Competitive Loss,Gendered Backlash and Sexism in Politics

Political Behavior - Politics is often seen as a zero-sum game, so understanding how competition affects political behavior is a fruitful, yet underexplored area of study. Reactions to competition...     

National renewal in the discourse of neoliberal transition in Britain and Chile

ABSTRACT

The term neoliberalism became associated with processes of economic and social restructuring in various parts of the world during the latter years of the twentieth century. While the importance of these processes is undisputed, the extent to which neoliberalism constitutes a coherent and consistent ideology, or merely a contingent and contextual set of broadly related policies, remains a source of contention. In this article, we explore this question through a comparative analysis of the political discourse of neoliberal transition in Britain and Chile. Drawing on the model of historical comparison developed by Antonio Gramsci, we argue that these two countries represent paradigm cases of the constitutional and authoritarian routes to neoliberalism. However, by focusing on the discourses of national renewal in the speeches and writings of Margaret Thatcher and Augusto Pinochet, we argue that both cases rest on a particular articulation of the themes of coercion and consent. As such, we suggest that while each paradigm articulates these themes in distinct ways, it is the relationship between the two that is essential to the political ideology of neoliberalism, as the coercive construction of consensus in Chile and the consensual construction of coercion in Britain.     

Goodbye to All That? The Rule of Law,International Law,the United States,and the Use of Force

The attitude of past United States administrations to public international law, particularly but not exclusively governing the use of force, has often seemed ambivalent, or sometimes decidedly hostile (where the conduct of the United States itself was called in to question). This paper considers the attitude of many of those with power or influence in the Bush administration (particularly that of the 'neo-conservatives'), and the implications of their often thinly disguised contempt for public international law which might seek to constrain the exercise of United States power. The conclusion is that while the academic arguments which seek to justify this American 'exceptionalism' are worthy of serious examination, they are ultimately inadequate and in the interests of neither the rest of the world, nor, finally, the United States itself.