Paradigms in South African cinema research: Modernity,the New Africa Movement and beyond

Abstract

The history of theoretical approaches about South African cinema is discussed from the turn of the twentieth century period of the New Africa Movement, through various other theoretical moments, up to the early 1990s. These include conservative cultural theory, liberal humanism, workerist, Althusserian and Gramscian Marxisms. The discussion examines theoretical interventions either promoting or opposing modernity in the work of Thelma Gutsche, Hans Rompel, John Grierson and various Afrikaner cultural organisations during the first half of the twentieth century. Post-1970s cinema theory is critically examined in relation to discursive contestation occurring within both academia and the industry.     

Why “Conservative,” Not Liberal,Internationalism?

There is no broad literature defining conservative internationalism as there is for liberal internationalism and realism. Yet conservative internationalism differs from liberal internationalism and realism in four important ways. First, it seeks a world of limited government or separate sovereign nations not big international institutions. Second, it believes that national security is a function of ideological differences not just relative power or diplomatic misunderstandings. The democratic peace is a much safer world for America than the balance of power or United Nations. Third, it recognizes the need to use force during negotiations, not just after negotiations fail, because authoritarian states will not take negotiations seriously if they can achieve their objectives outside negotiations. And fourth, it advances democracy conservatively by prioritizing regions where strong democracies exist nearby (today Ukraine and Korea) and by using military leverage to reach timely compromises that weaken authoritarian states.     

The Rise of the Social Development Model: Institutional Construction of International Technology Organizations, 1856–1993

This study identifies an important thematic change among international technology organizations (ITOs). Within the general expansion of the ITO population, the social development model has risen rapidly over time in comparison with the industrial and professional models. Rationalistic political theories, which tend to treat international organizations as negotiated arrangements among nation-states or interest groups, locate organizational changes in the power capabilities and interest calculation of such actors. These theories do not explain this historical change among ITOs. Building upon the constructivist approach and sociology's institutionalism, this study emphasizes ITOs as constructed by world cultural norms. I propose that the rise of a liberal and rationalized world regime of development in the post–World War II era affected the popularity of different ITO models by supplying a new norm for technology. Data were collected for the population of ITOs established between 1856 and 1993, and the impact of the main forces on the rise of the social development model was formally tested with event-history methods. The study demonstrates the importance of world cultural norms in shaping the evolving field of ITOs.     

Not Whether,But When? Governments’ Use of Militias in War

Abstract

Although government use of militias during civil conflict can ultimately undermine state authority, governments still use militias for battlefield assistance. This paper examines the selectivity of government decisions to use militias by disaggregating civil conflict to the level of battle phases. Civil-conflict battles typically consist of four phases: preparation, clear, hold, and build. I argue that governments decide to use militias based on the strength of government security forces, operational advantages of militias, and the type of battle phase. Governments will limit the use of militias during key battle phases that are likely to receive increased media attention unless a victory secured by government security forces is unlikely or militias hold an operational advantage. A comparative analysis of the offensive operations in Tikrit and Ramadi during Iraq’s war against the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) lends initial support to this theory.     

Do National Economic and Political Conditions Affect Ideological Media Slant?

Political scientists are interested in the influence of the news media on politics. However, relatively few studies investigate whether or not ideological slant in news coverage changes systematically over time. If it changes systematically, what factors explain the changes? This study argues that external conditions, such as national political and economic situations, influence ideological media slant at the aggregate level. To examine this argument, “macro media bias” is measured quarterly by gauging the relative size of liberal and conservative news stories regarding domestic issues from 1958 through 2004. Utilizing ARIMA models, this study reveals that the news media tend to negatively react to government spending. Also, economic conditions, such as unemployment and inflation, significantly explain changes in the relative number of liberal and conservative news stories.

[Supplementary material is available for this article. Go to the publisher's online edition of Political Communication for the following free supplemental resource(s): the coding keywords, detailed coding rules, and alternative regression results.]     

The North down under: antinomies of conflict and intervention in Solomon Islands

Drawing upon recent critiques of the ways in which organised political violence in the global ‘South’ is interpreted and responded to, this paper examines the recent conflict and intervention in Solomon Islands. We argue that standardised liberal templates have served to frame both the aetiology of the Solomons conflict and the manner of its proposed resolution. Australia's intervention in Solomon Islands can be said to represent the ‘local North’ as it seeks to impose a liberal peace over a ‘deviant’ and ‘unruly’ neighbour. We draw upon published material to highlight the social, cultural and historical contexts of the conflict. We then demonstrate how the ‘off-the-shelf’ intervention, with its emphasis on asserting a liberal peace, fails to account for these complex social dimensions of the conflict. The antinomies of conflict and intervention in Solomon Islands demonstrate how both the liberal interpretation of developing-country conflict and its bedfellow, the liberal peace, attempt to divorce conflicts from their social contexts. In doing so, the demonstrable potential for violent intrastate conflict to result in positive social transformation is reduced.     

The Romanticisation of the Local: Welfare,Culture and Peacebuilding

The key feature of the dominant liberal approach to peacebuilding is the neoliberal marketisation of peace, rather than engagement with civil society and the agents and subjects of this peace. This is a particularly Western, liberal, and Enlightenment-derived discourse of peace, which is far from culturally and socially appropriate or sensitive, and has little chance of establishing a locally self-sustaining peace. This represents a “romanticisation of the local”, of civil society, and of the liberal culture of peacebuilding. Its cultural engagement, including its support for civil society development, is therefore little more than instrumental and is used to defer responsibility for the welfare of the local.     

Liberalism,and the limits of pluralism

The primary aims of this article are (a) to examine the importance of cultural norms and what part they play in requiring us to tolerate others out of respect, and (b) to formulate some guidelines designed to prescribe boundaries to liberty and tolerance conducive to safeguard the rights of individuals and, in turn, democracy. I argue that a liberal democracy can interfere in the business of its sub‐cultures when some cultural norms subvert the basic principles upon which a liberal society is founded. I proceed by making a further radical claim that democracy may prevent cultural groups from entering society if their conceptions of the good essentially conflict with its norms. My basic argument is that considerations of context and intentions must be taken into account, and that they may require the introduction of constraints. I conclude by considering the question whether or not the intolerant group has any right to complain, arguing that it does not.1     

Between Liberal Autocracy and Democracy: Democratic Legitimacy in Hong Kong

The partial democracy in Hong Kong is an experiment with limited suffrage in a liberal, self-governing society. This article examines the impact of system dissatisfaction and fundamental cultural values on democratic legitimacy, using logistic regression analyses of data drawn from an electoral survey in 2000. It is found that widespread public dissatisfaction with the economic downturn has not been generalized to the abstract, structural level of regime legitimacy. Equally widespread discontent with the political situation matters; but it has strengthened public support for democracy, rather than weakened it. Finally, democratic legitimacy is grounded in liberal, post-material and individualist-competitive values. In recognition of the plausible durability of these fundamental cultural norms and in view of the relative lack of support for non-democratic alternatives and strong support for partial electoral reform, we conclude that Hong Kong is very likely to remain on track toward a fuller democracy by incremental steps.     

Who Speaks for Women? Print Media Portrayals of Feminist and Conservative Women's Advocacy

Feminists have frequently accused media outlets of not giving them enough coverage and/or portraying them negatively. Conversely, conservative women have argued that media suffer from liberal biases. While some studies have addressed the larger question of media and ideological prejudices, none have examined how media report women's activism in comparative terms. Since feminist and conservative women's organizations vie with one another over who represents women's interests, how media portray them has implications for how well they achieve this goal. Using data gathered from four major national newspapers, this study analyzes how print journalists depict feminist and conservative women's activism over a 14-year span. In so doing, it provides information about frequency of media coverage, as well as how advocates are labeled, on which issues they are getting visibility, and whether or not media present feminist and conservative women's organizations as being in direct conflict with each other. Implications for understanding women's political efforts, broadly speaking, are also explored.     

Democracy and Islam: Implications for Civilizational Conflict and the Democratic Peace

The extent to which democracy and Islam are mutually exclusive is tested empirically with implications for civilizational conflict and the democratic peace. Three measures of democracy are used: a political rights index, an index of liberal democracy, and a measure based on institutionalization. Environmental variables such as sea borders and rainfall that minimize external threat to democratic systems are found to predict better to the more rudimentary political rights index, while cultural variables, including Islam in a negative direction, are more clearly associated with liberal democracy. The measure of democratic institutionalization behaves in a manner intermediate between the two. Divergence of the structures of explanation for these measures suggests that conclusions concerning the likelihood of war between democracies can depend on the specific index of democracy employed. The absence of a significant negative association between Islam and the political rights index under controlled conditions suggests that the probability of civilizational conflict is low.     

The European ‘Other’ in Poland’s Conservative Identity Project

Since taking office in November 2015, Poland’s conservative government has pressed for a sweeping reinterpretation of the past, and a re-envisioning of the future, of the political community. This conservative identity project idealises the allegedly fully sovereign Poland of the interwar period and repudiates the normative commitments underpinning Poland’s accession to the European Union. The worldview of the conservative government’s liberal critics, by contrast, represents a fusion of the inclusive nationalism asserted in opposition to communist rule with the affirmation of a European identity. The reawakening of historically resonant debates about the nature of Poland’s European-ness, emphasizing the centrality of the (Western) European ‘other’ in Poland’s national idea, carries significant implications for its relations within the international environment.     

Conflict art: scholars develop the tactical value of cultural patrimony

Historically, empires recruited scholars to capture artworks as a complement to military victory. Over the past century, cultural scholars have integrated fine art and antiquities into campaigns of conquest and assessed the political ramifications of damage to historic sites and religious monuments in military intervention. Consequently, historians, archaeologists and legal scholars have advanced the role of cultural patrimony in international conflict from a rite of conquest to a means of combat. In World War II, art historians in the Nazi regime planned plunder of artworks and destruction of historic structures as a tactic for conquest. During the Cold War, archaeological discoveries in developing nations enabled looting of cultural artifacts, and subsequent legal studies on the transfer of cultural property developed the value of cultural patrimony in the covert battle for control of the Third World. Since the Cold War, as transnational organized crime and terrorism exploit antiquities trafficking and target cultural sites in acts of political violence, scholars in international relations have considered culture in security theories. Across the three periods of international conflict, cultural scholars have actively developed the tactical value of cultural patrimony and played a role in transforming the perception of plunder in the context of military victory.     

World views in peace building: a post-conflict reconstruction challenge in Cambodia

This article explores post-conflict reconstruction in Cambodia through an analysis of both the dangers of liberal peace building and the positive role that training in capacity building plays in war-torn societies. The central question addressed is how insider–outsider dynamics influence Cambodia's post-conflict reconstruction projects; and what assumptions do international workers and Cambodian NGO staff make about ‘the good life’ that will be constructed? The article offers an overview of Cambodia's history and cultural context to situate its analysis of liberal peace building and foreign donors, as well as the behavioural characteristics of international peace builders operating within Cambodia. It assesses the potency of elite capture of insider–outsider partnership, specific NGO management practices, and the role of gender to better illuminate the challenges for post-conflict reconstruction. The article concludes with recommendations for improving future partnerships between insiders and outsiders in Cambodian peace-building projects.     

Liberal intervention in the foreign policy thinking of Tony Blair and David Cameron

David Cameron was a critic of Tony Blair's doctrine of the ‘international community’, which was used to justify war in Kosovo and more controversially in Iraq, suggesting caution in projecting military force abroad while in opposition. However, and in spite of making severe cuts to the defence budget, the Cameron-led Coalition government signed Britain up to a military intervention in Libya within a year of coming into office. What does this say about the place liberal interventionism occupies in contemporary British foreign policy? To answer this question, this article studies the nature of what we describe as the ‘bounded liberal’ tradition that has informed British foreign policy thinking since 1945, suggesting that it puts a distinctly UK national twist on conventional conservative thought about international affairs. Its components are: scepticism of grand schemes to remake the world; instinctive Atlanticism; security through collective endeavour; and anti-appeasement. We then compare and contrast the conditions for intervention set out by Tony Blair and David Cameron. We explain the similarities but crucially the vital differences between the two leaders' thinking on intervention, with particular reference to Cameron's perception that Downing Street needed to loosen its control over foreign policymaking after Iraq. Our argument is that policy substance, policy style and party political dilemmas prompted the two leaders to reconnect British foreign policy with its ethical roots, ingraining a bounded liberal posture in British foreign policy after the moral bankruptcy of the John Major years. This return to a pragmatic and ethically informed foreign policy meant that military operations in Kosovo and Libya were undertaken in quite different circumstances, yet came to be justified by similar arguments from the two leaders.     

Norway between NATO,the EU,and the US: A Case Study of Post-Cold War Security and Defence Discourse

This article addresses the post-Cold War security and defence discourse in Norway, focusing on the impact of the transformation of NATO, an increasingly ambitious EU within security matters and the transatlantic tensions in the War on Terror. The article argues that changes or continuity in policy result from the discursive battle between various power constellations, which are forcing conflicting understandings of reality on each other. In this battle, the dominant representation frames NATO's transformation as a precondition for national defence with reference to alliance solidarity, loyalty and interoperability. The alternative representation, on the other hand, has framed NATO's transformation as negative for national defence, claiming that forces trained for global, warlike missions are neither capable nor available for national defence tasks such as containment of Russia's strategic interests in the Barents Sea. The EU has been brought into the security and defence discourse only when new integration steps, such as the European security and defence policy and EU Battle Groups, put the question of how far Norway may participate, to a test. However, developments like the slow withering away of NATO and unilateralist US foreign policy on Iraq are contributing to pushing the Norwegian discourse, and hence policy, closer to Europe.     

What price justice? On the evolving notion of ‘right to fair trial’ from Nuremberg to The Hague

Following the Second World War, evolving notions of human rights have been met by evolving understandings of rights that should be afforded the accused in judicial processes. The following considers this evolution in proceedings stretching from Nuremberg to The Hague, as a struggle between forces that have given birth to each successive stage in international criminal justice, as well as of forces that have grounded rights of defence as advancing the cause of justice itself. Indeed, while notions of ‘right to fair trial’ and ‘equality of arms’ suffer from conflicted understandings over what consists in justice, and from conflicting interests over what powers should be afforded parties in the judicial process, this article suggests that the primacy afforded rights of the accused reflects, most evidently in the International Criminal Court, the growing acceptance of liberal democratic notions that justice is most clearly founded not on the treatment of victims, but on the treatment afforded those who mistreat others.     

Informers,agents and the liberal ideology of collusion in Northern Ireland

There is now considerable evidence of systemic and institutionalised collusion between state forces and loyalists paramilitary groups during the Northern Ireland conflict, not least in the late 1980s and early 1990s. Focusing on a critical reading of the 2012 de Silva report into the killing of human rights lawyer, Pat Finucane, this article examines state collusive practices surrounding the handling of agents and informers as evidence of a culture of collusion extending into the highest echelons of state institutions. The article will argue that such practices evidence an approach to state counterinsurgency predicated on a “doctrine of necessity” and what can be understood as a “liberal ideology of collusion”.     

Running the Blockade: Information Technology,Terrorism, and the Transformation of Islamic Mass Culture

Arab media is no longer limited to state-sponsored sources, opening a door of opportunity to the Muslim world. Islamic terrorist groups leverage information technology to form resilient, networked organizations that influence how many Muslims perceive events and U.S. political goals. This article looks at the connection between information technology and cultural transformation in the Middle East. It focuses on how information technology—as the major weapon system in the battle of ideas—has been used effectively by Islamic extremists and less so by the U.S. Important conclusions are drawn regarding the necessity of culturally-attuned uses of information technology.