Human Rights, “Orientation,” and ASEAN

This article will first look at the recent promulgation by the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) of its ASEAN Human Rights Declaration (AHRD). This development follows on from ASEAN's official attempts since the development of the 2007 ASEAN Charter to promote a “people-oriented” ASEAN. This article explores the various criticisms that have arrived of the ASEAN Human Rights Declaration, and, in particular, considers the criticisms concerned with or relevant to sexual orientation and gender identity rights. Second, the article uses the context of the arrival of the AHRD and, indeed, the arrival of its auspicing institution, the ASEAN Intergovernmental Commission on Human Rights (AICHR), to ask broader and deeper questions about the cultural politics of making rights claims and the manner in which these claims may contribute to the development of a more democratic politics.     

US Policy and the Nuclear Weapons Ambitions of the “Axis of Evil” Countries*

This article examines US policy as it pertains to the nuclear weapons objectives of what the Bush administration identified as the countries making up the “axis of evil,” pre-war Iraq, Iran and North Korea. Having drawn the same conclusion as that appearing in the 2000 report of the Project for the New American Century, which alleged the involvement of these countries in illicit activities relating to nuclear weapons, the Bush administration initiated an overtly hostile and accusatory policy toward each of these nations after 9/11.Undeterred by the paucity of evidence and the failure to find a nuclear weapons program (or any weapons of mass destruction) in Iraq, the Bush administration has remained relentlessly focused on the nuclear weapons ambitions of North Korea and Iran, all the while ignoring or minimizing diplomatic efforts that are not hegemonic and confrontational. This paper stresses that for the past several years the Bush administration has not hesitated in using questionable and uncertain information relating to the nuclear weapons objectives of the “axis of evil” countries, even though it has demonstrated no interest in eliminating US nuclear weapons as the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty obligates it to do.     

Introduction to “charting,tracking, and mapping: new technologies,labor, and surveillance”

Advances in information technologies over the last two decades have offered the promise of revolutionizing workplaces and other settings by expanding the capabilities of individuals working in various professions. Enabled by high-speed computing systems and marked by an intensification of command and control properties, new technologies have expanded, and in some cases intentionally surpassed, the scope of the senses. Technologies such as drones, surveillance cameras, and airport and border security systems promise the seemingly infinite catchment and infinitesimal account of human actions, while computer processing software provides real-time data on large-scale transactional processes occurring in monetary systems and security markets. Charting, tracking, and mapping functions open up new vistas for quantifying social behaviors and detecting misbehaviors, creating new frontiers for criminal justice, the military, and economic activity. The papers in this special issue reveal the processes guiding the rapid transformation and flexible adaptation of institutional structures, economic and financial systems, and threat surveillance and military/police mobilization in the near future.     

Stability and change in political attitudes: Observed,recalled, and “explained”

Using data from a panel survey of members of two generations, this study explores observed change in policy opinions across a 9-year span and respondents' recollections and explanations of their self-perceived attitude shifts. In general, remembrances corresponded poorly to opinions as originally expressed, with respondents perceiving that they were more attitudinally stable than was actually observed. When attempting to reconstruct their past political attitudes, individuals appeared to rely on simple rules of thumb such as one might employ to account for another's behavior. Finally, respondents readily supplied explanations for their self-perceived attitude history, even when those perceptions directly contradicted observed opinion change. It is argued that these results are not artifacts of survey measurement problems. Instead, they indicate that policy attitudes generally do not have strong cognitive representations, are eminently changeable, and once they are changed, an individual's cognitive autobiography is revised so as to render the changes invisible.     

Psychodynamics,symbolism, and socialization: “object relations” perspectives on personality,ideology, and political perception

Psychodynamic aspects of the perceptual process by which individuals relate to the distal symbolism of the political environment are explored through a conjunction of object relations theory and intensive analysis methodology. Drawing upon the joint theoretical perspective that object relations theory and the transference postulate bring to bear on personality and perception, a psychodynamic account of the attributional interface that exists between political symbols aspublic objects, on the one hand, andprivate symbolic meanings, on the other, is advanced and the dynamics at play demonstrated through detailed consideration of selected specimen cases. The individual dynamics demonstrated in each of the cases were found to obtain as well in the cases of others holding similar political views; moreover, certain of these group-wide personality patterns were discovered to have predictive significance in distinguishing radical ideologues from individuals subscribing to more moderate political views. Finally, the implications for a psychodynamic theory of political perception and socialization are considered.A revised and abbreviated version of a paper presented before the panel on Intensive Analysis in Political Psychology at the annual meeting of the Midwest Political Science Association, Chicago, April 20–22, 1978, under the title, Personality, Perception, and Political Ideology: Psychodynamic Aspects of Political Socialization and Symbolism.     

Childhood,Biosocial Power and the “Anthropological Machine”

Abstract

This article examines how childhood has become a strategy that answers to questions concerning the (un)governability of life. The analysis is organized around the concept of “biosocial power,” which is shown to be a particular zone of intensity within the wider field of biopolitics. To grasp this intensity it is necessary to attend to the place of imagination in staging biosocial strategies, that is the specific ways in which childhood is both an imaginary projection and a technical project, and to this end Agamben’s concept of the “anthropological machine” is used to examine how biosocial power has been assembled and deployed. The paper begins with the question of childhood as it was posed towards the end of the nineteenth century, focusing on how this positioned the figure of the child at the intersection of zoē and bios, animal and human, past and future. It ends with a discussion on how the current global obesity “epidemic” has transformed this one-time vision of mastery into a strategy of survival.     

“Civilization” and “Mission”

““Civilization” and the Self-Critical Tradition” argues that the word “civilization” in Europe comprises intrinsically the idea of progress contrary to the negative portrayal that prominent theorists have associated to this term. I argue that skepticism will remain about this idea, especially for the formerly colonized people who associate the term with two other words “mission” and “colonialism.” However, exploring a cultural perspective could serve to make the point about the cyclic dimension of the evolution of all “civilization.