“There Is an Eye on Us”: International Imitation, Popular Representation, and the Regulation of Homosexuality in Senegal

Drawing on data from Senegal, this article develops the concept of pockets of world society to explain how adherence to a liberal vision of gay rights emerges within an otherwise illiberal legal landscape. Pockets of world society appear at the site where the global field of human rights penetrates the national juridical field. Senegal’s Ministry of Justice sits at this juncture. It is a member of both fields but tends toward a logic of international imitation. The ministry accommodates world society’s stance on homosexuality, offering a moderate re-interpretation of its nation’s criminalization, and quietly circumventing local law to enact global scripts of sexual actorhood. In stark contrast, Senegalese courts, located solely within the national juridical field, adhere to a logic of popular representation, rejecting sexual self-determination, insisting on national sovereignty, and carrying out the nation’s criminalization of homosexuality in accordance with both law and collective will. These conflicting logics are driven by external pressures, field membership and position, professional trajectories, and sources of legal legitimacy and social accountability. Finally, I contend that the conflict in Senegal spotlights not only world society’s limits, but its persistent strength and its ability to disrupt the coherence of the law.

A benevolence narrative

This chapter describes an alternate narrative of democracy that centres around the value of sedana or benevolence. This narrative has three parts: the challenge of dictatorial leadership in Myanmar and the moral failure of citizens; the vision of a morally transformed society based on benevolent leadership and the values of unity and obligation; and a strategy of moral education to renew these values within society and promote discipline. This narrative highlights a moral rather than liberal vision – one in which the ability of individual political actors to transcend self-interest is of the highest importance. Proponents of this narrative emphasise that a focus on the narrow interests of particular individuals or groups will spark division and thereby undermine democracy – with the most immoral approach to politics being that of the ar nar shin (‘power-obsessed dictator’).

¿La naturaleza pública del derecho privado?

In this paper the author challenges the liberal vision of the private sphere as a realm of in which agents are justified in acting without taking into consideration anyone else’s interests. The private realm cannot be thought in isolation of public law, which should in turn be conceived as an embodiment of the mutual interest of the members of that group in the flourishing of one another.

Edwards’s Place and Importance in Anglo-American Literature

Long recognized as foundational contributions to British American belles lettres, the works of Jonathan Edwards influenced later writers and shaped narratives of American literary history. Edwards appears in the first descriptions of early American literature, and he continues to figure prominently in anthologies and histories of American writing today. This essay emphasizes major authors—from Harriet Beecher Stowe and Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr., to Robert Lowell, to Marilynne Robinson—who have acknowledged his influence. The nature of that influence varies, for every generation creates a distinctive version of Edwards. Advancing a liberal vision of Christianity, Stowe and Holmes reacted against Edwards’s alleged theological rigidity and spiritual cruelty. Lowell wrote poems reflecting the Edwardsean revival of the mid-twentieth century and bearing the imprint of the New Criticism. And in recent years, Robinson has staked a claim as a latter-day Edwardsean, embracing his intellectual legacy as an inspiration and resource for her celebrated novels.

The Progressive Mind and the Islamist Challenge

At the millennium a progressive consensus influenced and constrained western democratic behaviour. The new consensus transcended conventional party politics. Its more prominent exponents considered developed states without enemies. It was no longer implausible to embed a realistic utopia, where global citizens, cherishing minority rights, would enable cosmopolitan democracy to flourish in a world society. This ambitious project pursued the universal emancipation of the culturally and colonially oppressed. Yet when the progressive mind encountered a rejection of its values expressed in a politically religious, Islamist idiom, it refused to countenance it. Assuming all problems available to rational solution, the progressive liberal order dismissed faith-based rejections of its universally shared, but essentially secular norms. The consequences of this rejection were fateful. Political Islam, in an absolutist mode, found the west’s commitment to secularism, democracy and progress delusional. This chapter explores the manner in which a distinctively Islamist idiom of expression, that in an extreme form, countenanced violence to instantiate its apocalyptic version of the end of history, rejected the secular liberal vision, but found in its tolerance, technological resources helpful to the promulgation of its postmodern message, in the Muslim world and across Europe.

Lillian Smith

Lillian Smith (b. 1897–d. 1966) was born in Jasper, Florida, and grew up in a large and well-to-do southern family. In 1915, in the wake of the First World War, her father, Calvin Warren Smith, lost his financial standing and relocated his family to their summer home in North Georgia where he opened first a hotel and then a summer camp for girls, which Smith would later own and direct. It is somewhat surprising that no one has yet made a feature film based on Smith’s life. She is the Floridian teenager who found herself transplanted to a scenic but rural environment in the north Georgia mountains; the young woman who superintended elementary schools in this rural setting; the undergraduate student at both the local Piedmont College (1915–1916) and the Peabody Conservatory of Music in Baltimore (1917–1918, 1919–1922); the music teacher at a missionary school in Huzhow, China, an experience that solidified her social consciousness (1922–1925); the progressive director of Laurel Falls Camp for girls, many of whom came from the state’s wealthiest families (1925–1948); the publisher of South Today, a quarterly magazine and forum for liberal thought that she coedited for ten years with her life partner Paula Snelling (1936–1944); the controversial author of Strange Fruit, one of the best-selling novels of 1944; the self-analyst who published Killers of the Dream, a groundbreaking work of autobiography and cultural criticism that appeared first in 1949 and then again in an expanded edition in 1962; the friend and advisor to influential players on the national scene, including Eleanor Roosevelt and Martin Luther King, Jr.; and the combative social activist who withstood threats as she promoted her liberal vision through fiction, letters, essays, speeches, and pamphlets—including Now Is the Time (1954), her ardent defense of school desegregation—and creative works of self-writing and nonfiction prose, including The Journey (1954) and her final book, Our Faces, Our Words (1964). Smith was diagnosed with cancer in 1953, the disease that took her life in 1966 at the height of the civil rights movement that she, through her writings and activism, had helped to bring about and which she saw as evidence that human beings can in fact evolve. Smith turned a searchlight on the workings of white supremacy and blasted conservative ideologies of both race and gender. She has, since her death, emerged slowly but steadily as a pivotal figure in attempts to redraw the boundaries of the literary and cultural renaissance in the mid-20th century South.

Kuwaiti Foreign Policy Towards Iraq: A Future Analytical Study

It is well known that the study of foreign policy of any country in the world is undoubtedly one of the important topics in the international political affairs and the reason for this is that the state and at the level of domestic policy is a reflection of its foreign policy in light of a complex international environment. As Iraq has undergone several chronic and chronic crises, it must have an ambitious and efficient foreign policy towards the international and regional environment in particular as it directly influences it. In this study, we will focus on one of Iraq's regional crises with neighboring countries, namely, Kuwait's foreign policy towards Iraq. Countries and countries, according to international dealing standards and influential international effectiveness, are no longer measured by their geopolitical, demographic or military size, but by their political effectiveness and political weight based on how these are adapted. Relations between the Gulf and the Gulf region, as Iraq has gone through several crises and Kuwait was one of them, it must be a prospective study describing the nature of the relationship that may take several possibilities or future scenes and h Insulting the nature of international and regional changes that are characterized by tension and attraction from time to time. The reason for choosing the future of Kuwaiti-Iraqi relations comes from the nature of the State of Kuwait itself. It is not a state of institutions that meet all the specifications of a democratic state according to the Western liberal vision. It is a hereditary state based on the transfer of power by succession. Making the Emir, government institutions and social figures under the title of tribal and religious identities and local leaders as inputs that no decision maker can transcend in understanding the mechanism of making foreign or domestic policy in them. Kuwait has the privileges of staying the status of Kuwait away, even if ostensibly and not involved in regional events and at the same time open regionally, so Kuwait was more inclined to diplomatic means at the level of foreign policy, except in the case of Iraq has tended to create an international and regional environment hostile to Iraq after 1990, which is still Suffers from the effects of that policy to this day.

Appearances of Disability and Christianity in Uganda

This article considers how Christianity contributes to the appearance of cognitive disability in Uganda, a country with some of the most progressive disability policies in the world but little in the way of formal care and advocacy for cognitively disabled people. As a point of departure, the article invokes Hannah Arendt’s notion of appearance as a way to thematize the importance of public display in Ugandan social life, as well as the challenge that people with evidently profound disabilities pose to Ugandan social aesthetics. It first traces how cognitive disability disappears under the liberal logics that organize Uganda’s secular disability laws and activism, and then compares the ways that Catholic and Pentecostal efforts sustain the appearance of cognitive disability, in light of their theological differences and their common paternalism. Even as Christian paternalism in the face of cognitive disability may prove repugnant to a liberal vision of disability politics, I argue that it sustains a form of disability appearance otherwise not possible in Uganda. Bufunze Ekiwandiiko kino kilagira ddala bulungi, nga obukristaayo bwe bwewaddeyo ennyo ku nsonga etekwatiddwa bulungi ey’endabika y’abantu abalina obulemu mu butesobola nga buva ku bwongo nga bali mu Uganda. Eggwanga erya Uganda lirina enkola ennungi mu byokwezza obuggya ku nsonga y’abantu abo munsi yonna. Wabula ate kinakuwaza nnyo, nti libulamu nnyo enkola ennungamu mu ngeri y’okuwagira endabirira esaanidde abantu abo, mu mbeera zaabwe zonna okutwalira awamu. Ekiwandiiko kino okwawukana ku bya bulijjo ebirala byonna, kikoona butereevu ku ndowooza ya Hannah Arendt, era nga kirina n’okulaga okusomooza okuleteddwaawo obutafa bulungi ku bantu abo mu mbeera zaabwe mu ggwanga lyonna. Ekiwandiiko kisookera ddala n’okulaga engeri y’okufaayo ku nsonga eyo bwe kigenda kisaanirawo ddala nga kino kiyita mu kwekkiriranya abantu kwe batambuliramu ng’abakweyambisa, nga bakola amateeka agakwata ku butesobola obw’obwongo, wamu nebirala ebikolebwa okukisaamu amaanyi, Kati ekyo, nga bwe twongerako netukigeerageeranya n’ekyo ekikolebwa abakatuliki n’aba Pentekooti ku nsonga eyo yemu mu kuyimirizaawo endabika entuufu eyandisaanidde ku bantu abo abalina obulemu bwobutesobola. Naye ate olwokuberawo enjawukana z’e byeddini wakati waabo bombi, nekitasobola kutambula bulungi, nga kino kiva mu kugaaana okukolera awamu nga abantu abali ku mulimu ogumu. Ekisinga obukulu nga kyekireeeta obutakkanya obwo kyangu okulaba. Kale obutasobola kukolera wamu olw’obukulu bwensonga eyo, nakyo kiyinza okuva ku bukyaayi okwesigamiziddwa ku kwolesebwa okulina obulemu mu bwongo, mu nfuga yaabwo egobererwa. Ekyo ne kiyimirizaawo endabika eyobulemu obutesobola era nga nayo tesoboka mu Uganda kukolebwako.

The Trans-Pacific Partnership as Megaregulation

The Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) brings into legal effect a new form of inter-governmental economic ordering and regulatory governance on an extended “megaregional” scale. This chapter proposes the concept of “megaregulation” as a way to understand what is distinctive about TPP and about the particular type of governance project which it partly pioneered. Megaregulation as exemplified by TPP is characterized by five features. First, it comprehensively covers commercial flows in goods, services, capital, and data. Second, its broad aim is to create a generalized freedom to operate for large corporations and their affiliates across the set of national markets covered by the treaty. Third, as its method, megaregulation employs regulatory alignment—nudging and shaping both the substance and the processes of national regulatory systems. Fourth, megaregulation involves a large but not universal (like the WTO) scale in volume of covered economic activity and creates significant gravitational pulls and emulatory pressures for third parties. Fifth, megaregulation takes the treaty-institutional form which prescribes detailed rules and empowers some inter-governmental or transnational institutions and the communities of practice spawning around them. TPP’s specific version of megaregulation further advances an ordo- or neo-liberal vision of the state and its relation to markets that deliberately builds out contrasts with China’s party-state economic ordering, thereby giving it lasting geopolitical and geoeconomic relevance.

The Decline of Liberalism in Europe and how to Revive it

The liberal world order has produced immense benefits for Europe and people across the planet. Beginning in the 18th and 19th centuries, liberalism reinforces the natural rights of man to life, liberty and property, and has transformed the world in ways that have improved the material and social circumstances of humankind. But the liberal order that has been in place in Europe since 1945, after two world wars, is showing signs of deterioration. Today, this liberal order is being challenged by a variety of forces. The essence of the European experience is the development of a civilization that considered itself to be a unity and yet was politically decentralized. Former free towns in Italy and the Low Countries became bastions of a self‑governing middle class in the Middle Ages. However, with time, states tend to overgrow taking more and more resources, which results in the increase in taxes and public spending, excessive regulation, deficits and public debt. There is a fight between the advocates of two different ideals of the European Union, the non‑liberal and the liberal vision. There is a consensus in that the market economy is the system that best produces the most, removing millions of people from poverty. But it is the unequal distribution of the wealth created that is often criticized. We examine the distribution of income, before and after taxes and transfers, concluding that market liberalization does not necessarily lead to increased social inequality. On the other hand, two of the most important threats challenging the liberal order in Europe are populist parties and protectionism. Finally, this paper suggests a way towards a future Europe, deepening the single market and economic integration, but transforming the obsolete and dysfunctional nation‑states into other forms of decentralized political units.