Dawns, Twilights, and Transitions: Postmodern Theories, Politics, and Challenges

The postmodern turn which has so marked social and cultural theory also involves conflicts between modern and postmodern politics. In this essay, we articulate the differences between modern and postmodern politics and argue against one-sided positions that dogmatically reject one tradition or the other in favor of partisanship for either the modern or the postmodern. Arguing for a politics of alliance and solidarity, we claim that this project is best served by drawing on the most progressive elements of both the modern and postmodern traditions. Developing a new politics involves overcoming the limitations of certain versions of modern politics and postmodern identity politics in order to develop a politics of alliance and solidarity equal to the challenges of the new millennium.     

FEMA, Federalism, Hugo, and 'Frisco

This article examines intergovernmental performance during naturaldisasters. The United States has an ongoing response systemwhich requires the cooperation of national, state, and localgovernments. This system was severely tested during the fallof 1989 by four major crises: Hurricane Hugo in the Caribbean,South Carolina, and North Carolina, and the Loma Prieta earthquakein San Francisco. The intergovernmental response functionedvery differently in the four situations. Three patterns emergeto describe the intergovernmental dynamics of disaster relief.The article discusses the causes and consequences of these differentpatterns.     

Intelligence,Crisis, and Democracy: Institutional Punctuations in Brazil,Colombia, South Africa,and India

This article analyzes why institutional crises are bound to happen and how they impact on national intelligence systems’ development. Punctuated Equilibrium theory is reviewed and employed to explain one institutional crisis in each of Brazil, Colombia, South Africa, and India. In Brazil, the case study is the fall of the Brazilian Intelligence Agency (ABIN) director in 2008, following the Satiagraha operation conducted by the Federal Police Department (DPF). In Colombia, the 2009 wiretapping scandal known as chuzadas is examined. In South Africa, the investigation in Project Avani (2006–8) is reviewed. Finally, in India the case study is the intelligence crisis following the Mumbai terrorist attacks in 2008. We found that institutional crises are inevitable because there are tensions between security and democracy, both being co-evolutionary dimensions of successful contemporary state building. However, the impacts of such crises vary across the four cases pending on three variables: (1) degree of functional specialization inside the national intelligence system; (2) degree of external public control over the national intelligence system; (3) whether effectiveness, legitimacy or both were the main drivers of the crisis. Our analysis of the four case studies suggests that the amount of positive institutional change in the aftermath of an intelligence crisis is greater in countries with more functional specialization and stronger external control mechanisms.     

Apology,Recognition, and Reconciliation

The article examines the role of apology in a process of reconciling with historic injustice. As with so many other facets of the politics of reconciliation, official apologies are controversial, at times strenuously resisted, and their purpose and significance not always well understood. The article, therefore, seeks to articulate the key moral and practical resources that official apologies can bring to bear in a process of national reconciliation and to defend these symbolic acts against some of the more influential criticisms from the skeptics. The analysis is developed in relation to apologies offered in the context of state-indigenous reconciliation processes in the Americas, Australasia, and other regions of the globe.     

Hope,Critique, and Utopia

Abstract

This paper assesses the extent to which the category of hope assists in preserving and redefining the vestiges of utopian thought in critical social theory. Hope has never had a systematic position among the categories of critical social theory, although it has sometimes acquired considerable prominence. It will be argued that the current philosophical and everyday interest in social hope can be traced to the limited capacity of liberal conceptions of freedom to articulate a vision of social transformation apposite to contemporary suffering and indignity. The background to these experiences is the structural changes associated with the injustices of globalisation, the mobilisation of the capitalist imaginary and the uncertainties of the risk society. The category of hope could assist in sustaining the utopianism of critical theory through con joining normative principles with a temporal orientation. Yet, the paradoxes of the current phase of capitalist modernisation have further denuded notions of progress. Since the theological background to the category of hope constitutes a major limitation, the utopian orientation of critique is clarified in relation to the antinomies of the turn to social hope and the potential of Habermas' discourse theory of democracy, law and morality. Despite Castoriadis' profound critique of the category of hope, its present usage in social analyses will be seen to have affinities with Honneth's conception of the struggle for recognition.     

Race,gender, and jobs

In his influential indictment of the Great Society, Charles Murray focused upon young black males being unemployed as the result of government programs. He is correct in stating that the employment problems of young black males have worsened since 1965 but wrong in asserting that older black males and white males had no employment problems. Labor force participation for all males has dropped since 1965. The employment problems of young black males resulted from sweeping changes in the job market and, secondarily, the revolution in female employment. Blue-collar jobs and full-time jobs are a smaller portion of the job market, while white collar and part-time jobs have increased substantially. Women have obtained a far higher proportion of all jobs than ever before, and sometimes in occupational categories dominated by males. Both the restructured job market and the competition of men and women for jobs, issues ignored by, Murray, raise painful policy dilemmas. To what extent should a politically powerless group like young black males be directly assisted in their employment struggles? To what extent should they be encouraged to migrate or secure further education? To what extent should women's employment be publicly supported through programs such as day care?     

Power,throne, and rank

Richard Hoggart has spent all his working life teaching English literature and involved in different ways with cultural studies. He is the author of the seminal book The Uses of Literacyand most recently of Townscape with Figures: Farnham—reviewed in this issue of SOCIETY.     

Toleration,Skepticism, and Blasphemy: John Locke,Jonas Proast,and Charlie Hebdo

As the recent Charlie Hebdo, Copenhagen café, and Garland, Texas, shootings show, religion has recently reemerged as a source of violence within liberal democracies, particularly in those instances where cases of alleged blasphemy are involved. Although toleration arose, within the liberal tradition, as a means of dealing with such conflict, some individuals, possessed of devout religious belief, when confronted with beliefs or practices profoundly at odds with their faith, cannot conceive of toleration as a possibility. In such situations, the demand that these individuals tolerate that to which their faith is at odds is likely to run up against a more personal and, for its adherents, eternal agenda. This article considers a way in which those with devout religious beliefs might tolerate that which is profoundly at odds with their faith, thereby providing a means to avoid violent outcomes such as those in the “extreme cases” above.     

Laborde,liberalism, and religion

ABSTRACT

In this introduction, we provide a brief overview of the debate on religion in political philosophy. We present the main arguments defended by Cécile Laborde in Liberalism’s Religion and explain how these arguments contribute to the debate.     

Identities, Interests, and Imports

There is increasing attention to the mass public in the politics of trade debate, yet we still know little about how Americans formulate opinion on trade. Scholars are puzzled by the ineffectiveness of traditional dispositional beliefs to account for trade policy judgment, while an emerging economic self-interest perspective contends that opinion on trade is based on material concerns. This article demonstrates how symbolic predispositions provide critical information shortcuts for Americans on trade in which the relationship between trade policy and economic self-interest may be unclear. Symbolic politics theory explains how citizens can rely on accessible symbolic predispositions, including conceptions of national identity, in an unfamiliar and evolving trade policy environment often subject to multiple and conflicting cues, limited political information, and changing economic circumstances.     

Deadlines,routines, and change

Routines, the habitual and predictable behavior patterns of an organization, play central roles in both maintaining organizational performance and in adapting such performance to changing conditions. Deadlines interact with routines in important ways in influencing the course of organizational adaptation. This paper examines the role of routines and deadlines in influencing change in a regulatory program. It describes the adaptation of routines in the Environmental Protection Agency's (EPA) water pollution and pesticide programs in response to pressures and deadlines imposed by Congress, the courts, and the White House. The programs analyzed offer contrasting glimpses of the effects of routines on organizational change. Routines may be collective and shared by the members of an organization or unique to the specific groups or subgroups within it. When the organization primarily has widely-shared routines, few options will be perceived; consequently, collective routines tend to blunt the impact of pressures for change. On the other hand, routines that become fragmented, diverse, and individual in the face of repeated external pressures may facilitate change.     

Mandates, Powers, and Policies

Elections provide a mandate to pursue a set of policies. Party label provides a concise ideological cue for voters to choose among candidates, and research on industrial democracies verifies a link between the parties voters elect and subsequent policy outcomes. The combination of inchoate party systems and economic vulnerability elsewhere may weaken the link between voter choice and policy. When examining economic policies in Latin America, there is some controversy as to whether governments carried out "reform by surprise"—promising one thing during a campaign while implementing another in office. We test whether the ideological reputations of executives' and legislators' parties explain whether they adopt market-oriented policies. We find that the future behavior of presidential candidates is difficult for voters to predict. However, the ideological reputation of legislators is a reliable predictor of policy outcomes, and the relationship is clarified by the prospects of collective action by legislative delegations.     

Prediction,Proxies, and Power

Many enduring questions in international relations theory focus on power relations, so it is important that scholars have a good measure of relative power. The standard measure of relative military power, the capability ratio, is barely better than random guessing at predicting militarized dispute outcomes. We use machine learning to build a superior proxy, the Dispute Outcome Expectations (DOE) score, from the same underlying data. Our measure is an order of magnitude better than the capability ratio at predicting dispute outcomes. We replicate Reed et al. (2008) and find, contrary to the original conclusions, that the probability of conflict is always highest when the state with the least benefits has a preponderance of power. In replications of 18 other dyadic analyses that use power as a control, we find that replacing the standard measure with DOE scores usually improves both in‐sample and out‐of‐sample goodness of fit.     

Baudrillard,modernism, and postmodernism

While Baudrillard denies that his work is in any way 'postmodern', and while his writings offer a critique of both the rationality of the modernist project and the eclecticism of the postmodern temper, it seems evident that his work makes a major contribution to the analysis of postmodern culture. At its most effective, Baudrillard's theory-fiction accelerates analysis of postmodern culture by looking beyond the shifts in prior discourse examined by most cultural historians, and by attempting to generate analysis on the scale of the most substantial changes within the postmodern condition. Nevertheless, Baudrillard's theory-fiction often seems limited by its reliance upon rhetoric and references drawn from early and late cultural modernism, rather than from the present (which Baudrillard tends to caricature in apocalyptic terms). Despite these limitations Baudrillard commands respect for his independent and insistent attention to many of the most fundamental discursive transitions within postmodern culture. a predominantly modernistpostmodern thinker,his work combines innovative insights with slightly antiquated frames of reference.     

Globalization, secessionism, and autonomy

This paper analyzes the relationship between the persistence and growth of secessionist parties in democratic countries and economic globalization, controlling for political and economic factors. The implications of secessionist persistence for decentralization are also examined. The paper finds that globalization is positively related to secessionist vote growth, while there is some evidence that economic conditions also impact secessionist parties in systematic ways. Secessionist support is also substantially affected by policy changes. Central governments have offered autonomy more often to regions with secessionist parties than to regions without such parties, though often the offers take the form of symmetrical countrywide decentralization.     

Public affairs,issues management,and political strategy: opportunities,obstacles, and caveats

This paper evaluates research in corporate public affairs, social issues management and political strategy, and theoretical integration of the three areas and also cross‐disciplinary and cross‐institutional collaboration, especially with business or government officials. Copyright © 2001 Henry Stewart Publications     

Autonomy,residence, and return

This article argues that those unjustly displaced from a particular territory T cannot involuntarily lose their rights to reside there, or, as a consequence, their rights of return to it, even if they develop territorially grounded conceptions of the good where they now reside. The contrary position fails to accord the unjustly displaced the respect due to them in virtue of their personal autonomy. Facts commonly alleged to justify the supersession of rights of return to T only provide evidence that the unjustly displaced have abandoned their rights to reside there, or would do so if given a just opportunity to return. The rights of those now residing in T, which author argues may include those responsible for the unjust displacement, may limit the right of return but are unlikely to preclude it altogether.     

Psychopathy,sociopathy, and crime

He is a past president of the Society for Psychophysiological Research, and in 1990 he received the American Psychological Association’s Award for Distinguished Contribution to Psychology in the Public Interest. Dr. Lykken is the author of A Tremor in the Blood: Uses and Abuses of the Lie Detector(1981) and of The Antisocial Personalities(1995).     

Constraints, states, and wars

Abstract. The rational choice assumption is already disputable at the individual level of decisionmaking. At the level of collective decision-making unitary rational action is an unrealistic assumption. It neglects the transitivity of collective preferences issue, the logic of collective action and freeriding, the agency problem, and the human tendency to agree with each other irrespective of the facts. While unitary rational action is rejected as a basis for theorizing on international relations and war, the idea of decision-making under constraints seems as valid in the interstate context as in economics. The most important constraints on national security decision-making are the anarchical character of the international system and the corresponding need for self-help, the security and the territorial delimitation dilemmas, the presence or absence of plausible blueprints for victory, and the presence or absence of domestic constraints on bellicosity. A simple explanatory model of war built on these ideas is suggested and tested with dyadic data for the 1962–1980 period. In addition, there is some discussion of why collective security is doomed to fail, and why hegemony rather than balance improve the prospects of peace.