Closed spaces or (in)competent citizens? A study of youth preparedness for participation in elections in Zimbabwe

This study sets out to explore the barriers to youth participation and how youth could be supported to enhance their participation in elections and governance processes in Zimbabwe. The study was carried out using quantitative methodologies. A survey was carried out to collect data, which in turn was analysed using SPSS. Evidence from the study shows that decision-making processes are not improving and becoming more participatory and youth inclusive. It was observed that youth participation in elections and governance processes is low and it is hampered inter alia by restrictive political structures, lack of interest, lack of information and lack of funds. Whilst some youth are ready to run for public office, they need to freely participate in politics and develop without restrictions, including getting support through leadership training. These young candidates will also need training in elections and governance processes as well as mobilise and sensitise other youth to register to vote if they are to succeed in their quest for public office. Resources and support must be given to youth-led initiatives that are reaching out to young people and ensure they play their part in democratic processes at all levels of governments.     

Sewing to satisfaction: craft-based entrepreneurs in contemporary Kyrgyzstan

This article focuses on the reassembling of apparel production in post-Soviet Kyrgyzstan. We contribute to this special issue on well-being in Central Asia by examining how individual craft-based apparel producers (a subset of producers in the apparel industry) describe the process through which they built upon their Soviet past and reoriented their professional trajectories in a new competitive market environment. These producers locate professional satisfaction in their ability to draw upon and creatively re-employ local knowledge and experience learned in Soviet institutions, ultimately – as they articulate and perceive – deriving pride and well-being from the process of selling highly regarded ethnically inspired apparel products both at home and abroad.     

Constitutionalism as a solution to despotism and imperialism: the Iranian Constitutional Revolution in the Ottoman-Turkish press

This article contributes to the growing scholarship on the connections between the Ottoman and Iranian revolutions by exploring Ottomans’ reactions to and portrayal of the constitutional struggle in Iran. Based on an examination of primary sources that have not been utilized before, it reveals how an ideologically diverse group of intellectuals tried to link the two revolutions together in the Ottoman-Turkish press, focusing on shared problems and ideals. It demonstrates that undergoing a revolutionary process themselves, these intellectuals interpreted the events in Iran through the prism of their own experiences and used them to garner support for the constitutional regime at home. Through their depictions of the Iranian revolution, they not only portrayed the 1908 Revolution as part of a broader struggle against despotism and imperialism with significant implications for the Islamic world, but also conveyed the message that the Ottoman constitution needed to be supported and protected so that it did not fail like the one in Iran.     

Apparence et réalité du pouvoir de représentation des provinces à Paris L'exemple des Etats provinciaux du Nord au XVIIIème siècle

SUMMARY

In this article, Marie-Laure Legay has examined the relations of the Provincial Estates on the north-eastern border of France—Flanders, Artois and le Cambrésis—with the central government. It shows that they did not waste energy disputing the tax demands of the crown, their right to assent to taxation had been reduced to a formality and they voted them without debate. But they then used direct representations through the delegations they sent to Paris, which usually resulted in some concessions being made by the crown. Similarly the Estates did not engage in formal assertions of their autonomy, but the full-time agents they hired in the capital processed a flow of remonstrances and petitions to the agencies of the central government. Thus instead of resisting the movement towards increased centralization of authority, they used it to pursue local advantages. In this way, the Estates were able to purchase the right to make appointments to local offices, while they repeatedly bypassed the Intendant, lobbying successfully for the transfer of many of his areas of competence to the Estates. This pragmatic strategy of working with the system, rather than opposing it was pursued consistencly down to 1789.     

Consanguinity as capital in rights assertions: Japanese-Filipino children in the Philippines

This paper examines the material dimensions of ethnic identity claims by Japanese-Filipino children in the Philippines and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) advocating on their behalf. Most Japanese-Filipino clients of NGOs in the Philippines were raised by their Filipino families with little knowledge of their Japanese fathers and little or no lived experience of Japan. Although these children and young adults are often called “multi-cultural” by NGO workers, they frequently grow up with no connection to Japan other than an awareness of their Japanese parentage and Japanese cultural products equally accessible to most Filipinos. I argue that filiation can be leveraged to gain access to resources not only through the legal implications that are provided by biological relationships, but also through symbolically salient claims for belonging to a nation or people by virtue of descent. This consanguineal capital should primarily be understood in politically symbolic terms, mobilized in processes of claims-making and based on notions of “blood” and belonging and their frequent conflation with ethnicity.     

Feeling so Hood. Rap,lifestyles and the neighbourhood imaginary in Tunisia

The article examines the role of rap in reimagining the social structure in Tunisia after its 2010/2011 revolution. Before the revolution, the Ben Ali regime imposed a narrative of Tunisian society as mainly middle class; beneath this narrative, the Tunisian folklore hosted multiple markers of social distinction that classified people through their perceived lifestyles: residence, language habits, consumption patterns, religious attitudes. Disadvantaged neighbourhoods were obliterated by the official narrative and condemned to social spite by the unofficial ones. After the revolution, the success of rap came to ‘represent’ those quarters and the youth that inhabited them: rappers sang the hoods by criticizing their hard conditions and, at the same time, glorifying the hoods themselves. The vagueness of the social narratives in the country allowed rap musicians to manipulate both the image of the poor neighbourhoods and the idioms of social difference circulating in Tunisia: through this manipulation, they provided a new dignity to the most marginalized sectors of Tunisian society. At the same time, by representing the hoods, rappers could claim social capital and credibility as the ‘true’ narrators of the new Tunisia. But the reimagination of social narratives was not enough to improve the life conditions of dispossessed youth.     

Development Discourse and Popular Articulations in Urban Gujarat

This article discusses how members of marginalized groups in the Indian state of Gujarat make sense of hegemonic discourses about national development in light of their own experiences and material circumstances. For many, the idea of development resonates even when they do not experience material progress in their lives. This partial hegemony of development discourse can be explained by the concept of “political articulation.”. This captures the political process by which parties succeed, at specific historical moments and under certain circumstances, in joining different, even potentially conflictual interests by referring to a common idea and project. The article focuses on Ahmedabad city where the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) has created a cross-caste bloc through the trope of development. The BJP has been particularly effective in linking the idea of development to mundane concerns about security, identity and spatial order. However, anxieties about the degradation of labour by increased casualization, informalization, and socio-spatial marginalization have disrupted this common sense linkage and weakened the hegemony of the BJP's model of development.     

Rights,Duties and Aboriginal People

In this paper I reconsider debates in the Australian colonies in the 1830s and 1840s about Aboriginal people and rights in land. I contend that Aboriginal rights of property in land were seldom the matter at stake in these debates. Further, I argue that a notion of duties rather than rights was invoked by Christian humanitarians as they pleaded that Aboriginal people should be provided with protection as well as compensation for the loss of their lands. I suggest that the position that they adopted was determined not so much by the moral, political or legal principles they sought to uphold but by their acknowledgement of material forces at work in the colonies. I also point out that the debate that occurred about rights in land was an intra-British one that concerned the rights of settlers vis-à-vis the Crown. Finally, I suggest that the principal ways in which pastoral leaseholders tried to legitimise their claims to land were rather different to that suggested by historians in recent decades.     

Staying Alive: 1970s Southern Cone Exiles in the UK

This article seeks to contribute to the study of the 1970s dictatorships in Argentina, Chile and Uruguay by looking at one specific aspect of those regimes: exile. It considers exile in the UK, a host country on which research is limited, and claims that the fundamental political ideas that had inspired these exiles did not vanish but were variously reshaped, depending on changing political circumstances, how the exiles interacted with local forms of solidarity, and how they lived through the personal challenges that they experienced during exile.     

Voting Advice Applications and the Estimation of Party Positions – A Reliable Tool?

Data contained in Voting Advice Applications (VAA s) is not only a prerequisite for the vote recommendations they provide but can also be used for estimating party positions in low‐dimensional spaces. Given that VAA s can be designed differently in terms of their number of items and their measurement level, how much can one trust the party positions obtained from this source? We tackle this question by exploiting relevant variation in a real‐world setting: three VAA s offered at the 2017 Lower Saxony election. Despite substantial design differences, the policy spaces extracted through an inductive scaling approach are highly convergent. Simulated random item removal from the pooled dataset of all three VAA s furthermore suggests that about 40 items yield satisfactory reliability of the party positions. Finally, we find that a priori assigning VAA ‐items to ideological dimensions is potentially problematic as the interpretation of resulting party spaces may differ from the ones derived inductively.     

The local impacts of large-scale land acquisitions: a review of case study evidence from Sub-Saharan Africa

Large-scale land acquisitions (LSLAs) are controversially discussed with respect to their local impacts. On the one hand, they are regarded as an opportunity for employment creation and a transfer of knowledge and technology, which enhances productivity and output in agriculture. On the other hand, they are said to impair food security and to foster land conflicts and environmental degradation. Despite the existence of numerous case studies, systematic evidence on the impact of LSLAs on local communities is not available. In this paper we review the existing literature in order to provide a summary of the characteristics of LSLAs and of the impact they have on local livelihoods. We find that while positive effects arise through employment creation and the provision of public goods and services, these benefits are offset by inadequate compensation, land conflicts, and environmental degradation. Overall, most case studies find a negative impact of LSLAs on local livelihoods.     

Unterscheidung und Härtung. Bewertungs- und Notenkommunikation in Lehrerzimmer und Zeugniskonferenz

In schools humans are classified and categorized by other humans through the assessment of their actions and documents they produce there. This practice of differentiation essentially relies on contingent teacher judgements that are aggregated into marks, end-of-year reports or school graduation certificates. The article explores the formal and informal situations of teachers talking about their students and classes and making decisions about their school reports. While teachers share their judgements on pupils in informal staff-room conversations, the thereby generated knowledge does not necessarily result in social consequences. It does, though, in formal gatherings such as report conferences, where the judgements are ratified and fixated. The judgement of an individual teacher is hereby transformed into a grade given by the school. By analytically characterizing these social and numeric-administrative objectifications the article shows how judgements on pupils are kept reversible and simultaneously become solidified during the school year.     

“Let's See What Happens”: Hope,Contingency, and Speculation in Nepali Student Activism

This article analyzes Nepali student activists’ resistance and resilience as strategies that foreground their aspirations within existing political constructs. While they may enter into party politics through student organizations, they downplay their roles as political party foot soldiers. By focusing on their creative strategies and coping mechanisms during the political movement that ousted the monarchy in 2006, I highlight the nature of hope in youth political action through a common phrase they use: “Let's see what happens.” Using the concept of “subjunctive instrumentality” and ethnographic engagement, I analyze students’ internal micro-politics alongside public protests to demonstrate how they interweave the categories of idealism and opportunism, simultaneously inhabiting both in a way that makes politics personal and the personal political. These student activists’ “not-yet” orientation, in which they mobilize political, temporal, and symbolic contingencies, provides alternative templates for the present and visions for the future.     

Integration, Ethnizität und Bildung

Societal integration of Turkish immigrants with higher education does not go hand in hand with cultural assimilation. Educational success is accompanied by the individual-strategic integration of German and Turkish identity attributes, because new diversity management concepts of international organizations are offering new career opportunities. The process of social-emotional integration is ?selective“ as well, because socialization of Turkish students in German educational institutions leads to disaffection with their ethnical heritage and their social connections to German communities remains incomplete. Questions of cultural-authentic integration, connected with a strong bias for individualism, are answered by a new culture of immigration beyond class and ethnic community. Communicative Integration, enabled by public discourse, is causing a distancing from German and Turkish lifeworlds. Turkish immigrants with a higher education do not accept a categorization of themselves through ethnic characterization; instead they construct hybrid identities, posttraditional communities, and active trust through the process of reflexive integration.     

From bandit colonialism to the modern triage society: Towards a moral and cognitive reconstruction of knowledge and citizenship

Abstract

This article argues that the transition from bandit colonialism through the intricate systems of the modern triage society that is wired for Western cultural compliance requires more than just critique, or a prayer for the meek to inherit the earth. It requires a decisive consensus that the meek do not inherit the earth by their meekness alone – they need defences of the mind and conceptual categories around which they can organise their thoughts and actions. Turning the previously colonised into participants in a new moral and cognitive venture against oppression requires more than just periodic elections – significant though electoral processes are. Addressing the atrophy of human capabilities that has characterised human development in the context of both bandit colonialism and the modern triage society demands the development of a plurality of insights, of critical traditions, and a deepening of the tools for diagnosis and hence the quality of prognosis. It may, in certain instances, demand a cognitive indifference to the Western model and a robust engagement with the methods of science and in particular their impact on sustainable livelihood when acting in consort with economics. But most of all it calls for a vigorous engagement with conceptual categories and the theoretical and cultural underpinnings from which they have descended, with the clear intention of their dismantling.     

《美韩自由贸易协定》的新变化及其背后的动态博弈

《美韩自由贸易协定》达成后,其进展并不顺利。经过两次追加谈判,历时四年多,最终获得美韩两国国会的批准。本文以2011年2月10日美韩双方签署的新协定为切入点,首先论述了《美韩自由贸易协定》的新变化及其实质,进而从理论和实证两方面对这种新变化背后美国国内政治的动态博弈进行了阐述。通过分析,充分再现了美国国内政治博弈对《美韩自由贸易协定》的内容和走向施加影响的过程,并由此看出,美国政治体制的掣肘已经成为美国迫使对方做出妥协或更大让步以实现自身利益最大化的筹码。     

Redeeming the Warrior: Myth‐making and Australia's Vietnam Veterans

In late 1960s a powerful myth developed in the United States that Vietnam veterans were spat on when they returned home. A parallel myth survives in Australia with widespread claims that paint or even blood was routinely thrown at returning soldiers. In a 1966 incident, red paint was thrown on Lieutenant Colonel Alex V. Preece as he led the First Battalion through Sydney. The Australian myth remains central to perceptions of Australian Vietnam veterans as despised outsiders and feeds into contemporary demands that Australians support their soldiers and the wars in which they are involved. This paper explores connections between cultural politics in the Unites States and Australia, particularly as they pertain to the contentious legacies of the 1960s.     

Communications

How do people handle their regret at having believed that a foolish war was not just acceptable but necessary? Japan after World War II provides an instructive example. Many contrite Japanese revisited the aesthetic realm, looking for ways to interpret culture that did not convey the values of fascism, such as glorifying willing surrender to a powerful leader. They saw their task as engendering an individual aesthetic and therefore political subjectivity, so that Japanese would in the future more bravely resist state violence at home and abroad. These individuals saw culture as intrinsically political rather than as a refuge from politics. Recognizing the difficulty in countering fascist culture through ideas alone, they also created what economists today call “capacity building” institutions to help them do so, such as Japan's first museum dedicated solely to modern art, the Kamakura Museum of Modern Art, established in 1951. The founders of the Kamakura Museum self-consciously set out to create a new institution that would embody a democratic aesthetic and so prevent—they hoped—Japan from repeating the disastrous experience of war. The curators argued for diverse and dynamic modernities, a concept that parried both the idea that artistically Japan was a pale copy of modern Europe and the notion of a single national culture in Japan or elsewhere. At the same time, however, the legacy of the war was visible in an entirely different and less admirable way in the museum curators’ stance toward Asian modernity beyond Japan and its evasion of Japan's responsibility for the wartime devastation of China.     

Constructing Mutuality: The Zapatistas' Transformation of Transnational Activist Power Dynamics

This article examines the evolution of transnational Zapatista solidarity networks. Although scholars have described an emerging "mutuality" between the Zapatista movement and its allies at the level of international framing, this article considers how the Zapatistas forged this mutuality on the ground, through active redefinition of alliances with Northern supporters. It argues that the Zapatistas delimited who was included in their solidarity networks, set new terms for partnerships, and redefined legitimacy in their transnational alliances. In so doing, they asserted their autonomy from donors. They also fostered discourses and practices of mutual solidarity and Southern leadership, shifting the balance of power between North and South. The case both illuminates the possibilities for Southern movements to challenge Northern control from within and suggests potential pitfalls of doing so; by defying Northern NGOs' influence, the Zapatistas may have risked their long-term viability.     

Faith in forgiveness? Exploring conversions to Christianity within a former Khmer Rouge community

This article explores stories of former members of the Khmer Rouge who have converted to Christianity. It sheds light on the intersections of patterns of religious change in Cambodia, which implicates peace-building, redress, and development trajectories in the wake of conflict and atrocities. The case raises important questions about why former members of the Khmer Rouge convert to Christianity and the social, political, and ethical implications of their conversions. We explore these questions to show that, while transitions and attendant redress efforts in Cambodia have been principally explained at the level of the state, we should pay closer attention to the granular experiences of former Khmer Rouge members as they navigate Cambodia’s changing post-conflict terrain, and the social and cultural sites through which they have made their experiences of the past meaningful.