Populism,ontological insecurity and Hindutva: Modi and the masculinization of Indian politics

Abstract

In an era increasingly defined by insecurity and populist politics, India has emerged as a forceful ontological security provider under the leadership of Marendra Modi. If ontological security is about finding a safe (imagined) haven, then ontological insecurity is about the lack of such a space in narrative terms. Drawing on Lacanian understandings of ‘the imaginary’ as something that can fill and naturalize this lack of space, the article is concerned with how memories, places and symbols of narrative identity constructions are used in populist discourse. More specifically, it attempts to understand the relationship between ontological insecurity and the imaginaries of populist politics in India. In so doing, it argues that the re-invention of ‘nationhood’, ‘religion’ and ‘Hindu masculinity’ along gendered lines has created a foundation for governing practices aimed at ‘healing’ a number of ontological insecurities manifest in Indian society. It specifically looks at how the Modi doctrine has formulated and expanded its foreign policy discourse into one that privileges populist narratives of nativism, nationalism and religion as forms of ontological security provision at home and abroad, but also how everyday practices can challenge such narratives, thus allowing different imaginaries of the Indian state.     

Welcome home! Routines,ontological insecurity and the politics of US military reunion videos

Abstract

This article investigates the military ‘reunion’ videos that proliferated in the United States throughout the late 2000s and early 2010s. The typical video entails a returning soldier who surprises a family member, usually a child or female spouse, at a public event. I articulate the reunion video as a key feature of populism in contemporary US society. The videos can be considered examples of the ‘encounters’ theorized by both Anthony Giddens and Erving Goffman. Both private and public ‘social occasions’ with performative qualities of ‘day-to-day life’, the videos disclose the institutional and societal routines of not only a family but broader layers and circles of the US political community. They relate not only to loss but also to redemption. The article therefore investigates when and how, and provides a provisional argument for why, these videos have proliferated by consulting the everyday features of ontological security. It focuses on both the local and the international contexts within which they attend to, but also generate, US ontological insecurity.     

The normative threat of subtle subversion: the return of ‘Eastern Europe’ as an ontological insecurity trope

Abstract

A combination of undemocratic developments in Hungary and Poland as well as Eastern Europe’s reluctance to engage in solidary burden-sharing at the height of the refugee crisis in Europe has brought back familiar allusions of Eastern Europeans as troublemakers for European unity and peace. This article offers a discursive dissection of ‘Eastern Europe’ as a subtly subversive challenge to Europe’s security of ‘self’, entailing a fear of being overrun by an ‘other’ perceived as endangering one’s normative and cultural order. Proceeding from Ingrid Creppell’s (2011 Creppell, Ingrid (2011) ‘The concept of normative threat’, International Theory, 3:3, 450–487[Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]) notion of normative threat, this article argues that the reappearance of ‘Eastern Europe’ as an ontological insecurity trope is indicative of deeper anxieties within Europe, some of which are systemic (such as doubts about the efficacy of integration and the legitimacy of the European Union) and some of which are contingent (such as concerns about defending the European political order from populist upsurges amidst ‘resurgent nationalism’).     

Substitutability,securitisation and hydro-hegemony: ontological and strategic sequencing in shared river relations

When a river passes through multiple states, to what extent are those states able to co-operate over or come into conflict over that shared water source? To address this question, I build on previous literature that emphasised benefit sharing, securitisation narratives and basin-level hydro-hegemony to advance an ontologically and strategically sequential framework for understanding shared river relations. I apply that framework to explain the changes in the hydro-political relationship between Turkey and Syria with regard to the Euphrates River. From 1980 to 1998, the policy-makers in both states saw use of the Euphrates as helping the government achieve high priority political goals and perceived full usage of that water to be the only means of doing so. Therefore, they both securitised the issue of Euphrates water usage to a significant degree. This mutual securitisation drove the two states toward greater conflict. After 2000, each state found substitute means for those same goals and so reduced its securitisation of Euphrates water usage. This reduced securitisation facilitated greater co-operation between them.     

Rethinking Kurdish geopolitical space: the politics of image,insecurity and gender

Global publics and local actors are increasingly saturated with variegated still and moving images. The important role played by images in world politics, however, remains understudied in the International Relations (IR) discipline. This article argues that the Kurdish geopolitical space is increasingly tied to a new regional and global imagination, which emanates from verbal–visual meaning-making strategies such as narrative reconstructions and pictorial representations (for example illustrations, pictograms, or photographs). The article’s investigation illustrates how the construction of new Kurdish geopolitical imagination became increasingly regionalized and internationalized during the war against the so-called Islamic State (IS), particularly after the Kobane siege in Syria in late 2014. It shows how the war between the Syrian Kurdish forces and the IS involved gendered and aesthetic signification for the global and regional audiences. Such strategies of meaning-making served as vital venues for gendering and making the threat of the IS and its “distant war” proximate, familiar and urgent for otherwise disinterested western audiences. These verbal–visual strategies vitally acted as a transmission belt between individual, state and systemic levels, turning the struggle against the IS into a globalized cultural-symbolic war. The article employs critical visual semiotics and critical discourse analysis to investigate the regional and global politics of image and offers three empirical cases to illustrate its argument: the narratives of the Kobane siege; the cartoon depicting a “Kurdish homeland” and globally circulated Kurdish female fighter photographs.     

Protracted refugee situations and state and regional insecurity

This article examines the long‐stating importance of refugee issues in international politics and underlines the changing emphasis given to these issues by policy makers and academic researchers, both in the immediate post‐Cold War and post‐9/11 periods. The authors then address the manner in which the relationship between forced migration and state security has been addressed in the past decade. The article highlights how this area of research continues to over‐emphasize the migration‐related security of Western states and the presence of armed elements in refugee movements in the Third World. In contrast, the literature largely neglects the security concerns of states hosting protracted refugee populations. Ironically, chronic refugee situations in regions of refugee origin constitute the overwhelming majority of the world's refugee population.     

Discursive Multilateralism: Global Benchmarks, Shame, and Learning in the ILO Labor Standards Monitoring Regime

A distinct feature of contemporary international relations is the proliferation of multilateral monitoring regimes. Despite the significance of this for the study of international law and organization, little empirical evaluation of the effectiveness of multilateral monitoring exists. This article examines the effectiveness of the supervisory system of the International Labor Organization (ILO), widely recognized as the prototypical model for all multilateral monitoring regimes. I examine the speech acts and rule-practices of the ILO regime within a hermeneutic/constructivist framework. This yields a set of heuristic hypotheses reflective of the "logic" that guides regime interactions with its member states. This asserts that "shame" influences member states to comply and respond positively to regime obligations. To test this, I statistically generate global benchmarks. These consist of world and regional averages in the behavioral patterns of member states. Quantitative findings demonstrate recidivist patterns of deviance by "global pariahs" set against a statistical background consisting of large-scale normative conformity on the part of ILO member states but configured around some regional variations. My analysis contends that global benchmarking reduces the risks of member state defection from core international labor standards and thereby promotes monitoring by learning or discursive multilateralism.     

The power of Trump-speak: populist crisis narratives and ontological security

Abstract

For most observers, the election of Donald Trump as the 45th president of the United States (US) came as a shock. This has been widely recast as the culmination of the American public’s long-standing dissatisfaction with the political elite and deep-seated frustrations with broader socio-economic conditions. We argue that the Trump campaign’s success also stemmed from its effective use of an emotionally charged, anti-establishment crisis narrative. With insights from political psychology, we examine the socio-linguistic mechanisms that underlie the effectiveness of ‘Trump-speak’ through both quantitative and qualitative content analysis of Trump’s communications toolkit during the 2016?US presidential election campaign. We show that his leadership legitimation claims rest significantly upon ‘crisis talk’ that puts his audience in a loss frame with nothing to lose and explain why ‘crisis talk’ impacts on political behaviour. As we demonstrate, the crisis stories that political agents tell simultaneously instil ontological insecurity among the American public and serve to transform their anxiety into confidence that the narrator’s policy agendas are the route back to ‘normality’. Through these rhetorical mechanisms, the Trump campaign manipulated individuals’ ontological (in)security as a tool in the politics of reassurance at the broader, societal level.     

Peace-building and the predatory political economy of insecurity: evidence from Cambodia,East Timor and Afghanistan

International peace-building interventions in post-conflict countries are intended to transform the socio-political context that led to violence and thereby build a stable and lasting peace. Yet the UN's transitional governance approach to peace-building is ill-suited to the challenge of dealing with the predatory political economy of insecurity that often emerges in post-conflict societies. Evidence from peace-building attempts in Cambodia, East Timor and Afghanistan illustrates that the political economy incentives facing domestic elites in an environment of low credibility and weak institutionalisation lead to a cycle of patronage generation and distribution that undermine legitimate and effective governance. As a result, post-conflict countries are left vulnerable to renewed conflict and persistent insecurity. International interventions can only craft lasting peace by understanding the political economy of conflict persistence and the potential policy levers for altering, rather than perpetuating, those dynamics.     

Modes of prison administration,control and governmentality in Latin America: adoption,adaptation and hybridity

This article analyses processes of international policy transfer and diffusion in an understudied aspect of security sector reform: prisons. It looks at how Latin American countries, especially Brazil, have responded to a growing security crisis of capacity, effectiveness and violence within their prison systems by adopting, adapting and even resisting reform models available globally in three reform areas: prison administration (state-run versus forms of privatisation and public-private partnerships); control (the technologies of super-max versus the intelligence- and relationship-centred approach of dynamic security); and governmentality (the ethos underpinning state and societal treatment of offenders as subjects and objects of penal discipline). It also examines how Brazil has produced its own home-grown models of penal governance—prisons run by civil society in partnership with the state—which challenge some of the current dominant tropes in prison reform. The globalisation of neoliberal modes of governance may often aim at institutional monocropping, and isomorphism certainly occurs, yet examination of actual practices confirms that Brazil, and the region, have adopted a hybridised diversity of penal reforms.     

Food riots as representations of insecurity: examining the relationship between contentious politics and human security

The 2007–08 global food crisis saw the eruption of a wave of contentious action across the developing world, represented most clearly by the food riot. Food riots are sudden, unexpected events, presenting a challenge to the state that moves beyond simple demands for food. The upheaval caused by a food riot can lead to lasting instability and violence as social and political structures are challenged. The aims of the article are to: (1) identify the character of contemporary food riots in relation to traditional forms; (2) determine the extent to which food riots can be seen to represent broader human insecurity; and (3) demonstrate the utility of contentious actions in demonstrating insecurity. This article examines the causes of the 2007–08 wave of food riots in relation to earlier manifestations. The findings show that the contemporary food riots have similar origins to their historical counterparts. The article also shows that food riots are a clear sign of insecurity, demonstrating the benefit of examining contentious politics in this context.     

Population, Prophets, Pensions, and Politics

As immigrant populations in Western welfare states grow at a faster rate than the native populations, whose birthrates have declined dramatically in recent years, Europe's tradition of democracy and tolerance is threatened. The reasons for the birthrate decline and the resultant aging of the native population are many and complex, but one important contributing factor is the pay-as-you-go pension system, which reduces people's immediate dependence on children. Moreover, the payroll and social security taxes that support the welfare state reduce the earnings capacity of men and women of the traditional age for having children, thus pushing down the birthrate. It is time to consider whether modern Europe's small-size families and high pensions are sustainable     

Indigeneity,Ethnicity, and the State: Australia,Fiji, and New Zealand

This article draws on the politics of indigeneity to distinguish the claims of first occupancy from simple ethnic identity politics, illustrating that relative political marginalization in Australasia is not so much a function of minority status but of indigeneity itself. The politics of indigeneity's aim is to create political space for self-determination and a particular indigenous share in the sovereign authority of the nation-state itself. The Australasian states are compared with Fiji to demonstrate that the significance of historical constraints on political authority transcend the withdrawal of a colonial power and the restoration of collective indigenous majority population status.     

Pakistan,India, China,and the United States: Energy,Climate Change,and National Security

This article focuses on the interplay of energy, climate change, and national security issues in Southwest Asia, using the newer definition of “national security” to include energy security, economic development, and climate change, as well as traditional security focusing on the military aspects.     

Culture,liberation, and 'development'

Most of the socio-economic changes taking place in Africa and much of the South are externally driven. External agencies, often in league with the State, by-pass working people and do not involve them in the decision-making processes. Their economic approaches ignore people's cultures and their world view. This denies working people a creative capacity to adapt new techniques and knowledge to their own concrete reality. This article argues for the importance of the historical frame of reference and for the centrality of culture in socio-economic processes. The author argues against approaches which are not culturally familiar to working people.     

The roles of,and relationships between,expatriates, volunteers,and local development workers

This article reports on exploratory research based on interviews with expatriate and local aid workers employed by local and international NGOs in Phnom Penh, Cambodia. Thematic analysis of the interviews found that personnel were placed in groups based on their job category – consultant, volunteer, or permanent staff – regardless of experience. These categories logically reflect each worker's pay level, purpose, and role, but they may also have an implicit power meaning which reinforces group differences and inhibits inter-group relationships. Relationship building was reported to be the most important factor contributing to the success of capacity-development initiatives. Four sub-themes were identified: communication, friendship, reciprocal learning/teaching, and confidence.     

Negotiation,politics, and management

Book reviews in this article:
Samuel B. Bacharach and Edward J. Lawler , Power and Politics in Organizations: The Social Psychology of Conflict, Coalitions, and Bargaining .
Max H. Bazerman and Roy J. Lewicki , eds., Negotiating in Organizations .
Jeffrey Pfeffer , Power in Organizations .