Authoritarian attitudes and support for radical right populists

ABSTRACT

This paper examines which parties attract support from people with authoritarian attitudes by comparing multi-party systems to a pure two-party system (the US). It proposes reasons why radical right populist (RRP) parties may serve as outlets for illiberal sentiments in multiparty systems, and offers reasons why such attitudes could correspond with support for the US Republican Party. Some have raised concerns about democratic deconsolidation in liberal democracies. There is limited evidence here consistent with deconsolidation. Politically authoritarian attitudes do exist among a small but non-trivial proportion of electorates in established democracies. In multiparty systems people with such attitudes were more likely to be supporters of smaller RRP parties that generally do not join government, but not centre-left or centre-right parties. However, US Republicans had supporters who resembled European RRP supporters in their politically authoritarian attitudes, and authoritarian attitudes were a notable predictor of support for Donald Trump in 2016.     

Media Framing on Armed Conflicts: Limits of Peace Journalism on the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict

ABSTRACT

Media framing and coverage of contemporary armed conflicts largely focus on the defence of national security and war propaganda. The concept of peace journalism draws on the Galtung tradition and provides a toolkit for opposing war journalism and contributing to reconciliation. By examining the case of media framing of the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict, this article asks whether and why peace journalism is possible in the given political context. Our study of limited peace journalism shows that traditions of war journalism are predominant and points to limitations of liberal instruments in (semi-)authoritarian post-Soviet conflict contexts.     

UN Peace Operations and Conflicting Legitimacies

ABSTRACT

Analyses of United Nations (UN) peacekeeping increasingly consider legitimacy a key factor for success, conceiving of it as a resource that operations should seek and use in the pursuit of their goals. However, these analyses rarely break down legitimacy by source. Because the UN is an organization with multiple identities and duties however, different legitimacy sources – in particular output and procedural legitimacy – and the UN’s corresponding legitimation practices come into conflict in the context of peacekeeping. Drawing on a range of examples and the specific case of the United Nations Organization Mission in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (MONUC), this article argues that looking at different legitimacy sources and linking them to the institutional identity of the UN is thus critical, and it shows how the UN’s contradictory legitimation practices can reduce overall legitimacy perceptions.     

Elections,repression and authoritarian survival in post-transition Indonesia and the Philippines

Abstract

This paper compares post-transition Philippines and Indonesia, examining the ways in which authoritarian practices survive and are shaped by regime transition. It examines the transition process in each case, to identify the problems of management and control that regime elites set for themselves in the post-dictatorship period. It is argued that Philippine elites set out to disaggregate and domesticate an already mobilized opposition movement, while the Indonesian authorities strove to keep similar popular politics from mobilizing. The paper then considers how these political objectives find expression in the structuring of two important institutional fields – the electoral and policy making processes – concluding with an examination of how these considerations influence patterns of repression. In particular, the paper also investigates whether repression targets primarily proscribed modes of activity, or sets out to threaten and intimidate proscribed organizations and people. Differences in electoral and policy processes, as well as in patterns of repression, demonstrate the ways in which authoritarianism can survive regime transitions and can undermine the promise of democracy in the post-dictatorship period.     

Birthplace,bloodline and beyond: how ‘Liberian citizenship’ is currently constructed in Liberia and abroad

As a twenty-first century post-war, emigrant-sending country, Liberia reflects global citizenship norms while simultaneously departing from them, and this unique positioning offers new opportunities to theorise citizenship across spatial and temporal landscapes. In this article, I examine ‘Liberian citizenship’ construction through a historical prism, arguing that as Liberia transformed from a country of immigration to one of emigration, so too did conceptualisations of citizenship – moving from passive, identity-based citizenship emphasising rights and entitlements to more active, practice-based citizenship privileging duties and responsibilities. Given the dynamic trends in citizenship configuration across the globe and particularly in Africa, this article fills gaps in the growing body of literature on citizenship and participation in emigrant-sending countries by contributing to wider debates about how identities, practices and relations between people transform in the aftermath of violent conflict. Empirical evidence presented is based on multi-sited fieldwork conducted in 2012 and 2013 with 202 Liberians in urban centres in West Africa, North America and Europe.     

Applying the Environment Shaping Methodology: Conceptual and Practical Challenges

Abstract

Repatriation has long been the international community's preferred solution to refugee crises. This article argues that repatriation must be understood not in terms of physical return but as a process of political rapprochement between citizen, community and state. In particular, this work takes account of the need to accommodate community-based political identities. Repatriation should be conceived of as the deliberate remaking of a social compact between not only refugee-citizen and state but also refugee-nation and state. This offers a means for resolving the inherent contradiction between the notion of universal human rights and contemporary political organization which determines meaningful access to these rights on the basis of group or national identities. This is particularly important given the role of group-based conflict in causing mass refugee flight.     

Afghanistan’s Taliban – Legitimate Jihadists or Coercive Extremists?

ABSTRACT

The military intervention in Afghanistan in 2001 was portrayed as a fight to oust the extremist Taliban. But the Taliban have long been regaining influence, with the military victory of the Afghan government and its foreign allies now seeming less likely than ever. In light of these developments, this article investigates what the affected people – rather than the foreign interveners – think about the Taliban, and whether they perceive them as coercive or legitimate. Building on a conceptual understanding of legitimacy that has been adjusted to the dynamics of conflict-torn spaces, the article suggests that people judge the Taliban on the basis of how their day-to-day behaviour is perceived. While the Taliban are a coercive threat in urban centres and other areas where they launch attacks, they nonetheless manage to construct legitimacy in some of the places which they control or can access easily. A major source of their legitimacy in these areas is the way in which they provide services – such as conflict resolution – which some people consider to be faster and fairer than the state’s practices.     

‘No Interest in Land': Legal and Spatial Enclosure of Gypsy-Travellers in Britain

This paper examines the place of Gypsy-Travellers within the British legal system. It considers the function of the law in establishing moral and social norms and pathologising aspects of Traveller life. It examines how a variety of legal principles, discourses and bureaucratic agencies combine to construct travellers as deviant with regard to the moral and social order. It considers the attempts in British law to control Travellers' spatial practices and nomadic lifestyle, and the ambivalent nature of legislation in this area. The Caravan Sites Act 1968 is examined in terms of its formation and implementation. The origin and impact of the Criminal Justice and Public Order Act 1994 are assessed. It contends that the criminal justice system has its own rationality which may conflict with both that of the formal law and other parts of the state. It is argued that institutional discrimination exists within the legal system, based on ingrained ‘sedentarist' assumptions about what constitutes a normal way of life. Both the 1968 and the 1994 Acts can be criticised in these terms. Travellers have, however, been able to resist many of the practices of legal and spatial enclosure to which they are subject.     

Local Ordering and Peacebuilding in Kyrgyzstan: What Can Customary Orders Achieve?

ABSTRACT

The post-liberal IR debate on peacebuilding has made considerable efforts to reintroduce ‘the local’. In principle, critical peace studies follow the argument that communal capacities for peace formation exist in every society. However, few take the further conceptual step of taking emic perspectives on ordering and peacebuilding more seriously. This article aims at exploring and understanding customary concepts and practices of ordering with examples from Kyrgyzstan. It asks how and why communal actors and institutions contribute to ordering in the context of limited local tensions and how these actors navigate at national and international levels.     

ASEAN and regional governance after the Cold War: from regional order to regional community?

Abstract

This paper first reviews and critiques the dominant realist and constructivist accounts of ASEAN, which have enjoyed much prominence in The Pacific Review since the journal's founding in 1988. ASEAN behaviour and outcomes cannot be fitted into neat theoretical categories that emphasize either material or ideational variables in explanation. Instead, ASEAN displays complexities in behaviour that are the product of the contingent interaction between the material (power, territory, wealth) and the ideational (norms, ideas, identity) as member states actively seek to manage domestic order as well as regional order within and beyond ASEAN. In all of this, state interests and identities remain paramount, which means that the long-standing ASEAN norms of sovereignty/non-interference remain central to regional governance. Under these conditions, and despite the Charter's newly articulated political norms of democratization, human rights, and the rule of law, the prospects seem doubtful for building a people-centred ASEAN Community in which regional governance displays inclusiveness, seeking to address the interests and needs of the region's ordinary people as opposed to what its elites deem appropriate. The final portion of the paper explores what a critical approach to studying ASEAN might reveal. In particular, the paper attempts to identify whether there may be any political spaces opening up within existing structures and practices from which progressive change could emerge, even if slowly, particularly in the area of human rights and social justice, key elements in building an inclusive, ASEAN Community.     

The Structure of Political Competition: Dimensions of Candidate and Group Evaluation Revisited

In this paper, we take a fresh look at the structure of sociopolitical conflict through confirmatory factor analyses of survey data gathered in Florida during the presidential campaign of 1996. Our analysis shows both stability and change in the electorate. In line with prior research, a single bipolar partisan dimension underlies the mass public's evaluations of political leaders, though national figures fit more comfortably on this continuum than do those at the state level. Citizens' evaluations of key sociopolitical groups reflect orthogonal cultural disputes, class divisions, and conflicts relating to issues of social control. While all three of these dimensions impinge to some degree on voters' conceptions of party and ideology, our findings point to the leading role that cultural issues now play in shaping ideological images and identities.     

The myopic Foucauldian gaze: discourse,knowledge and the authoritarian peace

ABSTRACT

The discourse of liberal peacebuilding has often been characterized by critics as a hegemonic discourse, in which power and knowledge are co-constitutive. Influenced by the work of Michel Foucault, an important strand of the literature has demonstrated how epistemic communities have produced knowledge that supports this discourse, while marginalizing other, contrary voices. A ‘local turn’ has sought to uncover what Foucault termed ‘subjugated knowledges’, peripheral voices that were seen as potentially contributing to a more emancipatory peace. This article, in contrast, argues that the explicit and implicit Foucauldian framing of discourse and knowledge is no longer adequate to conceptualize the contested nature of peace and conflict in a rapidly changing international system. In a period of significant geopolitical shifts away from a Western-centric international order, post-Foucauldian discourse theories offer a more productive analytical perspective that makes visible the multiple, competing discourses that attempt to achieve closure in defining meanings of peace and conflict. A theoretical framework that emphasizes discursive contestation rather than unitary domination allows serious consideration of alternative conceptualizations of peacemaking. In particular, theoretical frameworks that highlight contestation make visible an authoritarian, illiberal approach to managing conflict that challenges both liberal and emancipatory conceptualizations of peace and conflict, but is occluded in the current debate over post-liberal peace.     

‘A Real Woman Waits’ – Heteronormative Respectability,Neo-Liberal Betterment and Echoes of Coloniality in SGBV Programming in Eastern DR Congo

ABSTRACT

Drawing on archival and field research, this article critically examines the production and distribution of gender roles and expectations in SGBV programming, in particular in eastern Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC). We find the underlying currents in some of these programmes reinscribe heteronormativity and focus on individual betterment which resonates with regulating gender and sexuality during colonialism. In some cases, strongly western-inspired norms of individual agency have been introduced, disregarding structural constraints of people’s lives. To conclude, we explore alternative approaches to SGBV prevention, ones in which international approaches are re-defined and vernacularized for local use – but which also at times inform global understandings.     

Using the Law as a ‘Harmonious Weapon’: The Ambiguities of Legal Activism in Favour of Migrant Workers in China

Abstract

Legal mobilization has spread in China over the past 20 years and is generally considered by both activists and scholars as a way to advance democracy and rule of law. Focusing on the mobilization in favour of migrant workers and on politically moderate practices, which are both more frequent and widely held as more successful, I argue to the contrary that resistance and reproduction of political domination are mutually constitutive. Public interest litigation and administrative litigation appear as new forms of political participation that constitute an internal regulation to the authoritarian regime, thus contributing to explain the regime's capacity to adapt and its durability. This article also accounts for new strategies developed by some lawyers that shun the courts and use law to ‘empower civil society’ and that thus do not contribute to structural reproduction. Though activists are struggling to turn their strategies into more institutionalized practices, they remain an ad hoc mechanism of internal control.     

The “Phantom Local” and the Everyday Distinction Practices of Humanitarian Actors in War: A Socio-Legal Perspective

ABSTRACT

This article is concerned the everyday practices of international humanitarian actors who deliver assistance in armed conflict zones. Drawing on original fieldwork conducted in South Sudan, it elucidates how humanitarian actors engage with the principle of distinction in international humanitarian law (IHL). The article considers how the desire to enforce distinction impacts humanitarian actors’ relationships with others, and introduces the concept of everyday distinction practices. These practices have an important performance component, designed to appease the “phantom local.” It is proposed that such practices may have adverse implications for the humanitarian–beneficiary encounter. By positioning war-affected populations as an audience for distinction, everyday distinction practices reconfigure the victims of war from being receivers of aid to perceivers of aid. By lumping beneficiaries together with armed actors as part of the “phantom local,” distinction practices also paint the victims of war as an object of mistrust, fear, and potential danger.     

Rights,bioconstitutionalism and the politics of reproductive citizenship in Italy

The introduction of a restrictive law on assisted reproduction in Italy in 2004 sees the privileging of a conservative model of family relations and a patriarchal conception of society. This law excludes many individuals from full reproductive citizenship. The 2004 Act excludes gay couples, single people and people who are carriers of genetically inherited conditions from access to assisted reproductive technologies. This article examines the manner in which citizen contestation of the law via Court challenges engages what Jasanoff (2011, Reframing rights: bioconstitutionalism in the genetic age, Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press) has termed a practice of ‘bioconstitutionalism’. Such a practice has led to a gradual judicial reworking of the Act, and demonstrates the power of individuals acting in concert to contest successfully draconian state action. It undoes the imposition of a biopolitical ordering on individuals and allows them, through their own continuous action, to perform a contestatory form of citizenship.     

Studying Peace in and with Central Eurasia: Starting from Local and Trans-Local Perspectives

ABSTRACT

In view of a crisis of liberal universalism peace research must reflect on how it is perceived, how peace is constructed in other places and how it can cope with diversity in ordering and peacebuilding. This Special Issue is an attempt to search starting points for peace research in and with Central Eurasia. The introductory concept clears a path through current research questions, normative problems and barriers of knowledge production. Considering ethnographic methodologies, it starts from the local everyday and takes an interest in how actors and institutions in concrete places and multiple socio-spatial configurations navigate conflict and peace.     

Creative appropriation: academic knowledge and interventions against sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo

ABSTRACT

Recent academic research has questioned assumptions about sexual violence in (post-) conflict contexts. Gender norms rather than military decision-making have been found to constitute a major underlying reason for wartime sexual violence. In this contribution, we investigate whether international organisations seeking to prevent sexual violence in the Democratic Republic of Congo have accordingly changed their analytical perspectives and modified policies and programming. We find that many, but not all, such organisations creatively appropriate new academic work in their policy and project documents. However, incentives for continuity in the humanitarian field have slackened the pace of any substantive practical changes.     

The range and limitation of sub-national regime variations under electoral authoritarianism: The case of Russia

ABSTRACT

As has been demonstrated by scholars, different levels of a polity may encompass different political regimes. In this study we examine variations in regional political regimes which have developed under Russia's system of electoral authoritarianism. Comparing the results of two cycles of regional assembly elections (2008–12 and 2013–17) we analyse and compare elections results and levels of electoral contestation in both the party list (PL) and single member district (SMD) contests. This allows us to identify the range of sub-national regime variations: ‘hegemonic authoritarian’, ‘inter-elite bargain authoritarian’, ‘clearly-competitive authoritarian’, and ‘moderately-competitive authoritarian’ regions. Approximately half of the regions demonstrate stable electoral patterns across both cycles. At the same time, none of the regions go beyond the authoritarian limitations imposed by the Russian regime. The variation is explained by a combination of structural and agency factors with a prevalence of the latter.     

The civilian's visual security paradox: how open source intelligence practices create insecurity for civilians in warzones

ABSTRACT

Images taken by civilians and shared online have become an important source of conflict intelligence. This article explores issues around how states and non-state actors appropriate civilians’ images to produce intelligence about conflict, critically scrutinizing a practice often called open source or social media intelligence. It argues that image appropriation for open-source intelligence production creates a new kind of visual security paradox in which civilians can be endangered by their everyday visual practices because their digital images can be appropriated by outside actors as conflict intelligence. The transformation of everyday images into conflict evidence relies on what Barthes termed the photographic paradox, the paradox that while a photograph is clearly not the reality it depicts, the photograph is casually interpreted as a copy of that reality. When images are appropriated as conflict intelligence this photographic paradox translates into a security paradox. A visual security argument can be made without the intention or knowledge of the image producer, who then comes to perform the role on an intelligence agent. Yet civilians in warzones can hardly refrain from producing any images when they need to call attention to their plight, and to stay in contact with friends and relatives. The paradox, then, is that such vital visual signs of life can rapidly become sources of danger for the civilian. This civilian visual security paradox, it is argued, demands that intelligence actors respect the protected status of civilians in their online collection practices. So far, however, there is little sign of such respect.