Political participation,political action and political identities: young d/deaf people's perspectives

This paper critically examines the dominant, and predominantly negative, discourses around young people's political participation, or supposed lack of it. Drawing upon contemporary debates about young people within geography, political science and sociology, it considers the ways in which a redefinition of what constitutes ‘the political’ is required if young people's engagement in political participation is to be understood fully. The paper reports on research conducted with young D/deaf people that did not intentionally set out to research their political participation, action or identi ties, but which uncovered a range of political aspects in their lives and experiences. It explores the ways in which volunteering can be defined as political action and, after de Certeau and Scott, how the use of British Sign Language can be a resistive act, a tactic or weapon of the weak. Threaded throughout the paper is a consideration of the ways in which there are complex geographies of activism at play.     

Political Sociology of International Interventions: Peacebuilders and the Ground

ABSTRACT

This special issue, instead of questioning what effect peacebuilding interventions have on post-conflict societies, analyses what the ground of intervention does to peacebuilders. It demonstrates that everyday interactions on the ground shape the interveners and even the scope of their missions. We delineate how a political sociology approach might break away from binaries (‘internationals/locals’) and, instead, illuminate processes (of internationalization and localization). We intend to offer a political sociology of the ‘intervention encounter’, that is, to scrutinize the everyday interactions among peacebuilders and between peacebuilders and domestic actors, and to investigate effects of the ground on peacebuilding organizations, doctrines and decision-making processes, as well as on peacebuilders’ trajectories, positions, professional practices and representations. In fine, we explore how peacebuilders’ relations to the ground structure the socio-professional field of peacebuilding.     

Political science,political ideas and rhetoric

The article reviews ‘ideational’ analysis and theory in political science. It argues that this is an important area of research limited by lack of a clear sense of what ideas in politics are and of how to analyse them as directly as possible. It is argued that political science should learn from the ‘rhetorical turn’ in various areas of the social sciences, developing ways, appropriate to political science, of analysing the language, rhetoric and argumentation of political and policy discourse in its governmental contexts. Such an approach rests on a strong sense of the dynamic, contested and creative nature of political activity.     

Justifying Civic Activism in Russia and Finland

ABSTRACT

In this article, we present a novel way of researching civil society in a comparative perspective and illustrate it through a detailed analysis of public disputes concerning urban building construction projects in St. Petersburg and Helsinki in 2008–2009. In our illustration, we use justification theory, a line of thought developed by Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot in the early 1990s, but until now little used in comparative civil society research. Moreover, we use a variant of Public Justification Analysis, a new method for analysing media data. Our focus is on moral justifications, that is, on arguments which are presented against or in favour of the proposed projects and which draw on shared moral principles. Clear differences were found in referrals to these principles by urban activists in Russia and Finland. We argue that justification theory enables both international comparisons as well as inclusion of specific features of national political cultures.     

Orientalism and Intelligence Analysis: Deconstructing Anglo-American Notions of the ‘Arab’

Despite revived notions of a ‘cultural divide’ between East and West, Edward's Said's ‘Orientalism’ has received little attention from scholars of intelligence and diplomacy. This article brings to light for the first time a number of recently declassified documents of a different nature to usual assessments produced by Anglo-American analytic bodies: those focussed primarily on the issue of ‘national character’. Using and critiquing Said's thesis of Western ‘Orientalism’ it reveals some critical and enduring conceptualizations articulated by the diplomatic and intelligence community about Arab culture such as the role of Islam, rhetoric, political motivation and notions of ‘honour’. Such a critical approach demonstrates how diplomatic and intelligence history can also be a history of culture, ideas and institutional mentalité.     

Individual integrity,freedom of association and religious exemption

ABSTRACT

Of the many questions Cécile Laborde addresses in her magisterial Liberalism’s Religion, several relate to what she describes as ‘the puzzle of exemptions’. I examine some of the issues raised by her efforts to solve that puzzle: whether her ideal of moral integrity squares with the nature of religious belief; whether we should find the case for collective religious exemptions in freedom of association and the ‘coherence interests’ of associations; how much significance we should give to the ‘competence interests’ of organised religions; and by which criteria we should assess individual claims to religious exemption.     

Between Michel Foucault and Erving Goffman: between discourse in the abstract and face-to-face interaction

Michel Foucault's ‘archaeology’ and Erving Goffman's interpersonal sociology are complementary. Both are essential for understanding how classifications of people interact with the people classified, and hence for the author's studies of ‘making up people’. The paper begins by explaining how that project is rooted in an ‘existentialist’ conception of the person. It then uses Goffman's Asylums and Foucault's Folie et déraison - both published in 1961 - to illustrate how these methodologies reinforce each other.     

The Stein Rokkan Lecture 2016 Mission impossible? Reconciling economic and social Europe after the euro crisis and Brexit

During the crisis, the European Union's ‘social deficit’ has triggered an increasing politicisation of redistributive issues within supranational, transnational and national arenas. Various lines of conflict have taken shape, revolving around who questions (who are ‘we’? – i.e., issues of identity and inclusion/exclusion); what questions (how much redistribution within and across the ‘we’ collectivities) and who decides questions (the locus of authority that can produce and guarantee organised solidarity). The key challenge facing today's political leaders is how to ‘glue’ the Union together as a recogniseable and functioning polity. This requires a double rebalancing: between the logic of ‘opening’ and the logic of ‘closure’, on the one hand, and between the logic of ‘economic stability’ and ‘social solidarity’, on the other. Building on the work of Stein Rokkan and Max Weber, this article argues that reconciliation is possible, but only if carefully crafted through an extraordinary mobilisation of political and intellectual resources. A key ingredient should be the establishment of a European Social Union, capable of combining domestic and pan‐European solidarities. In this way, the EU could visibly and tangibly extend its policy menu from regulation to (limited, but effective) distribution, reaping the latter's benefits in terms of legitimacy. The journey on this road is difficult but, pace Rokkan, not entirely impervious.     

Animal ethics and the political

Some of the most important contributions to animal ethics over the past decade or so have come from political, as opposed to moral, philosophers. As such, some have argued that there been a ‘political turn’ in the field. If there has been such a turn, it needs to be shown that there is something which unites these contributions, and which sets them apart from previous work. We find that some of the features which have been claimed to be shared commitments of the turn are contested by key theorists working in the field. We also find that the originality of the turn can be exaggerated, with many of their ideas found in more traditional animal ethics. Nonetheless, we identify one unifying and distinctive feature of these contributions: the focus on justice; and specifically, the exploration of how political institutions, structures and processes might be transformed so as to secure justice for both human and nonhuman animals.     

Democratic justice: the priority of politics and the ideal of citizenship

In his Democratic justice and the social contract, Weale presents a distinctive contingent practice-dependent model of ‘democratic justice’ that relies heavily on a condition of just social and political relations among equals. Several issues arise from this account. Under which conditions might such just social and political relations be realised? What ideal of equality is required for ‘democratic justice’? What are its implications for the political ideal of citizenship? This paper focuses on these questions as a way to critically reconsider Weale’s model. After presenting Weale’s procedural constructivism, I distinguish his model from an institutional practice-dependent model, one salient example of which is Rawls’s political constructivism. This distinction allows for a formulation of the social and political equality required for justice in each case. The contingent model assumes that an equality of ‘status’ will generate just social practices, yet it fails to recognise that an equality of ‘role’ is also important to ensure citizens’ compliance. The paper ultimately seeks to show that the contingent model is insufficient to ensure that just social practices will become stable.     

Sudpolitik: the political economy of Taiwan's trade with Southeast Asia

Abstract

In December 1993 the Taiwan government adopted a policy called nanjin zhengce or sudpolitik, a policy aimed at diverting part of Taiwan's trade and investment flows from China to Southeast Asia. This paper addresses the following questions: what is sudpolitik? why adopt such a policy? what are the economic, political, and strategic considerations in the pursuit of this policy? which countries are its specific targets? how do the countries directly affected by this policy respond to it? The paper also discusses the issue of Taiwan's aid in connection with sudpolitik. While the effectiveness of the policy is far from clear at present, the paper concludes with four observations: Taiwan's trade and aid are beginning to intertwine; Taiwan's diplomacy is largely economically or commercially led; Taiwan has achieved some positive results in improving its relations with Southeast Asian countries; and, Taiwan has reached a new stage in its economic development whereby it needs to invest overseas in order to sustain its economic growth. Overall, sudpolitik represents a novel step in Taiwan's diplomatic practice.     

How to stay populist? The Front National and the changing French party system

Abstract

The main aim of this contribution is to assess the relevance of the notion of ‘exclusionary populism’ for the characterisation of the Front National (FN) in France. Since its emergence in the 1970s, several categories or notions have been applied to this political party. Once considered as the resurgence of a traditional extreme right, it has since been classified as a case of a new European right-wing extremism, or as one of the neo-populist parties that obtained electoral successes in the 1990s. The recent evolution of the party has also been described as a sort of ‘normalisation’. Is therefore ‘exclusionary populism’ still a category that can grasp the evolution of the party, as well as its present position in the French party system? To answer this question, this article examines political discourses and various electoral platforms of the Front National to gather some empirical evidence. The argument is twofold: The Front National, despite its ‘dédiabolisation’ strategy, is still a classic populist party characterised by exclusionary populism and a sort of ‘catch-all populism’; its evolution is, however, dependent on the recent evolution of the French party system.     

Introduction: A post-Polanyian political economy for our times

Abstract

2014 is the seventieth anniversary of the publication of Karl Polanyi's The great transformation and the fiftieth anniversary of its author's passing. This special issue celebrates these markers by bringing together a collection of critical engagements with Polanyi's work which, whilst sympathetic to his intellectual aims, ward against any straightforward application to contemporary issues. In so doing, it suggests that part of the value of Polanyi's work lies not in its ability to be recited, repeated and re-applied in its original form, but rather in its openness and its susceptibility to alteration and transmutation. In this introductory article, I consider the return to intellectual ‘voices from the past’ in the post-2008 landscape. I suggest that the distinctiveness of Polanyi's voice comes from his attempt to problematize, challenge and re-imagine the very notion of ‘economy’ itself, a theme which underpins all of his most important ideas, and one which reverberates across contributions to this special issue. I suggest that, beyond his immediate critique of free-market ideas, the desire to de-centre the notion of an autonomous economic sphere – and to challenge abstract modes of thought that address such a notion, regardless of their political sensibilities – is his most valuable legacy, and one which might encourage us to seek out new innovations and engagements in future Polanyian scholarship.     

Cross-border influences or parallel developments? A process-tracing approach to the development of social conservatism in Canada and the US

ABSTRACT

Social conservatism emerged in the 1960s in both Canada and the US as a variety of conservatism that emphasized opposition to feminism, liberalized abortion access, and the expansion of gay rights as critical political issues. Adopting Freeden’s framework for ideology analysis, the article examines how social conservatism differed from other varieties of conservatism when it emerged and how it evolved within religious institutions, social movements and political parties in the two countries. It then illustrates that adding a Multiple Streams Analysis approach and process tracing methodology (developed by scholars of public policy) allows for an improved engagement with two ‘how’ questions important to understanding social conservatism particularly and ideology more generally: how to trace the evolution of an ideology without a clear core of concepts or texts? and, how has Canadian social conservatism been influenced by its American counterpart? Offering short overviews of developments in the two countries, it deploys this framework to argue that American social conservatism directly influenced Canadian social movements and religious communities but not political parties. American social conservatism can, though, be shown to have an important indirect influence on Canadian politicians.     

Beyond reason and hysteria: Towards a postmodern model of communication and control in science

This article takes the controversy over ‘Mad Cow Disease’ ('BSE') in Britain as the starting point to reflect on postmodern contexts for the production, circulation and control of scientific discourse. It looks at two competing models of scientific rationality, modernist and postmodernist, as they function in contexts we call ‘postmodern’. With BSE? the Government began with the modernist project of combating hysteria with calm reasonableness, thereby helping to produce the hysteria they feared. But science, far from being entirely rational or unitary, is a set of relatively independent discourses? including ‘entropie’ discourse: discursive black holes which are strictly policed but never fully contained—the unconscious of science? where scientific creativity and popular paranoia meet. Where modernist science defends against the crisis of unreason to prevent it from happening, postmodern science (chaos theory, fuzzy logic) accepts the normality of crisis? chaos and unpredictability, which are not coincidentally coming to characterise the postmodern world. The problems of modernist science are not purely epistemological. The postmodern alliance of modernist science and global agribusiness has meant unprecedented assaults on nature, producing a ‘return of the (biotic) repressed’ that, in turn, becomes the content of the discursive repressed of science itself. To contend with these processes, we need postmodern theories of science—including the anomalous? the improbable in the analysis—as was not done with BSE until too late? because current science refused to accept the possible existence of a phenomenon that was empirically unproven and did not fit in. Of equal importance is to include popular discourses among the full set of available sources of scientific ‘truth’. Films like Outbreak and popular science like The Hot Zone express a popular paranoia that discourses of science urgently need to attend to. The study of popular culture should become an integral part in a new postmodern sociology of science.     

Free software production as critical social practice

Abstract

This paper analyses the phenomenon of free and open source software (FOSS) in the light of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello's The new spirit of capitalism. It argues that collaborative FOSS production by volunteer software developers is a species of critical social practice in Boltanski and Chiapello's sense: rooted in resistance to capitalist social relations, and yet also a source of values that justify the new routes to profitability associated with contemporary network capitalism. Advanced via collective projects that are sustained by hacker norms and privately legislated ‘copyleft’ law, the FOSS ethos is apparently antithetical to private property-based accumulation. Yet it can be shown to embody the ‘new spirit of capitalism’ in its most distilled form; moreover FOSS developers have instituted new forms of property and new modes of profit creation around software that are in the process of being adapted for use in other economic sectors. Meanwhile, the private law constraints on profit-seeking that have emerged from the FOSS movement are counteracting some of the social pathologies that accompany network capitalism only to consolidate others. The paper concludes by identifying likely bases for a renewal of critique given these realities.     

The new Korean political economy: beyond the models of capitalism debate

Abstract

A key theme within the literature on the evolution of the Korean political economy since the 1997/8 crisis has been the extent to which Korea remains a ‘developmental state’ or has pursued radical neoliberal reform. These debates have not only reflected a concern with understanding the Korean economy but with a wider set of questions relating to the future of capitalist diversity within a globalized economy. By the late 1980s Korea had come to be regarded as a model of successful state-led late capitalist development. Korean modern economic history has insured that questions relating to the extent that it has pursued neoliberal reform have been of keen interest to students of political economy globally. This paper argues that substantive neoliberal reform has taken place in Korea since 1997. The thesis that a new ‘developmental state’ is in process of consolidating itself is simply wrong. However, the state's reform program interacted with material conditions and political coalitions at the meso level in a complex and uneven manner. In certain critical sectors, such as finance, a neoliberal regulatory regime has been consolidated. In others, such as telecommunications, developmentalist regulatory structures have proven to be highly resilient. In order to fully understand the complexity of the contemporary Korean political economy it is necessary, therefore, to prioritize the importance of meso-level analysis.     

On Justification Work: How Compromising Enables Public Managers to Deal with Conflicting Values

In the public administration literature, a variety of responses to value conflicts have been described, such as trade‐offs, decoupling values, and incrementalism. Yet little attention has been paid to the possibility of constructive compromises that enable public managers to deal with conflicting values simultaneously rather than separately. The authors use Luc Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot's theory of justification to extend current conceptualizations of management of conflicting values. On the basis of a qualitative study of daily practices of Dutch health care managers (executives and middle managers), they show how compromises are constructed and justified to significant others. Because compromises are fragile and open to criticism, managers have to perform continuous “justification work” that entails not only the use of rhetoric but also the adaption of behavior and material objects. By inscribing compromises into objects and behavior, managers are able to solidify compromises, thereby creating temporary stability in times of public sector change.     

‘Everybody else just living their lives’: 9/11, race and the new postglobal literature

ABSTRACT

López's essay focuses on three questions or concerns: globalization, its aftermath and how those on the bottom survive it. During globalization's rise through the 1990s even the most virulent critics treated its eventual hegemony over the planet as a fait accompli; the only relevant questions were how it would change us, and whether those changes were desirable. Today the question is how to live now that globalization has failed us. As the aftermath of each of the global cataclysms of the last decade have amply demonstrated, it is the poor, the disenfranchised and marginalized who bear the brunt of the suffering and anxiety set in motion by the economic, political and cultural changes unleashed by globalization at the level of neighbourhoods and communities. What López calls the ‘postglobal’ emerges precisely at those moments when globalization as a hegemonic discourse stumbles, when it experiences a crisis or setback. The first section of his essay consists of a detailed exposition of the term ‘postglobal’ and its efficacy for the study of contemporary literature and culture. The rest focuses on Monica Ali's novel Brick Lane as an exemplar of what he calls the new postglobal literature.