-2. That power is seen in the differentiation of citizen from non-citizen and Roman territory from non-Roman territory. Roman violence in Germany contrasts with Germanicus in the East. There he recognised a shared history and community. Sovereign power required a recognition of the sovereign by the citizen and of the citizen by the sovereign. An individual’s membership and a territory’s place within the Roman Empire depended not on innate characteristics but political negotiation. Ancient political geographies gave primacy to the political rather than the territorial in determining citizenship.

Separated by a common language: How Breitbart and The New York Times produce different meanings from common words

We build on the work by Peled and Bonotti to illuminate the impact of linguistic relativity on democratic debate. Peled and Bonotti’s focus is on multilingual societies, and their worry is that ‘unconscious epistemic effects’ can undermine political reasoning between interlocutors who do not share the same native tongue. Our article makes two contributions. First, we argue that Peled and Bonotti’s concerns about linguistic relativity are just as relevant to monolingual discourse. We use machine learning to provide novel evidence of the linguistic discrepancies between two ideologically distant groups that speak the same language: readers of Breitbart and of The New York Times. We suggest that intralinguistic relativity can be at least as harmful to successful public deliberation and political negotiation as interlinguistic relativity. Second, we endorse the building of metalinguistic awareness to address problematic kinds of linguistic relativity and argue that the method of discourse analysis we use in this article is a good way to build that awareness.

Examining the Australian Digital Platforms Inquiry and theorizing ‘accidental policy’

‘Accidental policy’ is a term often used to disparage unplanned or under-deliberated policy, but it can also be used as a concept to define and theorize policy development and its effects more broadly. This article does the latter by applying the accidental policy lens to the case of the Australian Digital Platforms Inquiry – the first of its kind worldwide – and then uses elements from the development and effects of the inquiry to theorize the concept for application in other policy studies. This article examines the factors – including existing media, communications, technology developments and policies and political manoeuvring – that led Australia to confront large multinational platforms and become a world leader in digital platforms policy. Rather than the continuation of a long-term, consistent policy regime, the inquiry resulted from political expediency and behind-the-scenes parliamentary deal making. This article provides an analysis of a situation in which a deliberative policy process did not occur but a significant policy impetus was still developed. This study adds to the understanding of accidental policy making in which a rapid response to external pressures, as well as more complex factors including political negotiation and deal making, is at play.

Historical Origins of the Personal Belief Exemption to Vaccination Mandates: The View from California

A number of states, starting with California, have recently removed all non-medical exemptions from their laws requiring vaccinations for schoolchildren. California was also one of the earliest states to include a broad non-medical, or personal, belief exemption in its modern immunization law, which it did with a 1961 law mandating polio vaccination for school enrollment, Assembly Bill 1940 (AB 1940). This paper examines the history of AB 1940’s exemption clause as a case study for shedding light on the little-examined history of the personal belief exemption to vaccination in the United States. This history shows that secular belief exemptions date back further than scholars have allowed. It demonstrates that such exemptions resulted from political negotiation critical to ensuring compulsory vaccination’s political success. It challenges a historiography in which antivaccination groups and their allies led late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century opposition to vaccination mandates while religious groups drove mid-twentieth century opposition. It also complicates the historiographic idea of a return to compulsion in the late 1960s, instead dating this return a decade earlier, to a time when belief exemptions in polio vaccination mandates helped reconcile the goal of a widely vaccinated population with the sacrosanct idea of health as a personal responsibility.

In Memoriam Indoor Fountains: Promenade Concerts and the Built Environment

Discussions of promenade concerts, at least in the United Kingdom, tend to run along one of two lines: either the format is emblematic of attempts to popularize classical music or (in the famous case of the Last Night of the BBC Proms) it is symptomatic of a contested cultural nationalism. An alternative line of inquiry is to consider promenade concerts as part of the built environment. Until 2010 the fountain at the Royal Albert Hall was a mainstay of musical promenading; it had been so for over a century and a half. Such fountains, often accompanied by potted plants and Arcadian décor, were said to cool the concert hall and freshen the air, especially when their sprinkles were supplemented with blocks of imported ice. They occupied a prominent place in a concert architecture that encouraged mobility and informality, drawing on a long tradition of outdoor promenading that had gradually moved indoors. The history of concert hall suggests that the promenade phenomenon constituted not only a site of social and political negotiation (as it has typically been described), but also a staging post in the enclosure of hitherto open spaces and an example of the Victorian desire to control the climate of public assembly.

Alinsky revisited: ‘rubbing raw the resentments of the people’

This chapter analyses American community organiser Saul D. Alinsky's theoretical background and shows that his understanding of 'resentment' was drawn from the ethics of the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith and the German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. 'Rubbing raw the resentments' and 'to fan the sores of discontent' are Alinsky's medical metaphors describing his technique to understand frustration and aggression, to cool down emotions and to transform its energy into common action and political negotiation. He tried to empower the people by turning personal discontents and problems into public issues. What are the lessons to be learned from Alinsky for contemporary community development responses to populism? His analysis and his confrontations with McCarthyism and proto-fascist agitator Father McCoughlin provide examples of ways of meeting the challenges we are facing in Germany today, where new prophets of deceit operating through populist politics again carry out the fine art of propaganda, using the new forms of mass communication and the opportunities of social media. Ultimately, the chapter offers a German perspective to the international discussion on community development, populism, and democratic culture.

The trouble with diverse books, part I: on the limits of conceptual analysis for political negotiation in Library & Information Science

PurposeThe term diverse books is increasingly popular yet persistently nebulous. The purpose of this paper – Part I of II – is to illuminate both that the concept is in need of a unified account and that conceptual analysis, though at first seemingly quite promising, fails as a method for identifying one.Design/methodology/approachThis paper utilizes traditional (or intuitive) conceptual analysis to specify the respective clusters of necessary and sufficient conditions that constitute four broad candidate accounts of diverse books.FindingsThough diverse books is a concept in need of a definition, conceptual analysis is not an appropriate method for adjudicating between the definitions we have on offer. This is because the concept is fundamentally political, serving as a resource for re-shaping collective social arrangements and ways of life. The conceptual problem outlined here requires for its resolution a method that will move us from a descriptive project to an explicitly normative one, wherein we consider what we properly work to achieve with and through the concept in question.Originality/valueThis paper initiates a systematic analytical project aimed at defining diverse books. In illustrating a moment of methodological failure, it paves the way for a critical alternative – namely, Part II's proposal of an analytical intervention in which political concepts are defined partially in terms of their benefits vis-á-vis informational justice.

Origins and functions of climate-related relocation: An analytical review

Planned, state-led population relocation is advanced as an adaptation to climate change. Concerned that climate hazards will threaten settlement viability and provoke widespread, unplanned migration, global discourse overwhelmingly characterizes relocation as a voluntary, “last resort” effort to resettle and rebuild communities in safer areas. Over the past decade, scholars have investigated where and why climate-related relocation materializes and how it functions as an adaptation (or otherwise). This article systematically reviews the scientific literature, concluding that climate-related relocation is a more diverse and complex process than recognized within dominant research efforts and policy narratives. While climate-related relocation is sometimes a function of environmental migration pressures and adaptation imperatives, recent critical scholarship shows that climate-related relocation processes are embedded in historical responses to environment and development problems and unfold through political negotiation, discourse, and the social construction of risk and response. In practice, “adaptive relocation” frequently involves population redistribution (villagization and sedentarization) as well as resettlement, is often proactive and involuntary, and risks (re)producing maladaptive outcomes. Based on this analysis, I argue for an expanded research and policy agenda centered around a pluralistic conceptual framework that respects the diversity of relocation efforts undertaken as adaptation.

الرؤية الإسلامية المقاصدية للمفاوضات السياسية: دراسة تحليلية للمفاهيم النظرية العامة (Political Negotiations from The Maqasidi Perspective: An Analytical Study of General Theoretical Concepts)

تتعرض هذه الدراسة لبيان ضرورة عملية التفاوض في شتى مجالات الحياة، سيما المتعلقة بالمفاوضات السياسية بين الدول والمجتمعات والجماعات، وذلك استنادا إلى مقاصد الشريعة الإسلامية، ومن جملة ما ترمي إليه الدراسة تفعيل دور الفقه السياسي في معالجة بعض النوازل وفق المقاصد الشرعية. ومن أبرز المحاور التي تم التركيز عليها: معاني المفاوضات وأهميتها، وعناصر المفاوضات وخصائصها، ومبادئ التفاوض ونظرياته، ومشروعية المفاوضات وضوابطها الشرعية ومقاصدها العامة، وذلك باستخدام مناهج ثلاثة: المنهج التحليلي لدراسة الإشكالات العلمية المختلفة المرتبطة بالتفاوض، والمنهج الاستقرائي لاستنطاق النصوص؛ لمعرفة مقاصدها، وتنزيلها على مستجدات واقعنا المعاصر، إضافة إلى المنهج التاريخي، وذلك من خلال جمع وتوثيق المعلومات التاريخية المتعلقة بالمفاوضات كالعوامل التي أثرت فيها، والظروف التي أحاطت بها. ومن النتائج التي توصلت إليها الدراسة، أن ثمة ترابطا بين المعاني اللغوية لمفهوم المفاوضات ومفاهيمها الاصطلاحية، وأن لعملية التفاوض ضوابط شرعية عديدة، أهمها ارتباطها بمصلحة غير ملغاة، وأن لا تتعارض مع ضرورة شرعية، فتبطلها، أو تقدمها على مرتبة أعلى منها دون سند شرعي أو عقلي سليم. من أهم مقاصد المفاوضات التعارف، والإقناع، والتعاون على البر والتقوى، والإصلاح بين المتخاصمين، والسلامة في الدين، والنفس، والعقل، والنسل، والمال والوصول بالخصم إلى الحق بطريق لا ينكره هو. الكلمات المفتاحيّة: المفاوضات، السياسة، الفقه السياسي، مقاصد الشريعة. Abstract This study aims to highlight the Maqasidi perspective in the negotiation process in various domains of life, especially the political negotiation between states, societies, and organizations. The activation of the role of Political Jurisprudence in addressing some of the contemporary issues has been one of the main concerns of this short study. Among the most prominent aspects that were focused on: the meanings and importance of negotiations, their elements, theories, legality, and general purposes as well as characteristics and principles of negotiations according to the Objectives of Shari’ah. Three approaches have been applied here namely; the analytical approach to study the various scientific problems that are related to negotiations, and the inductive approach for examining and scoping the texts to know their purposes so that they can be adopted in the developments of our contemporary reality, in addition to the historical method which has been used in collecting and documenting historical information related to negotiations such as the factors that affected them, and the circumstances that surrounded them. Among the findings of the study, is that noticeably there is a correlation between the linguistic meanings of the concept of negotiations and their idiomatic concepts and that the negotiating process has some Shariah regulations and controls the most important of which is their association with interests that are not Islamically rejected and that they do not contradict a necessity considered by Islamic Law, nullify it, or prioritize it over a higher rank interest “Maslahah” than it without legal and logical support. Persuasion, cooperation on righteousness and piety, reconciliation between the litigants, safety in religion, life, intellect, lineage and wealth, are among the most significant purposes of negotiations. Keywords: Negotiations, politics, political jurisprudence, Maqasid al-Shari’ah