The Making and Remaking of a National People’s Hero and Exemplar in Mongolia’s Socialist, Nationalist and Democratic Mobilisations

This paper examines the case of Ard Ayush [the commoner Ayush], a widely recognised national hero constructed in the socialist movement and an exemplar who survived the post-socialist rejection of socialist heroes and was reconstructed within the post-socialist democratic and nationalist movements. The paper’s title borrows the notion of a ‘national people’ from David Sneath and the notion of the ‘exemplar’ from Caroline Humphrey. Extending Sneath’s discussion of ard [commoner and/or people] and ard tümen [national people], this paper shows how the concept of ard that was constructed through the use of exemplars has become ard tümen. Then, extending Humphrey’s discussion of the moral influence of exemplars, this paper shows how some exemplars constructed during socialism helped the socialist government shape and govern a national people.

The dead archive: governance and institutional memory in independent Mozambique

Translated from the Portuguese expression arquivo morto, the dead archive is a site where files that have lost their procedural validity are stored for a determined number of years before they are destroyed or are sent to permanent archives. In Mozambique, where awareness and institutional capacity for proper archival procedures are still being developed, a common feature of the dead archive is the way in which files are untidily piled up with old typewriters, furniture, spare parts and other material debris of bureaucratic work and administration. In these archives, more than forty years of institutional and public memory lie ignored in leaky, damp basements across the country and in serious danger of irreparable damage. Drawing from various stints of historical and anthropological field research conducted between 2009 and 2016 in Maputo, Niassa and Inhambane provinces, this article examines the dead archive in order to explore the relationship between institutional memory and governance during the long period of austerity in Mozambique. Based on our investigation of the multiple layers of the dead archive, we argue that the Mozambican post-socialist government has sought to control institutional memory as a way to keep the ruling party in power in the context of multiparty politics. While the public sector has experienced conditions of austerity since independence, we show how, during the socialist period (1975–90) of single-party rule, the state's relationship with institutional memory was more progressive, with transparent and communicative archival practices. In contrast, despite the combination of public sector reforms and progressive legislation regarding the right to information, the multiparty democratic period (1990 to the present) has seen an exacerbation of administrative secrecy leading to less transparent and communicative archival practices.

Far-right party will shape mainstream Spanish politics

Significance Vox has gathered support by staunchly opposing Catalan independence, promoting a nationalist agenda and championing conservative values. The strength of its electoral appeal is already having a significant impact on the centre-right People’s Party (PP). Impacts The PP’s leadership at the national level will be more cautious of being perceived as too close to Vox. Deepening inequality after COVID-19 could undermine Spain’s Socialist government and push more younger people to support Vox. Concerns about Vox and rising support for Spanish nationalists in general may force the government to take a tougher stance on immigration.

Portugal on the eve of presidential elections

In 2015, Portugal entered a new political cycle with the main actors being the left-wing parties under the auspices of the Socialist Party and its leader Antonio Costa who took over as prime minister. The author analyzes the results of the socialist government activities carried out with the parliamentary support of the left. The author also studies the electoral process of 2017-2019, the dynamics of strengthening the position of the Socialist Party, and significance of the results of elections to national authorities. The trajectory of the country’s membership in the European Union, the history of the results of the European Parliament elections, including the 2019 elections, and the positions of the main political parties are analyzed. In connection with force majeure circumstances arising from the COVID-19 pandemic, the situation in the healthcare system was also studied and a program of the authorities to prevent the spread of coronavirus infection is presented in the article. The author touches upon the economic consequences of the pandemic, especially on those industries that will be most affected – tourism in particular. The article contains a brief forecast of the alignment of political forces on the eve of the presidential elections in 2021. The key is the idea that the pandemic will make possible adjustments in terms of the image and ratings of the country’s leaders and other participants in the election race. While presidential election results are usually a foregone conclusion in the event that a current head of state runs for a second term (as it is shown in the brief historical overview leading up to the article), the prime minister’s growing leadership can make adjustments to the final outcomes.

Roberto Bolaño

Roberto Bolaño (b. 1953–d. 2003) is widely considered to be the most important Latin American novelist of the turn of the 21st century. Bolaño’s reputation rests primarily on the fictional works he produced during a period of extraordinary creative activity from 1996 to his death in 2003: the novels La literatura nazi en América (1996), Estrella distante (1996), Los detectives salvajes (1998), Nocturno de Chile (2001), and the posthumously published 2666 (2004) as well as the short story collections Llamadas telefónicas (1997) Putas asesinas (2001), and El gaucho insufrible (2003). However, his oeuvre also encompasses a diverse corpus of poetry, fiction, and literary criticism written between the 1970s and the early 2000s, a substantial portion of which appeared in print for the first time after his death. Born in Santiago, Chile, and raised in southern Chile, Bolaño moved to Mexico City with his family in 1968, the year of the infamous Tlatelolco student massacre. In 1973, he went to Chile to “support” Salvador Allende’s socialist government (as he later put it). After briefly being detained in the aftermath of the Pinochet coup of 11 September 1973, he left the country and returned to Mexico City. Shortly after, he co-founded the avant-garde poetry movement infrarrealismo with close friend Mario Santiago Papasquiaro. In 1976, he traveled to Europe and eventually relocated to Spain, living in Barcelona and Gerona before settling in the small Spanish coastal city of Blanes. Bolaño’s fiction of the 1990s and early 2000s obsessively reconstructs this itinerary—often through the guise of his alter ego Arturo Belano—as a means of exploring the effects of the Latin American dictatorships on an entire generation of writers, political activists, and ordinary citizens. Critics have thus tended to classify Bolaño both as a major practitioner of Latin American post-dictatorial fiction and as a prominent figure within the contemporary Spanish-language tradition of autofiction. The critical discussion on his final work, 2666, on the other hand, has revolved around his turn to a “depersonalized” style of narration and a new scene of violence in Latin America: the ongoing murder and disappearance of women in the US-Mexican border city of Santa Teresa (a fictional version of the real-life Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez). His novels, short stories, and essays have been translated into multiple languages. Bolaño’s posthumous canonization in the United States has led to a voluminous body of English-language criticism of his work.

Epilogue

After the Soviet Union collapsed, the first post-socialist government under Boris Yeltsin supported programs to promote contraception and sexual education. As Russia transitioned to a market economy, foreign contraceptive devices as well as high-quality household appliances became available to those who could afford them. Post-socialist liberal politicians and family planning advocates attempted to reform the USSR’s long-time reliance on abortion for fertility control. They pushed for disseminating sex education and distributing modern contraception. However, this changed when Vladimir Putin became president. Putin identified shrinking population as a national crisis, and worked with the Orthodox Church, to introduce measures to promote motherhood and restrict abortion. Although Putin’s pronatalist policy sometimes stresses the importance of responsible fatherhood, many parallels can be drawn to Soviet pronatalism.

Perfil sociodemográfico y actitudes políticas de los grupos a favor y en contra de limitar la libre circulación de información durante la pandemia

The Covid-19 pandemic has produced not only a terrible sanitary crisis but also several problems related to the circulation of disinformation in the context of hybrid and increasingly fragmented media systems. In this work, we analyze a polemical question included in the Center for Sociological Research (CIS) survey conducted in April about the appropriateness of limiting free circulation of information to avoid diffusion of fake news and disinformation. The goals are to (1) analyze the sociodemographic traits of those in favor of limiting the free circulation of information, and (2) explore their general political preferences and affiliations, and the association with attitudes regarding freedom of information. The results obtained through a quantitative methodological approach based on contingency tables and standardized residuals indicate that the most common sociodemographic profile of those in favor of limiting the flow of information is the following: young women (between 18 and 25 years) with secondary education who live in small municipalities and belong to the lower social class. Moreover, the findings illustrate that there is a significant statistical association between supporting the limitation of information and different indicators of supporting the Socialist government: voting and sympathizing with the Socialist Party, self-location in the extreme left, and trusting both the central government management of the crisis and the leadership of Pedro Sánchez. Resumen La pandemia ocasionada por la crisis de la Covid-19 ha supuesto no sólo una terrible crisis sanitaria, sino importantes problemas relacionados con la difusión de desinformación en el contexto de sistemas mediáticos híbridos y crecientemente fragmentados. Analizamos la polémica pregunta del CIS (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas) sobre la pertinencia de limitar la libre circulación de información para restringir la difusión de bulos y noticias falsas. El objetivo es: 1) analizar las características sociodemográficas básicas de quienes se declararon partidarios de restringir la libre circulación informativa, y 2) explorar sus inclinaciones políticas e ideológicas, y su asociación con las actitudes en torno a la libertad informativa. Así, mediante una metodología cuantitativa basada en tablas de contingencia y residuos tipificados corregidos, los resultados reflejan que el perfil sociodemográfico más frecuente entre los partidarios de limitar la libertad informativa es el de una mujer joven (entre 18 y 25 años), con estudios secundarios, que vive en municipios pequeños y declara pertenecer a la clase social baja. Además, los resultados ilustran que existe una asociación estadística significativa entre apoyar la restricción informativa y diversos indicadores de apoyo al Gobierno central: votar y simpatizar con el PSOE, situarse en la extrema izquierda, confiar en la gestión de la pandemia del Gobierno central y confiar en su presidente.

Perfil sociodemográfico y actitudes políticas de los grupos a favor y en contra de limitar la libre circulación de información durante la pandemia

The Covid-19 pandemic has produced not only a terrible sanitary crisis but also several problems related to the circulation of disinformation in the context of hybrid and increasingly fragmented media systems. In this work, we analyze a polemical question included in the Center for Sociological Research (CIS) survey conducted in April about the appropriateness of limiting free circulation of information to avoid diffusion of fake news and disinformation. The goals are to (1) analyze the sociodemographic traits of those in favor of limiting the free circulation of information, and (2) explore their general political preferences and affiliations, and the association with attitudes regarding freedom of information. The results obtained through a quantitative methodological approach based on contingency tables and standardized residuals indicate that the most common sociodemographic profile of those in favor of limiting the flow of information is the following: young women (between 18 and 25 years) with secondary education who live in small municipalities and belong to the lower social class. Moreover, the findings illustrate that there is a significant statistical association between supporting the limitation of information and different indicators of supporting the Socialist government: voting and sympathizing with the Socialist Party, self-location in the extreme left, and trusting both the central government management of the crisis and the leadership of Pedro Sánchez. Resumen La pandemia ocasionada por la crisis de la Covid-19 ha supuesto no sólo una terrible crisis sanitaria, sino importantes problemas relacionados con la difusión de desinformación en el contexto de sistemas mediáticos híbridos y crecientemente fragmentados. Analizamos la polémica pregunta del CIS (Centro de Investigaciones Sociológicas) sobre la pertinencia de limitar la libre circulación de información para restringir la difusión de bulos y noticias falsas. El objetivo es: 1) analizar las características sociodemográficas básicas de quienes se declararon partidarios de restringir la libre circulación informativa, y 2) explorar sus inclinaciones políticas e ideológicas, y su asociación con las actitudes en torno a la libertad informativa. Así, mediante una metodología cuantitativa basada en tablas de contingencia y residuos tipificados corregidos, los resultados reflejan que el perfil sociodemográfico más frecuente entre los partidarios de limitar la libertad informativa es el de una mujer joven (entre 18 y 25 años), con estudios secundarios, que vive en municipios pequeños y declara pertenecer a la clase social baja. Además, los resultados ilustran que existe una asociación estadística significativa entre apoyar la restricción informativa y diversos indicadores de apoyo al Gobierno central: votar y simpatizar con el PSOE, situarse en la extrema izquierda, confiar en la gestión de la pandemia del Gobierno central y confiar en su presidente.

Pentecostalism in Mongolia

Pentecostal missionaries arrived in Mongolia as early as 1910 but the socialist government expelled all missionaries in 1924. By the time socialism collapsed in 1990, there were no more than 20 Christians in the whole nation. However, estimates suggest that there are now around 100,000 adherents, most of whom are Pentecostal. While some scholars have analysed the history of Christianity in Mongolia, little research has explored this significant subset. Mongolia Assemblies of God (MAOG—Монголын Бурханы Чуулган) was one of the first and fastest growing Christian denominations. It currently comprises around 2000 adherents, as well as over 200 graduates from its ministry training college. Using MAOG as a case study, this research argues that the rise of Pentecostalism in Mongolia is owing to its ‘ends of the earth’ mission; cultural protest movement; lure of modernity; imagined community; empowerment through transnational mobility; theology of divine ‘calling’; and contribution toward civil society.