Transnational public goods provision: the increasing role of rising powers and the case of South Africa

The paper delineates three debates, which will be conflated. One line of discussion relates to public goods at a transnational level. Here, the referencing of debates regarding the characteristics of ‘a common good’ will be of significance. A second strand addresses the group of countries known as the ‘rising powers’ and the role these countries could play towards a globalised common good. A third discussion thread analyses South Africa as a case study for the main rising power on the African continent. By creating connections between the lines of discussion, this paper drives forward the debates on how the role of rising powers can be conceptually repositioned in the light of a changing global context, and explores how these countries can respond to global challenges.     

From a follower to a trendsetter: Hungary's post-Cold War identity and the West

The article attempts to make sense of recent developments in Hungary's relationship with the EU and the US by explicating the logic behind the formation of its post-Cold War identity. The article's central theoretical argument derives from social identity theory (SIT) in social psychology which argues that social groups strive for positive distinctiveness and provides concrete hypotheses concerning the identity management strategies that groups use to enhance their relative position. Extrapolating the identity management techniques predicted by SIT to international politics, I suggest that states may enhance their relative standing by imitating more advanced states (strategy of social mobility), trying to displace the higher-ranked state (strategy of social competition), or finding a new arena in which to be superior (strategy of social creativity). The article argues that Orban's government post-2010 steps in domestic and foreign policy can be conceptualized as attempts to redefine Hungary's identity by moving away from the strategy of social mobility pursued since the end of communism towards the strategy of social creativity.     

Legitimacy and post-conflict state-building: the undervalued role of performance legitimacy

Legitimacy is essential to state-building after conflict. Yet, the prescribed path to gaining legitimacy is often a narrow one that borrows heavily from the experiences of Western states. Elections are prescribed as an essential first step on the logic that this means gaining process legitimacy can rebuild a social contract between citizens and the state, a social contract that is rooted in democratic norms and values. This article proposes an alternative path, one that emphasises the critical role of performance legitimacy and its non-exclusive nature. Performance legitimacy is granted when citizens perceive that some or all of their basic needs are being met. The article offers a new analytical framework for understanding a state’s potential source of performance legitimacy, how non-state actors may vie with the state to seize this form of legitimacy, and what consequences this has for processes of state institution-building after conflict. In this respect, this article seeks to reorient theory and practice to a broader view of legitimacy and its critical role in post-conflict state-building.     

Autocratic legitimation in Iran: Ali Khamenei’s discourse on regime “insiders” and “outsiders”

The article analyses Ali Khamenei’s discourse on insiders and outsiders in the Islamic Republic of Iran, arguing that it shows the leader of an electoral revolutionary regime striving to counter elite fragmentation and growing democratic demands. It studies identity demarcation as a tool of autocratic legitimation. In a political system where the possibility to access political positions depends on supporting a belief-system, all cadres share a basic identity, which rulers can exploit to draw boundaries between “us” and “them”. The analysis reveals how Iran’s leader capitalizes on the existence of an insider-outsider divide to promote ideas about an imagined “we” of the regime. The “we” is portrayed as an Islamic we, fully committed to his rule. The article maintains that Khamenei developed this discourse in response to the challenge of the Iranian reform movement. It analyses, first, the context in which the discourse emerged and, second, the discursive strategy itself, to substantiate the claim. It concludes that the discourse had two essential aims in the containment (1997–2003) and crushing (2009–2010) of the pro-democracy reformist and Green movements: to de-legitimate Khamenei’s opponents through othering and to legitimate the counter-mobilization of repressive agents.     

How authoritarian rulers seek to legitimize repression: framing mass killings in Egypt and Uzbekistan

How do authoritarian rulers legitimate repressive actions against their own citizens? Although most research depicts repression and legitimation as opposed strategies of political rule, justified coercion against some groups may generate legitimacy in the eyes of other parts of the population. Building upon this suggested link between legitimation and repression, this article studies the justifications of mass killings. To this end, framing theory is combined with recent research on the domestic and international dimensions of authoritarian rule. We contend that frames are directed towards specific audiences at home and abroad. Moreover, given the common threats at the global level and the diffusion of repressive tactics, we assume that learning processes influence discursive justifications of repression in authoritarian regimes. We provide an analysis of government rhetoric by comparing the protest crackdowns of Rabi’a ‘Adawiya Square in Egypt and Fergana Valley in Uzbekistan, taking into account the audiences and the sources of the frames that justify repression. In both cases, we find the terrorism frame to emerge as dominant.     

When school meets the Other: intercultural policies in the Basque inclusive school

ABSTRACT

Gatti, Irazuzta and Martinez address the intercultural public policies implemented in the education system of the Autonomous Region of the Basque Country (Spain). Focusing on the education system allows them to reconstruct the historicity of identity-alterity production in a region in which language has been central for the establishment of ethnic frontiers. More specifically, they examine the implementation of these policies in three pre-school and primary educational institutions in a multicultural neighbourhood of the city of Bilbao. They look at Euskara—the Basque language—as a key element of the us-them distinction. The various education models regarding language and the teaching in/of Euskara or Spanish pave the way for the specialization and spatialization of the schools analysed. ‘Integration’ policies are implemented in ethnically marked schools only, based on a rhetoric of interculturality that assumes that any ‘racial or ethnic discrimination’ can be overcome through knowledge of the Other. Moreover, the assessment of public policies through ‘interculturality figures and best practice’ developed to address the so-called ‘immigration issue’ promotes a protectionist intervention on behalf of the assumed social vulnerabilities of immigrant schoolchildren and their families, which are read as ‘problematic characteristics’. The article argues that, as a result of the approach based on the social conditions of immigrant children and their families in the Basque Country, the race issue evaporates.     

Where Do We Go from Here?

The left needs a fundamental rethinking of its politics for a new era. The first task is to understand the contemporary conjuncture: the dynamic combination of events and circumstances which structure a political settlement. Two such conjunctures have occurred in recent history. The first produced the postwar welfare settlement of 1945, which broke down in the economic crisis of the 1970s. The second took shape in the 1980s around the revival of liberal market economics and what became known as Thatcherism. It failed following the 2008 financial crash, and has begun to break apart with the vote to leave the EU. New political and cultural faultlines are confounding the orthodoxies of the governing class and cutting across the partisan loyalties of the main political parties. They herald the renewal of politics. But Labour is on the edge of an abyss. This article considers what the left can learn from Labour's previous periods of defeat and revisionism, and suggests where—if it survives—it should go next.     

A New Progressive Patriotism

The need to hold capital to account and to bend markets to the common good is as powerful as ever, yet it is becoming steadily harder to create an electoral or political majority for such an idea in societies that are fractured and divided. The fundamental bond between voters and parties depends on political identity relationships; old ones are fading, new ones need to be created. The most dynamic politics in advanced capitalist societies are those of nation, people and place. The strategic challenge for the left is to create a new progressive patriotism that can embed radical ideas in a common sense of national purpose.     

Carpool Karaoke: deconstructing the directly lived experience of hearing oneself singing

The various ways whereby spatial conditions afford to monumentalize culture and to appropriate geographically demarcated places in terms of individual and collective meaning structures has been amply documented in urban cultural studies. However, considerably less attention has been paid to how cultural identity is produced against the background of musical temporality. By way of a phenomenological inquiry into the staged spectacle of James Corden’s (the host of CBS Network’s Late Late Show) Carpool Karaoke, this paper addresses the issues of directly lived experience and authenticity as facets of cultural identity. By critically discussing the assumptions of self-presence and auto-affectivity while singing and listening to one’s sung voice against the background of pre-recorded songs, the notion of directly lived musical experience is put to the test. Furthermore, by examining the dramaturgical scaffolding of Carpool Karaoke, the analysis points to wider implications for post-modern cultural studies in terms of an identified ironic reversal of modernist universal criteria of legitimacy in favor of a celebration of post-modern being-with inauthentically. The analysis of the selected Carpool Karaoke corpus utilizes a resourceful blend of phenomenological method, semiotics and interpretive videography while challenging embedded orthodoxies in the extant literature.