“Be Nice or Leave Me Alone”: An Intergroup Perspective on Affective Polarization in Online Political Discussions

Affective polarization—growing animosity and hostility between political rivals—has become increasingly characteristic of Western politics. While this phenomenon is well-documented through surveys, few studies investigate whether and how it manifests in the digital context, and what mechanisms underpin it. Drawing on social identity and intergroup theories, this study employs computational methods to explore to what extent political discussions on Reddit’s r/politics are affectively polarized, and what communicative factors shape these affective biases. Results show that interactions between ideologically opposed users were significantly more negative than like-minded ones. These interactions were also more likely to be cut short than sustained if one user referred negatively to the other’s political in-group. Conversely, crosscutting interactions in which one of the users expressed positive sentiment toward the out-group were more likely to attract a positive than a negative response, thus mitigating intergroup affective bias. Implications for the study of online political communication dynamics are discussed.

Islamic Law Politics in The Contemporary Era (Revealing The Struggle for The Positivization of Islamic Law in Indonesia)

<p>This paper will discuss the politics of Islamic law until now, which still leaves debates between pros and cons parties, this debate is based on differences in views between secular Islamic groups and traditionalists, plus global political conditions increasingly influence the direction of Indonesian government legal policies. Library research is the method used in this paper, the legal policy approach and statute approach are used to analyze data found in various literature. The results of this study indicate that the struggle for the positivists of Islamic law in Indonesia is still reaping polemics, these polemics are based on three things; first, differences in understanding of the relationship between religion and state; second, the contemporary Indonesian political system is influenced by western politics; third, liberalism and communism have helped to hinder the positivists process of Islamic law in Indonesia</p><p><br />Tulisan ini akan mendiskusikan tentang politik hukum Islam hingga saat ini yang masih menyisakan perdebatan antara pihak pro dan kontra, perdebatan ini didasari oleh perbedaan pandangan antara kelompok Islam sekuler dan Islam tradisionalis, ditambahkan lagi dengan kondisi politik global semakin mempengaruhi arah kebijakan hukum pemerintah Indonesia. Library research merupakan metode yang digunakan dalam tulisan ini, pendekatan legal policy dan statute approach digunakan untuk menganalisis data yang ditemukan dalam berbagai literatur. Hasil penelitian ini menunjukan bahwa pergulatan positivisasi hukum Islam di Indonesia masih menuai polemik, polemik tersebut didasari oleh tiga hal; pertama, perbedaan pemahaman tentang hubungan antara agama dan negara; kedua, sistem politik indonesia masa kontemporer dipengaruhi oleh politik barat; ketiga, paham liberalisme dan komunisme turut menghambat proses positivisasi hukum Islam di Indonesia <br />Kata Kunci: Politik, Hukum Islam, Positivisasi</p><div><span><br /></span></div>

Non si può fermare il vento con le mani – Populismo e Moralismo nella crisi del pensiero europeo

One of the distinctive features of a democratic society is the pervasive and endless public debate that regularly antagonize groups and individuals, clashing different interests and ideologies. In this competitive environment, the delegitimization of a political enemy is the more natural – and yet democratically unhealthy – way to win the confrontation between diverse ideas. Historically, one of the predilected strategies to discredit a political adversary has always been blaming its morality, thereby eroding the very root on which any consensus rests. The moral blaming is declined differently, depending on the social and cultural context of the time and therefore the dominating values. In a democratic debate, these moral allegations often relate to duplicity or spreading of misinformation, the so-called demagogy. Today, the same campaign is rolled out against some partiers accused to be “populists” for their appeal to the most illogic and instinctive popular sentiment. The definition of “populism” is though still uncertain and subject to academic debate. This article aims at presenting different definition and interpretation of this political phenomenon to better frame it in the nowadays Western politics. The concept of populism is considered in its different shapes, questioning on the one hand the consistency of the existing definition and on the other its relationship with the democratic tenet. At the end of this analysis, the focus is shifted to the European Union and the reason as to why all the populist parties are seemingly Eurosceptic. The reason provided challenges the ideas of European unity itself, underlying the contrasting directions that the experiment of integration conveys, and question the multi-layered architecture of the contemporary democracy.

The Reconfiguration of European Boundaries and Borders: Cross-border Marriages from the Perspective of Spouses in Sri Lanka

Cross-border marriages between citizens with a migration background and spouses from non-EU countries have been politicised and restricted across Europe. This article simultaneously applies the analytical lenses of bordering and boundary work to this issue and de-centres the perspective by investigating the consequences of these restrictions not on Europe, but on a country of origin – Sri Lanka. We show that a particular symbolic boundary against cross-border marriages in European countries legitimises the externalisation of borders to the country of origin. This has important consequences for the female spouses before they even begin their journey to Europe: it challenges their life aspirations, enhances their economic dependency and precarity and directly impacts the marriage system in Sri Lanka. We argue that this situation creates a form of neo-colonial governmentality that perpetuates historically established forms of Western politics of belonging.

Rooting Intergeneration Conflict in Racism: An Examination of Disappearing Moon Cafe and The Jade Peony

A recurring theme in Canadian diaspora literature is the problematization of cultural identity in the children of immigrants as they navigate between Western influences and their cultural heritage. My paper examines the different portrayals of second generation Chineseness in SKY Lee’s Disappearing Moon Cafe (1990) and Wayson Choy’s The Jade Peony (1995) through close reading. Although both these texts depict diaspora-matured Chinese Canadians as incorporating Western values into Chinese tradition, the elder generation’s response to this hybridity is configured differently. Through opposing representations of second generation characters’ use of the English language, Lee depicts early Chinese-Canadian Vancouver as more accommodating to amalgamated culture, while Choy’s Chinatown is hostile to Western influence. Linguistic proficiency is central to the plot of Disappearing Moon Cafe, where “Westernized” Chinese youth are depicted as masters of the English language and Western politics. This enables them to fight against repressive laws and ultimately gains them the approval of the elders, whereas the same bilingualism and biculturalism is condemned as dangerous in The Jade Peony. My paper analyzes white xenophobia in each text as the root cause of this difference in treatment; in an era where anti-Chinese sentiment is again rising, it is valuable to be aware of the far-ranging impacts of this hostility.

Mapping Conservatism of the Republican Era: Genesis and Typologies

Chinese conservatism is often reduced to a cultural movement the main concern of which is the preservation of traditional culture. This article proposes a new framework with which to analyze modern Chinese conservatism. It identifies late Qing culturalist nationalism, which incorporates traditional culture into concrete political reforms inspired by modern Western politics, as the origin of conservatism in the Republican era. Conservatism in this period was a reaction against New Culture activists’ denial of the political utility of this culturalist nationalism and constituted a response to World War I, leading some to question the merits of Western civilization. As a result, tradition no longer unitarily evoked the cultural elements corresponding to modern Western politics. Adopting a typological approach in order to distinguish different types of conservatism by differentiating various political implications of traditional culture, it divides the Chinese conservatism of the Republican era into four typologies: liberal conservatism, antimodern conservatism, philosophical conservatism, and authoritarian conservatism.

Saïd et Genet. La représentation des Palestiniens et la question de l’orientalisme chez Jean Genet

During the last two decades of his life, Jean Genet (1910-86) stopped writing novels and plays. Instead he wrote non-fictional stories and essays, many of with depicted Palestinian soldiers and refugees living in Jordan and Lebanon. In this article, Genet’s representation of Palestinians is discussed in the perspective of Edward Said’s orientalism theory. At first sight, the fact that Genet is a Westerner writing in French about a foreign people whose language he does not speak might suggest that he moulds Palestinian reality in order to fit Western thought and Western aesthetics, thereby producing orientalist discourse. However, rather than exploiting the East to strengthen Western identity, Genet uses Eastern reality to undermine Western thought. It is concluded that Genet does not meet Said’s criteria of orientalism since the Palestinians are situated at the centre of his world and occupy a privileged position that surpasses the interests of Western politics, culture, and identity.

Online news media and propaganda influence on radicalized individuals: Findings from interviews with Islamist prisoners and former Islamists

This study is the first to explore the twin influences of online propaganda and news media on Islamists. We conducted 44 in-depth interviews with cognitively and behaviorally radicalized Islamist prisoners in Austria as well as former Islamists in Germany and Austria. We found that online propaganda and news media had interdependent influences on Islamists’ rejections of non-Muslims and Western politics, as well as on their willingness to use violence and commit suicide. Cognitively radicalized individuals were influenced by propaganda that blamed non-Muslims for opposing Islam; this was reinforced by online mainstream news reports of right-wing populism and extremism that propagandists selectively distributed via social media. Among behaviorally radicalized individuals, exposure to propaganda and news reports depicting Muslim war victims contributed to the radicalized individuals’ willingness to use violence. Moreover, propaganda and media reports that extensively personalized perpetrators of violence strengthened radicalized individuals’ motivations to imitate the use of violence.

Life Excluded from Law: Agamben, Biopolitics, and Civil War

This chapter focuses on Giorgio Agamben’s work on biopolitical sovereignty. It focuses on Homo Sacer and State of Exception to show that Agamben links sovereign violence to the establishment of a state of exception, wherein life is controlled through its exclusion from the juridical order. With this, Agamben continues the biopolitical line that sovereignty is orientated towards the regulation of life rather than the establishment of juridical order. The second part of the chapter ties this to Agamben’s discussion of civil war to argue that, contra Foucault, Agamben holds that the fundamental division marking Western politics is not a racial one, but one between oikos and polis, private and public. From this, Agamben argues that this political division makes possible and so subtends the sovereign decision to exclude individuals from law by establishing a state of exception. The key point is that Agamben links sovereign violence to life by excluding the latter from the juridical order. The chapter concludes by critically evaluating Agamben’s proposals to overcome this.