‘Women of substance’: Commodification and fetishization in contemporary advertising within the Indian ‘Urbanscape'

Advertising today has become an intrinsic part of modern culture. Apart from the obvious and tangible extolment of the virtues of a product and/or brand, more insiduously and less tangibly, advertising plays a key role in the functioning of social attitudes and values. This paper examines how advertising discourses in India, in particular the hugely successful and representative Woman of Substance’ ad campaign in the magazine Femina, transforms the manifold attitudes and qualities of the woman into commodities to be marketed; and how the ad campaign positions the woman within the nexus of her social interactions. The paper traces the economic and socio‐cultural changes that have characterised India's transition towards an open market economy to situate the role that advertising discourse plays in urban India today in the representation of the ‘Woman of Substance’. These changes have occurred in a relatively short space of time and have interacted profoundly with advertising discourse. This can best be seen in the fact that an urbanising trend in India has diversified the range of approved cultural models available to women in the search for what has come to be fashionably referred to in recent times as ‘lifestyles‘— exemplified both in the ‘Woman of Substance’ ad campaign, and the magazine itself, Femina.     

Citizens’ use of policy symbols and frames

This paper argues that citizens are capable of developing and promoting complex policy symbols, and that these symbols include supporting frames that explain and justify them. Based on a long-term study of education policies in Los Angeles, California, the paper uses interpretive methods to reconstruct and analyze these frames. Citizens developed two specific policy symbols while the district was engulfed in a desegregation debate; citizens identified schools as places where students gained academic knowledge and as institutions that affected broader race relations. However, education policy in Los Angeles could not support these two symbols over a long period of time, and a political movement to end mandatory busing eventually caused the academic symbol (originally the weaker of the two symbols) to become dominant. This trend reflects broader national discussions, in which education is now discussed in terms of standards and accountability and is evidence of continuing racism in US policy.     

‘Back Regions’ and ‘Dark Secrets’ in Singapore: The Politics of Censorship and Liberalisation

The political transition from Lee Kuan Yew to Goh Chok Tong to Lee Hsien Loong has generally been interpreted as a trajectory of gradual liberalisation in Singapore. This discourse of liberalisation is encouraged by a variety of factors such as policy changes over censorship regulations, a younger and more cosmopolitan polity, the government's global city ambition and desire to turn the city-state into a creative hub. Such factors, however, often obscure the contemporary policing dynamics of the People's Action Party (PAP) state. Using Erving Goffman's concepts of the ‘back’ and ‘front’ regions, this paper will demonstrate how the PAP state operates in different social spaces and how it engages in the different politics of these spaces. Using specific cases from the theatre community, this paper argues that the discourse of liberalisation has grown because the PAP state has, in recent times, exercised its censorship powers in the ‘back regions’ of theatre, away from the media and public. Finally, it will examine recent amendments to the Films Act and the Public Order Act which clamps down on acts of civil disobedience, and show that this is consistent with what Goffman calls ‘dark secrets’—that is, facts that are incompatible with an individual's or institution's public image.     

Devolution and identity: Multidirectionality in ‘Welshness’ and ‘Northern Irishness’

In an era of Brexit and on-going constitutional debates in the UK, questions around devolution and national identifications currently attract scholarly attention as never before. This article focusses on national identification in two devolved regions, Wales and Northern Ireland, never before compared in this way, to explore how devolution can act in a fluid and multidirectional way to produce differing framings of national identification. Using original qualitative research, combining the tools of documentary analysis, structured interviews and focus groups, it considers these theoretical ideas through the prism of both political elites and everyday life to explore and compare the reasoning behind the politicization of key national identifications.     

Keeping the ‘Ism’ in ‘cosmopolitanism’ – Wieland and the origins of cosmopolitan discourse

ABSTRACT

After having been dormant for much of the 20th century, the concept of cosmopolitanism has regained some of its former rhetorical power in current academic and political debates. Taking Kwame Anthony Appiah and Robert Fine as key interlocutors, the article argues that a historically informed analysis of the linguistic context, in which the language of cosmopolitanism first emerged, can help us understand better the political and ideological underpinnings of the concept. In the first part of the article, I discuss the emergence of cosmopolitanism in the context of what I shall refer to as the ‘ismatization’ of political language in the late 18th and early 19th centuries. In the second part, I turn to what I consider to be a key text for understanding the paradoxes of cosmopolitanism: the essay Das Geheimnis des Kosmopolitenordens (‘The Secret of the Order of the Cosmopolitans’), published by the German novelist, poet and publicist Christoph Martin Wieland in the journal Teutscher Merkur in 1788. At the end of the 18th century, I argue, Wieland makes a similar observation to Fine, namely that the ‘ism’ connotes something doctrinal, even sectarian, and steeped in secrecy and conspiracy.     

‘Land of jar and screen and fan’

’Japan and Britain: An Aesthetic Dialogue 1850–1930, an exhibition put on by Lund Humphries, London, in association with the Barbican Art Gallery and the Setagaya Art Museum, 17 October 1991 to 12 January 1992.     

The ‘Old’ and ‘New’ Political Economy of Hedge Fund Regulation in the European Union

The traditional literature on interest group behaviour presumes that private interests develop lobbying strategies based on the principle of effective allocation of resources. However, nearly 400 private interest groups actively lobby the Council of Europe, a classical intergovernmental organisation with weak decision-making powers, where no significant policy pay-off is expected to occur. This analysis aims to explain the seeming puzzle of private interest groups seeking to influence an institution which is generally perceived as having no strong decision-making powers in European political space. It does so by exploring three explanations from the existing literature, namely ‘policy overlap’, ‘venue shopping’ and ‘epistemic community’, and considers another explanation not hitherto fully developed, suggesting that the ‘ideological motivation’ of interest groups helps to explain their behaviour. Taking the ideological motivation of interest groups into account when analysing lobbying strategies can in fact shed light on certain lobbying preferences that would otherwise appear to defy the logic of interest representation. This paper therefore suggests that an ‘ideological motivation’ explanation potentially plays a crucial role in the analysis of the behaviour of any interest group.     

Denaturalisation and conceptions of citizenship in the ‘war on terror’

The threat of American and British nationals returning home after fighting with ISIS sparked calls in 2014 for legislation to allow the revocation of terror suspects’ citizenship. Using content analysis, this paper compares how citizenship was renegotiated during the debates that followed in both countries. For proponents of the new powers, acts considered prejudicial to national security did not simply constitute a ‘bad’ or dissenting citizen, but were incompatible with the status of citizenship itself. I find that republican discourses of citizenship conceived as loyalty to the state were used not as an alternative to liberal discourses that espouse individual rights and a more limited political arena, but precisely as means of discursively limiting of that arena, by selectively excluding particular undesirable or less desirable groups – terror suspects, naturalised citizens – from political life as we know it.     

‘Toys’ and ‘Whispers’ in ‘16‐land’: SOE and Ireland, 1940–1942

This article explores SOE plans to organise stay behind parties in neutral Ireland in cooperation with Irish army officers, in anticipation of a successful German invasion, as well as efforts to prepare for sabotage operations and to plant rumours through its agent Roddy Keith, and later through the British press attache John Betjeman. SOE's ambitions were opposed both by MI5 and SIS. MI5 wished to protect its own links with Irish intelligence, while SIS feared for the security of its covert Irish networks (which in fact were already penetrated). The consequent rows drew in C, Sir Frank Nelson, and other senior figures. They were resolved by Churchill, who felt that to provide the Irish with war material would only encourage them in their neutrality policy. His verdict was taken as an instruction to SOE to quit Ireland.     

Interrogating ‘invisibilization’ and ‘instrumentalization’: women and current citizenship trends in Canada

This paper examines current citizenship discourses and practices in Canada, focusing on the implications not only of marketization, but also of growing securitization vis-à-vis citizenship, and the gendered ramifications of such developments. The repercussions of marketization and securitization and their interrelations, for women in general, as well as racialized and immigrant women in particular, are outlined and assessed. In this way, we see how women are at the receiving end of highly contradictory processes in that they are both ‘invisibilized’, in other words, rendered invisible, by the Canadian state, but are also are increasingly ‘instrumentalized’, in other words, used in strategic ways. Yet, women also challenge these trends and tactics, thereby interrogating these processes that serve to limit the terms and scope of citizenship in Canada.     

Rethinking ‘Crowding Out’ and the Return of ‘Private Affluence and Public Squalor’

This article traces the history of ‘crowding out’, and its use as a justification for austerity and state deflation from its origins in the 1920s to its latest post-2010 incarnation. It examines why governments have kept turning to austerity and continue to justify it on the grounds that public sector activity crowds out more productive private activity, despite the accumulated evidence that this traditional pro-market formulation has failed to deliver its stated goals. It examines three other embedded forms of crowding out that have been highly damaging—leading to weakened social resilience and more fragile economies—but which have been ignored by both governments and mainstream political economists.     

‘Ireland of the welcomes’? racism and anti-racism in nineteenth-century Ireland

Irish society, North and South, has been slow to develop a social awareness and legal framework in relation to racism. This has resulted, in the main, from an unwillingness to admit to the presence of racism in Irish history and culture. Yet an examination of Irish society at the time of the visits of two black abolitionists to the country Olaudah Equiano in 1791 and Frederick Douglass in 1845—reveals deep currents of racism in both instances. The attempt by Belfast merchant Waddell Cunningham, who had made his fortune through the provisioning of slave plantations in the Caribbean, to establish a slave-trading company in Belfast in 1786 is a case in point. And, in the mid-nineteenth century, the Young Irelanders, a radical and militant nationalist movement, viewed national liberation as more pressing than the abolition of slavery. At the same time, both Equiano and Douglass noted the warm welcome they received, the former from anti-slavery activists, and the latter from such global players in the international abolitionist scene as Daniel O'Connell. Rolston concludes that there is nothing mysterious in contemporary Irish racism and anti-racism. Both have deep historical roots and are ultimately explained by Ireland's complex relationship to colonization: colonized itself, while at the same time intimately involved in colonizing others through the key roles played by Irish people throughout the British empire.     

The ‘party‐state’ in Greece and the fall of Papandreou

Revelations of corruption and of maladministration have forced a re‐examination of some of the basic characteristics of the Greek party‐state and party system. The purpose of this article is to examine how the controversies ‐ ‘scandals’ ‐ arose, and to assess their consequences for political development in Greece in the light of the June 1989 national elections. The elections may prove critical for the evolution of the State and the party system.     

The ‘I’ and the ‘we’ of citizenship in the age of waning democracy: Wolin and Balibar on citizenship,the political and dedemocratization

Despite drawing on different historical traditions and philosophical sources, Sheldon Wolin and Étienne Balibar have come to see citizenship and democracy in fundamentally similar ways. However, the work of one has not been considered alongside that of the other. In this paper, I examine some of their key texts and draw out three areas of common concern: the historical specificity of the political, citizenship as a dialectical process and dedemocratization. The significance of Wolin and Balibar’s writing on citizenship and democracy lies in a set of proposals for the eternal rebirth of the citizen as democratic agent between action and institution, hierarchy and equality, individual and community, difference and the universal. Their open-ended frameworks can be seen as an antidote to contemporary pessimism about the fate of democracy as either political order or normative ideal. I conclude by suggesting that contemporary Ecuadorean and Bolivian debates about how to combine relational ontologies and liberalism has opened a fertile domain for re-imagining the I and We of citizenship.     

‘Fraternity in diversity’ or ‘feudal fanatics’? Representations of ethnicity in Rwandan presidential rhetoric

ABSTRACT

Between independence in 1962 and the genocide in 1994, only two presidents ruled Rwanda. In addition to the enormous economic and developmental challenges that faced Presidents Grégoire Kayibanda (1962–73) and Juvénal Habyarimana (1973–94), each had to manage the ethnic divisions that plagued the country. In this paper Mayersen explores how each president discussed the issue of ethnicity in presidential speeches, interviews and key policy documents. Ostensibly, Presidents Kayibanda and Habyarimana both promoted national unity and advocated allegiance to a unified Rwandan identity rather than a focus on ethnicity. President Kayibanda called for ‘tolerance and understanding between the ethnicities’, while Habyarimana entreated Rwandans to ‘love your countrymen without distinction of ethnic or regional origin’. Yet in the allusive and indirect communication style typical of Rwandan discourse, underneath the presidential promotion of unity was a more complex message. Mayersen argues that the way each president addressed the issue served to maintain a high level of consciousness regarding ethnicity, and contributed to ongoing ethnic disharmony.     

Corporatism and the ‘privileged position’ of business

This article examines the contradictions between Lindblom's thesis of the ‘privileged position of business’ and the corporatist views of writers such as Schmitter and Lehmbruch. The implications of the two theories are analysed in the context of the exchanges between the capital and labour in corporatist systems. The analysis focuses on the kinds of exchange business may enter into, with special attention to the question of capital mobility, for that gives important insights into the stability of corporatist systems. Case studies of Sweden and Norway show that the kinds of bargain struck under corporatism may have serious consequences for corporatism, both as an analytical device and as a working system.     

Ararat and the politics of ‘preserving’ denial

ABSTRACT

Daldal analyses Atom Egoyan's film Ararat (2002) in terms of its ‘truth claims’ and its ostensible critique of the politics of denial of the Turkish authorities. Her essay is not an apologia for Turkish attitudes but claims that, while searching for the ‘truth’ amid denial and deception, the film creates its own ‘official history’, which is presented as the history, mostly based on nostalgia and ‘post-memory’. The Armenian diaspora still relies heavily on the genocide in order to build consciousness and cohesion, and Ararat contributes further to the need for sacred codes, sacred lands and sacred myths. Although the Turkish denial of the genocide is unacceptable, by demonizing the Turks and Turkey, the film contributes to the preservation of that denial, which has been helpful in the creation of diasporic Armenian identity.     

‘Ritual slaughter’ and the protection of animals

French courts produced contradictory judgments in similar cases involving daily newspapers accused of incitement to racial hatred.     

The logic of ‘Policy’ and successful policies

Developed on the premise that how we conceive of ‘policy’ and ‘successful policy’ guides policy sciences' research and evaluation, this paper responds to the conceptual questions of “what is a policy?” and “when is a policy successful?” Formal or logical conditions are established to distinguish ‘policy’ from related concepts. The notion ‘relevant public’ is introduced to distinguish public policies from private policies and to identify fairly-declared policies. Further, conditions are developed that can be used as logical tests for three types of policy success: implementation success, instrumental success and success in normative justification.     

Whose ‘Freedom of Navigation’? Australia,China, the United States and the making of order in the ‘Indo-Pacific’

The so-called freedom of navigation through the Malacca straits and the South China Sea, some of the world’s busiest trade routes, has long been of concern to scholars and practitioners of international politics in the region. Increasing tensions around territorial disputes recently propelled the issue to the forefront of global foreign and security policy making. Yet, despite the frequent invocation of threats to the ‘freedom of navigation’ for the justification of military measures to protect the ‘liberal rules-based order’, the substance of this rule or norm remains ambiguous and the nature of the threatened order unclear. Located at the confluence of the Indian and Pacific Oceans, Australian discourses represent a suitable case for clarifying both. Starting from the original provisions on navigational regimes in international law, this study analyses the meanings that officials, think tank analysts and academics have been attributing to the freedom of navigation and contextualize them in the evolving debate about order. Focusing on political rather than legal discourses, it finds that concerns with the freedom of navigation are largely unrelated to the safety of maritime transport. Instead, they serve as proxy for an increasingly static imagination of international order – written backward in time – to be secured.