公共政策评估多元模式的困境及其解决的哲学思考

通过对政策评估模式发展的历史考察,文章分析了政策评估模式由单一向多元转变的逻辑以及多元评估模式的困境。并以南水北调移民政策评估为例,解读了当今多元理性下的政策评估仍然存在的多元利益界定不准确、评估模式结构固化等诸多问题。要从根本上解决多元理性下政策评估模式的问题,必须实现政策评估哲学思维的进一步转变,而这一转变应遵循批判性政策分析理论、利益相关者理论以及理性选择理论的基本价值。     

The animal advocacy movement in the Baltic states: links to other social justice issues and possibilities for intersectional activism

ABSTRACT

This article focuses on the animal advocacy movement (AAM) in the Baltic countries of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. Taking an intersectional perspective, I examine whether and how key animal activists in the Baltics see links between animal rights and other social justice issues. I also consider how the movement communicates its messages to the general public in settings where ideas around animal justice and possibilities for animal advocacy are relatively recent and unfamiliar. This analysis contributes to debates regarding possibilities for intersectional activism and collaboration between social justice movements in the Baltics and beyond.     

Authoritarianism And Political Ideas Of Latvian Nationalist Intellectuals

This article explores the authoritarian elements of Eastern European nationalism from an historical point of view. The focus is on the case of Latvian nationalist ideas and particularly the authoritarian nationalism serving the interests of the Kārlis Ulmanis regime between 1934 and 1939. The evidence is collected from the political writings of nationalist intellectuals, who are treated as the authors of Latvian nationalist philosophy. It is concluded that the nationalist intellectuals were willing to accept authoritarianism as a realization of their visions of perfect national existence. Consequently, Latvian nationalism lost its conceptual independence and became an instrument of Ulmanis’ political rhetoric. Thus, the article provides insights about the complex relations between intellectuals and political power.     

Towards security governance as a critical tool: a conceptual outline

This article argues that security governance can and should be reframed as a critical tool that enables us to understand and reappraise concrete practices of security provision. Security governance needs to move beyond the functional mapping of different governing arrangements and the presumption that security governance leads to effective and legitimate problem-solving in a quasi-automatic manner. In this article, we propose a framework that identifies the essential characteristics of security governance and turns them into critical questions with the aim to reveal persisting frictions and dilemmas. First, we trace the rise of security governance as concept and practice over the past decade and identify its central characteristics with regard to prerequisites, structures and consequences. Second, we reframe the core characteristics of security governance into critical questions and thereby develop an understanding of security governance as a critical tool. Finally, we illustrate the relevance of this approach with examples from EU security governance.     

Editors’ introduction: critical terrorism studies: practice,limits and experience

The articles in this special issue are drawn from papers presented at a conference titled Critical Terrorism Studies: Practice, Limits and Experience. The conference was organised by the Critical Studies on Terrorism Working Group of the British International Studies Association (BISA). The event was supported by both a BISA workshop grant and by Loughborough University’s Centre for the Study of International Governance (CSIG) and was held at Loughborough University from 9–10 September 2013. The conference aimed to explore what we know about terrorism and counterterrorism and importantly to ask how we know it. Reflecting the recent “materialist”, “everyday”, “experiential” and “narrative” turns in the fields of International Relations (IR), Geography and Cultural Theory, the event brought together scholars and practitioners to reflect on practices of research and knowledge production in Critical Terrorism Studies and related fields. The articles in this special issue reflect those aims.     

Subaltern connections: Brazilian critical geographers,development and African decolonisation

Abstract

This article explores the relations to Africa and African decolonisation of three key figures in Brazilian critical geographies and development studies, Manuel Correia de Andrade (1922–2007), Josué de Castro (1908–1973) and Milton Santos (1926–2001). Based on an analysis of their works and unpublished archives, I argue the radical Third World perspectives these intellectuals expressed anticipated later critiques of development as a neocolonial device. Drawing upon current literature on decolonisation, international conferencing and anti-racist solidarity networks, I discuss these matters in relation to these authors’ interest in cultural diversity and internal colonialism. Crucially, they developed this sensitivity in the Brazilian Northeast, a region especially shaped by Afro–Brazilian and Indigenous cultural legacies. While supporting anti-imperialist nationalisms in the Third World, these Brazilian scholars fostered multilingual, internationalist and cosmopolitan activism and scholarship. This is revealed by the study of the transnational networks they developed during exile and the various persecutions that many of them suffered after the 1964 military coup. Finally, I argue these works can substantiate recent claims to ‘decolonise’ geography and development studies, on the condition that these fields of study take seriously their anti-imperial traditions and their ‘voices from the South’.     

Irony Practice: Reconstructing Structural Social Work: Enlightenment from Neoclassical Sociology

Structural social work has been expanding its influence while experiencing marginalized crises since 1970s: with the expansion of neo-conservatism, the structural perspective is incompatible with the liberal-based system at the political level. In recent years, the “critical reflection practice” established through the reunification of the socialist tradition of social work has become increasingly prosperous, but it has not been possible to answer the question of legitimacy in its own theory. The purpose of this paper is to reflect the crisis of the traditional sociology by analyzing the crisis of western sociology, and to try to reconstruct the critical social science by talking with Iván Szelényi and others to sort out the concept of “irony” as a methodology and the mission of contemporary intellectuals. Under the inspiration of relevance of classical sociology and social work, this paper provides insights to the reconstruction of social work.     

Towards a Decolonial Critical Political Economy of the Media: Some Initial Thoughts

Abstract

How the media are organised and funded has implications on who gets to speak and the stories that are told or silenced. The critical political economy of the media approach allows an understanding of the ideologies and power structures that influence media operations, ownership, and funding. Although the critical political economy of the media remains central in understanding these issues, the approach needs to be decolonised to address the dynamics of media power from the perspective of the global south. In this paper, we explore what the theoretical contributions of decoloniality can make to the project of rethinking political economy of the media. We argue that the critical political economy approach, whose core vocabulary is Marxist, contains inherent limitations in understanding conditions of media-state relations in Africa. Decolonial thought and its recent engagement with Marxism has produced new thinking and fresh ways of reflecting the relationship between Western capitalism and modernity. We contend that this approach allows us to foreground issues of modernity, coloniality, and race and their impact on contemporary media systems in Africa.     

The Will to Consume: Schopenhauer and Consumer Society

Consumer society has negated Freud's thesis presented in Civilization and its Discontents. The hindrance of desire affirmation is no longer the foundation of discontent. The inverse is now true. A seemingly limitless number of desires have been manufactured and administered with a solitary route to their affirmation via consumption. Because of this, consumer society's members find themselves in a lifeworld of aimless striving, dissatisfaction, disappointment and boredom. I demonstrate that the attempt to flee the sufferings of estranged labour through consumption has pushed consumer society into a new web of suffering brought on by a continual development of manufactured desires, creating a minor yet perpetual pain that is best understood in the light of a sociologized and historicized Schopenhauerian philosophy.