Different Voices and Luminosities

The author of this article will put an emphasis on museum practices that have encouraged the reconciliation process and dialogue in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Western Balkans. Moreover, this article will contribute to the ongoing discussions in museum and cultural studies expressing the need for reconsidering the values and roles of museum practices. It is about the comprehensive range of innovative approaches that can foster dialogue and reconciliation processes in the context of today’s Western Balkans societies, which are marked by distrust, prejudices, misunderstandings and numerous divisions and indoctrinations. This will be an attempt to verify two clear examples of museum practices emphasising the specific thesis about museums as the ‘new educational institutions’, their comprehensive and alternative roles in the construction of ‘new knowledge’ nurturing dialogue, intercultural interactions and exchange of opinions, ideas and experiences. The main question is whether this concept is sustainable and broadly possible in Bosnia and Herzegovina and the Western Balkans, due to the lack of cultural policy and political consensus that will support this indispensable process.

Political consensus and economic reforms in Tunisia

This article explores the role of political consensus in Tunisia in slowing reforms, following the political crisis that followed President Kais Saied’s decision to dismiss the Prime Minister and suspend parliament. It argues that the political consensus created by the 2016 Carthage agreement led to a slowing of economic reforms and triggered a political crisis. The article then considers the necessary preconditions for policymakers to make future political consensus an opportunity to endorse economic reforms that enforce accountability and advance a policy agenda that goes beyond the interests of the ruling coalition.

Enlightenment Historians of Ireland and their Critics

Elite Catholics, who accepted Hanoverian rulers as legitimate, believed that Enlightenment historiography would show the Penal Laws to be unreasonable, and would necessitate a re-definition of the Irish political nation. When Hume, whom these elite members esteemed, endorsed Temple’s interpretation of the 1641 rebellion, they commissioned a philosophical history for Ireland to be written by Thomas Leland, a Protestant divine. Leland failed to meet the expectations of his sponsors by concluding, after a close study of early modern events, that a single Irish political nation would exist only when Catholics renounced allegiance to the Pope. Failure to reach political consensus was largely irrelevant because popular histories showed that concessions to elite Catholics would not have assuaged popular discontent. Moreover, urban radicals, notably Mathew Carey, contended that Enlightenment thinking suggested that a multi-denominational Irish nation could be imagined only in the context of an independent Irish Republic.

Ghana’s Competitive Clientelism and Space for Long-Term Stable Policies

Given the close election results and the winner-takes-all nature of politics in Ghana, researchers have argued that the two parties are now characterized by a high degree of vulnerability, which in turn provides strong incentives for ruling elites in both parties to find strategies to ensure their political survival. This results in the distribution of state resources to political supporters and short-termism, which weakens the possibility of building a broad political consensus on any national development issues. Using the case of Ghana’s Right to Information Bill, this article will argue that there are conditions under which elite commitment to long-term development could be fostered and sustained in competitive clientelist political settings like Ghana.

Memory Culture and Memory Policy in Germany – Prerequisites and Critique

The paper analyses the contemporary debate about memory culture and memory policy in Germany which are highly valid for Europe as well. They base on the political consensus that the memory of collective crimes committed in the past, especially of the Holocaust, and the honour to the victims, are a basic prerequisite for the protection of human rights. In the second part of the paper different critical views on the conception and practice of memory culture and memory policy in Germany are discussed.

New deal breathes life into Somalia’s election process

Significance The deal opens a consensual path to elections after the parties agreed on steps to address disputes that have delayed polls since last December. Impacts Regional authorities will need to ramp up preparations to address the challenges posed by al-Shabaab, COVID-19 and seasonal flooding. Divisive polls will make the search for the political consensus to address key state-building tasks in the post-poll period challenging. Somaliland leaders will use the comparison with their just-concluded peaceful, democratic vote to push their independence claims.

VIII. Ohne Körperschaftsgarantie keine Reichsverfassung?

No Weimar Constitution without a guarantee of the corporate status of religious communities? The discussion about article 137 section 5 of the Weimar Constitution and its content in the National Assembly of Weimar. Some researchers hold that without the constitutional guarantee of the corporate status of religious communities in article 137 section 5 the Weimar Constitution in 1919 would not have come about. The minutes of the constituent Weimar National Assembly, however, do not indicate that the guarantee of the corporate status was in danger to fail in default of political consensus. Rather, the decision in favour of a constitutional guarantee of the corporate status had already been made early in the debate. Yet it remained unclear and controversial which rights this status contained, except of the right to taxation explicitly guaranteed by article 137 section 6 of the Weimar Constitution. The deputies assumed that the specific rights of the religious communities were not determined by Article 137 section 5 of the Weimar Constitution, but by the legislation of the German Länder.

Clashing Tactics, Clashing Generations: The Politics of the School Strikes for Climate in Belgium

Much has been written about the challenges of tackling climate change in post-political times. However, times have changed significantly since the onset of the debate on post-politics in environmental scholarship. We have entered a politicised, even polarised world which, as this article argues, a number of voices within the climate movement paradoxically try to bring together again. This article scrutinises new climate movements in a changing world, focusing on the School Strikes for Climate in Belgium. It shows how the movement, through the establishment of an intergenerational conflict line and a strong politicisation of tactics, has succeeded in putting the topic at the heart of the public agenda for months on end. By claiming that we need mobilisation, not studying, the movement went straight against the hegemonic, technocratic understanding of climate politics at the time. However, by keeping its demands empty and establishing a homogenised fault line, the movement made itself vulnerable to forms of neutralisation and recuperation by forces which have an interest in restoring the post-political consensus around technocratic and market-oriented answers to climate change. This might also partly explain its gradual decline. Instead of recycling post-political discourses of the past, this article claims, the challenge is to seize the ‘populist moment’ and build a politicised movement around climate change. One way of doing that is by no longer projecting climate change into the future but reframing the ‘now’ as the moment of crisis which calls on us to build another future.

A Thousand Years into One

Eisenhower’s “Atoms for Peace” speech is often seen as the founding story of atomic energy’s peaceful side. In fact, it was not such a dramatic break from the past. The Democrats had begun to use the atom in this way, first with radioisotopes and then with other intriguing ideas, such as irradiating seeds in the hope of generating wondrous mutations. The Democrats hatched the germ of the idea of “Atoms for Peace,” calling for a global atomic Marshall Plan, shortly after President Truman announced in 1949 his decision to pursue development of the hydrogen bomb. The idea of the peaceful atom was deployed rhetorically to mitigate the political consequences of significant escalations in weapons development. Eisenhower’s pledge delivered not a new program but American political consensus about how the atom should be discussed as a matter of state.