The Costs of Global Leadership and Neighborhood International Politics

The article examines the trends in international relations that have emerged in recent years, including during the pandemic. According to the author, a clear international space structure in the vein of Immanuel Wallerstein’s world-system, with equally clear rules of the game in such space is associated with the presence of an enforcer. The enforcer here is a country or group of countries that impose certain forms of communication on the international space, making the behavior of agents of the international political space predictable. Such a position for the enforcer, among other things, makes it possible to obtain benefi ts (material and status ones) that exceed its costs. This situation was not least determined by the relative homogeneity of the international space actors (States). However, in reality, as shown in the article, there are many more variants of polities in the world, which, under certain conditions, were convenient to imitate state political institutions. The conditions change is leading to actualization of such polities. The actualization of diversity results in a sharp escalation of the enforcer’s costs, a drop in their eff ectiveness and the attractiveness of the enforcer’s position itself. The leader bears more and more signifi cant costs ceases to perform its functions. Here, in place of the institutional system set by the enforcer, comes a diff erent way of organizing international relations – interpersonal trust, which arises and is strengthened by personal communication. Until recently, such “decisionmakers’ clubs” were not as bright as the enforcer, but they connected the global world. However, the pandemic also disrupts this type of communication or rather complicates it. As a result, the hierarchy of problems changes. The problems of domestic politics and the international problems that aff ect them come to the fore. Global politics is being replaced by “neighborhood” politics. In the age of the world without a global leader and regional players rivalry, tomorrows “weight” of one country depends on how eff ectively it will be able to fi t in the new type of political structure.

Intercultural Capital

Since about 2006, a growing number of academic publications have employed or referred to the concept of intercultural capital. In analogy to Pierre Bourdieu’s forms of embodied, objectified, and institutionalized cultural capital, it is analytically meaningful to conceive distinct forms of intercultural capital. Foreign language skills, experience of living abroad, and intercultural friendships constitute examples of empirical indicators of embodied intercultural capital. Products of art, writing, science, architecture, and design that carry intercultural meanings, associations, or connotations in durable and tangible ways exemplify manifestations of objectified intercultural capital. Examples of institutionalized intercultural capital include officially issued and recognized laws, guidelines, commemorative days, exchange programs, curricula, school books, and academic titles with a more or less explicit intercultural outlook. Existing empirical research spans a considerable range of different areas, including pre-tertiary and tertiary education, migration, intercultural dialogue, collective identity formation, tourism, electoral studies, social work, neighborhood politics, and transmigrant families. Thus far, questions pertaining to students and teachers at different levels of formal education have attracted particularly pronounced scholarly interest. Much still remains to be learned about the quantity and quality of concrete empirical manifestation of embodied, objectified, and institutionalized forms of intercultural capital in different geopolitical and sociocultural contexts, at different points in time. There is also a need for more theoretically informed empirical investigations of processes of intercultural capital realization in terms of awareness, acquisition, and application, which combine an emphasis on individual-level factors with a focus on pertinent contextual forces and fields of (symbolic) power. Pierre Bourdieu’s sociology of culture lies at the heart of current conceptual developments and is likely to sustain or frame future theoretical advances. However, it is important to emphasize that while the notion of intercultural capital is situated within a Bourdieusian conceptual framework, the famous French sociologist himself did not focus on the intercultural dimensions of cultural capital. Moreover, the centrality of Bourdieu’s body of work does not preclude explorations of the idea of intercultural capital in productive dialogue with other pertinent concepts, such as “intercultural analphabetism,” “funds of knowledge,” and “community cultural wealth.” The structure of this Oxford Bibliographies entry proceeds by topic rather than citation type—from important conceptual considerations to different pertinent areas of research. Yet, information on the particular citation type (e.g., book, book chapter, or journal article) forms an integral part of the respective annotations.

From Sanctuary to Safe Space

This article focuses on how the trajectories of gay and lesbian police-reform efforts in Los Angeles model a transition from a politics of sanctuary to the production of safe space. The production of safe space is conditioned by the multiplication of discourses of race, gender, and sexuality emblematized by the rise of identity-based neighborhood politics throughout the postwar period, and how these politics interface with the reterritorialization of the welfare state and the advent of community policing. The article historicizes several Stonewall-era gay organizations, showing how activists enacted a politics of sanctuary that helped to decriminalize gay and lesbian identity, and then arguing that this politics of sanctuary was drawn into the production of safe space. This writing invites possibilities for abolitionist organizing by demonstrating the life cycle of law and order that circumscribes urban, identity-based, antiviolence, and neighborhood-based politics.

National Urban Renewal

Urban renewal refers to an interlocking set of national and local policies, programs, and projects, implemented in the vast majority of American cities between 1949 and 1973. These typically entailed major redevelopment of existing urban areas with a view to the modernization of housing, highway infrastructure, commercial and business districts, as well as other large-scale constructions. Reformers from the Progressive Era through the Great Society strove to ameliorate the conditions of poverty and inequality in American cities by focusing primarily on physical transformation of the urban built environment. Citing antecedents such as the reconstruction of Second Empire Paris, imported via the City Beautiful movement, and then updated with midcentury modernism, US urban planners envisioned a radical reorganization of city life. In practice, federal programs and local public authorities targeted the eradication of areas deemed slums or blighted—often as much to socially sanitize neighborhoods inhabited by racial minorities and other marginalized groups as to address deteriorating physical conditions. And while federal funding became available for public works projects in declining central cities under the auspices of improving living conditions for the poor—including providing public housing—urban renewal programs consistently destroyed more affordable housing than they created, over more than three decades. By the end of the 1960s, urban residents and policymakers across the political spectrum concluded that such programs were usually doing more harm than good, and most ended during the Nixon administration. Yet large-scale reminders of urban renewal can still be found in most large US communities, whether in the form of mid-20th-century public housing blocks, transportation projects, stadiums, convention centers, university and hospital expansions, or a variety of public-private redevelopment initiatives. But perhaps the most fundamental legacies of all were the institutionalization of the comprehensive zoning and master planning process in cities nationwide, on the one hand, and the countervailing mobilization of defensively oriented (NIMBY) neighborhood politics, on the other.

The Chosen Ones

In The Chosen Ones, sociologist and feminist scholar Nikki Jones shares the compelling story of a group of Black men living in San Francisco's historically Black neighborhood, the Fillmore. Against all odds, these men work to atone for past crimes by reaching out to other Black men, young and old, with the hope of guiding them towards a better life. Yet despite their genuine efforts, they struggle to find a new place in their old neighborhood. With a poignant yet hopeful voice, Jones illustrates how neighborhood politics, everyday interactions with the police, and conservative Black gender ideologies shape the men’s ability to make good and forgive themselves—and how the double-edged sword of community shapes the work of redemption.