CDU refugee policies and the landesverband oder/neiße: Electoral tool or instrument of integration?

Despite the recognition that the integration of refugees and expellees into west Germany has been one of the success stories of the post‐war period, little light has been shed on the process of political integration of this group into the political system of the nascent Federal Republic. As the ‘newcomers’ were prevented from organising themselves in political or cultural organisations, the only legitimate way of exercising political influence was the way through the licensed parties. The CDU/CSU as a conglomerate of liberal and conservative traditions made use of its historic opportunity to adapt its flexible party apparatus and encourage refugee participation. Thereby, it made an important contribution to the political representation of refugee demands as well as attracting a large proportion of the newcomers’ votes.     

New markets,old struggles: Large and small farmers in the export agriculture of coastal Peru

Although the output of high-value crops in Peru has increased during the era of ‘globalization’, producers still tend to contextualize this development in relation to the 1969 agrarian reform. Considered here is how large and small farmers in the Cañete region perceive the changes that have occurred in agriculture since a generation ago, with particular reference to market competition and the implications of the new economic conditions for environmental sustainability. Despite the fact that farmers located at each end of the rural hierarchy experience the economic impact of globalization differently, small cultivators exporting their produce to the international market being particularly vulnerable to its laissez faire regime, they nevertheless share a common belief in the importance of agriculture for the well-being of the nation. The latter, it is suggested, is a discourse that reproduces much of the ideology associated historically with the agrarian and foundation myths.     

Ebola vaccines,evidentiary charisma and the rise of global health emergency research

Abstract

The 2013–2016 West African Ebola outbreak was both a catastrophic public health disaster and a rare research opportunity. This paper analyses how the tensions between the humanitarian imperatives of disease control and the epistemic conventions of bioscientific inquiry played out in the accelerated development, testing and licensure of Ebola vaccines. Beginning with the epidemiological projections of the disease’s spread, the paper develops the notion of evidentiary charisma to capture the power of experimental designs and data packages to marshal public health salience, recruit moral legitimacy and short-circuit scientific contestation. Attention to the charismatic dimensions of Ebola vaccine R&D helps to unpick the simultaneous appeals to exception and convention in the unfolding of a global health crisis, and to trace the normative and technical contours of the emerging paradigm of emergency research.     

Facts,power and global evidence: a new empire of truth

Abstract

What are the epistemological and political contours of evidence today? This introduction to the special issue lays out key shifts in the contemporary politics of knowledge and describes the collective contribution of the six papers as an articulation of what we describe as a ‘new empiricism’, exploring how earlier historical appeals to evidence to defend political power and decision-making both chime with and differ from those of the contemporary era. We outline some emerging empirical frontiers in the study of instruments of calculation, from the evolution of the randomized controlled trial (RCT) to the growing importance of big data, and explore how these methodological transformations intersect with the alleged crisis of expertise in the ‘post-truth’ era. In so doing, we suggest that the ambiguity of evidence can be a powerful tool in itself, and we relate this ambiguity to the ideological commitment and moral fervour that is elicited through appeals to, and the performance of, evaluation.