A legal realist view on citizen actions in Hong Kong's umbrella movement

This article considers the legal validity of citizens' actions in civil disobedience as it pertains to the umbrella movement in Hong Kong. It introduces the critical approach of “legal realism” in order to reconsider normative law, such as police enforcement and court interventions, in relation to political struggle. It has been argued that the legal precepts of rights, responsibility, and the rule of law are capable of contingent and contextually appropriate interpretations by different legal actors, including citizens who participate in civil disobedience. In politics, justice, and most importantly law, civil disobedience offers an alternative legal normativity to consider the citizen's right, and even duty, to express dissent. Furthermore, this right or duty is legally persuasive and conducive to guarding democratic principles.     

Associations,active citizenship,and the quality of democracy in Brazil and Mexico

In many Third Wave democracies large classes of people experience diminished forms of citizenship. The systematic exclusion from mandated public goods and services significantly injures the citizenship and life chances of entire social groups. In democratic theory civil associations have a fundamental role to play in reversing this reality. One strand of theory, known as civic engagement, suggests that associations empower their members to engage in public politics, hold state officials to account, claim public services, and thereby improve the quality of democracy. Empirical demonstration of the argument is surprisingly rare, however, and limited to affluent democracies. In this article, we use original survey data for two large cities in Third Wave democracies—São Paulo and Mexico City—to explore this argument in a novel way. We focus on the extent to which participation in associations (or associationalism) increases “active citizenship”—the effort to negotiate directly with state agents access to goods and services legally mandated for public provision, such as healthcare, sanitation, and security—rather than civic engagement, which encompasses any voluntary and public spirited activity. We examine separately associationalism’s impact on the quality of citizenship, a dimension that varies independently from the level of active citizenship, by assessing differences in the types of citizenship practices individuals use to obtain access to vital goods and services. To interpret the findings, and identify possible causal pathways, the paper moves back-and-forth between two major research traditions that are rarely brought into dialogue: civic engagement and comparative historical studies of democratization.     

The meanings of citizenship: media use and democracy in South Africa

In 1994, South Africans embarked on a project to create new meanings of citizenship in order to transcend the disenfranchisement and divisions created by apartheid. This article examines the context in which new forms of citizenship are evolving in South Africa and how South African citizens use the media to give meaning to concepts such as “an active public sphere,” “civic agency” and “participatory politics.” The objective of the research is to provide information about the way in which the media contribute to the quality of democracy in South Africa through mediating citizenship in a way that improves prospects for citizens to exert influence over public decisions. As has been the case in other post-authoritarian and postcolonial settings, the continuation of existing unequal relationships to government persists even when new democratic spaces have opened up. This article interrogates the assumption that media are central to citizens’ political and civic engagements in a transitional society marked by persisting inequalities. This interrogation draws on empirical research with citizens to investigate the question that the media are central to constructions of citizenship and participation and engagement with democratic processes. Our research finds that young South Africans interviewed are disengaged from politics and find that the media does not speak to or connect with their everyday lives. They view the state on both national and local levels as not being prepared to listen to their experiences, ideas or conditions of life. While the respondents trust the media as credible institutions, they do not experience the media as being relevant to their lives. The perceived disinterest of the state and the lack of relevance of the media, work together to create a sense of powerlessness and inability to influence policy-making among the young people interviewed. For the media to intervene in this state of affairs, it would have to create more opportunities for young people to participate directly in meaning production through the media, starting by listening more closely to their experiences in order to respond to their concerns in a relevant way.     

“Empowered Criminals and Global Subjects”: Transnational Norms and Sexual Minorities in India

In this paper, I comparatively examine the influence of transnational advocacy on legal struggles around sex work and homosexuality in contemporary India. While transnational scholars of sexuality understand globalization as a contradictory and uneven process, there has been little attention to how this unevenness is manifest in the realm of sexual rights and law. Based on qualitative research, I show how transnational discourses on health—in particular, HIV/AIDS interventions—and on human rights interact unevenly with national discourses on sexuality. Whereas discourses regarding HIV/AIDS enable sex workers to mobilize at the national level, global anti-trafficking discourses effectively reduce sex workers to “victims.” For Indian LGBTQ groups, discourses regarding the HIV/AIDS epidemic and global human rights enable these groups to problematize the anti-sodomy law in national politics. However, national legal discourses effectively reduce LGBQ individuals to “criminals,” and legal advancements in this arena are uneven. Focusing on this unevenness produced by transnational advocacy this paper highlights how sexual rights are articulated in context of asymmetric and uneven globalizations.     

Struggle and solidarity: civic republican elements in Pierre Bourdieu’s political sociology

Pierre Bourdieu developed a theory of democratic politics that is at least as indebted to civic republicanism as to Marxism. He was familiar with the civic republican tradition, and it increasingly influenced both his political interventions and sociological work, especially late in his career. Bourdieu drew above all on Niccolò Machiavelli’s version of republicanism, though the French republican tradition also influenced him via Durkheimian social theory. Three elements of Bourdieu’s work in particular—his concept of field autonomy, his view of interests and universalism, and his understanding of how solidarity is generated and sustained—may be understood, at least in part, as sociological reformulations of republican ideas. By drawing attention to these republican influences, the article aims to show that the conceptual resources which some critics, including Jeffrey C. Alexander, consider indispensable to an adequate theory of democracy are not entirely absent in Bourdieu’s work. On the basis of this reassessment, the article concludes that Bourdieu and Alexander are not as opposed in their thinking about democratic politics as it might first appear.     

Fake News Is Real: The Significance and Sources of Disbelief in Mainstream Media in Trump’s America

Are appeals to discredit mainstream media reporting of political news in the guise of “fake news” merely a diversion from more fundamental threats to democratic politics and policymaking? Or is the emerging belief in “fake news” itself a looming threat? Using data from the Voter Study Group’s panel survey, we examine the relationship between disbelief in mainstream media and a wide range of social attitudes and policy preferences. We find that in December 2016, just after Trump’s election, belief in fake news wields an outsized influence, independent of partisanship, ideology, media consumption, and other established foundations of public opinion. The effects of fake news beliefs are especially pronounced on key elements of Trump’s rhetoric as candidate and as president—hostility toward immigrants, racial and religious minorities, gender equality, perceptions of America’s “greatness,” and even support for democratic norms and institutions itself. We also find some evidence that by January 2019, the belief in fake news has become even more focally associated with Trump. These findings portend the possibility of an emerging exclusionary, populist variant of American conservatism, of which disbelief in media institutions is a key component.     

“Big Brother’s Bigger Brother”: The Visual Politics of (Counter) Surveillance in Baltimore

In 2016, without the knowledge of its citizens, Baltimore City Police deployed a military aerial surveillance technology called Wide Area Motion Imagery (WAMI), which can track the movements of every person in public view over the entire city. Though the trial of the “spy plane,” as the program was dubbed, quickly ended in scandal, organizers from Baltimore’s low-income minority neighborhoods successfully rebooted the program in 2020, this time framing WAMI partly as a tool of “sousveillance” (watching “from below”) that can track the movements of police officers. The paper shows how organizers “rebranded” WAMI around two conceptions of sousveillance—“citizen-centered” and “state-centered”—creating an unlikely coalition of supporters from both pro- and anti-policing sides of the criminal justice reform debate. But while the renewed program has vowed to be a “Big Brother” to the state, it will continue to be used for traditional surveillance, raising troubling questions about privacy. The article sheds light on the politics of watching and being watched in the era of technology-driven criminal justice reform.     

Witness Citizenship: The Place of Villa Grimaldi in Chilean Memory1

The rebuilding of democracy on the former site of a bloody dictatorship continues to be a work in progress in contemporary Chile. Since 1990, the importance of Villa Grimaldi, and other key cultural sites like it, cannot be dismissed as mere sideshows to the “real business” of democratic state‐making.The conversion of a former torture complex to a peace park raises a provocative question both around the function of cultural memory and memorialization: What is the role of a former concentration camp turned memorial park in Chile’s process of democratization? I argue that public memorials like Villa Grimaldi Peace Park can be important complements to the incomplete process of transitional justice in nations that have experienced grave human rights violations. Such sites provide significant forms of sociability, which I call “witness citizenship” (human rights participation, generational transmission, and other forms of civic action) that deepen the reach of democracy, especially in the social spaces where truth commissions and institutional processes have not been able to reach.     

Crafting the Neoliberal State: Workfare,Prisonfare, and Social Insecurity1

In Punishing the Poor, I show that the ascent of the penal state in the United States and other advanced societies over the past quarter‐century is a response to rising social insecurity, not criminal insecurity; that changes in welfare and justice policies are interlinked, as restrictive “workfare” and expansive “prisonfare” are coupled into a single organizational contraption to discipline the precarious fractions of the postindustrial working class; and that a diligent carceral system is not a deviation from, but a constituent component of, the neoliberal Leviathan. In this article, I draw out the theoretical implications of this diagnosis of the emerging government of social insecurity. I deploy Bourdieu’s concept of “bureaucratic field” to revise Piven and Cloward’s classic thesis on the regulation of poverty via public assistance, and contrast the model of penalization as technique for the management of urban marginality to Michel Foucault’s vision of the “disciplinary society,” David Garland’s account of the “culture of control,” and David Harvey’s characterization of neoliberal politics. Against the thin economic conception of neoliberalism as market rule, I propose a thick sociological specification entailing supervisory workfare, a proactive penal state, and the cultural trope of “individual responsibility.” This suggests that we must theorize the prison not as a technical implement for law enforcement, but as a core political capacity whose selective and aggressive deployment in the lower regions of social space violates the ideals of democratic citizenship.     

Aestheticisation of Politics: From Fascism to Radical Democracy

The “aestheticisation of politics”, a term coined by Walter Benjamin, refers to a critique of various modes of politics considered to be irrational in leftist, critical theory. The critique ties aestheticised politics to fascism and capitalism, thereby precluding the conceptual possibility of a radical democratic aesthetic politics. This paper challenges that position first by working through Wolfgang Welsch’s semantic clarification of the term “aesthetics”, then by deriving different senses of “aestheticised politics” from the range of meanings given by Welsch. A typology of aestheticised politics, from fascist to communist, depicts the conceptual possibility of a radical democratic political aesthetics.     

Documented,Undocumented, and Liminally Legal: Legal Status During the Transition to Adulthood for 1.5‐Generation Brazilian Immigrants

This article deconstructs the “illegal–legal” binary that characterizes much immigration scholarship. Using in‐depth interviews with 42 1.5‐generation Brazilian immigrants in young adulthood, I find that respondents discuss a distinct hierarchy with four categories of legal membership—undocumented, liminal legality, lawful permanent resident (LPR), and citizen—that affect their daily lives and incorporation. Liminally legal and LPR statuses in particular challenge this illegal–legal dichotomy. Liminal legality is an “in‐between” status in which immigrants possess social security numbers and work permits but have no guarantee of eventual citizenship. Without opportunities to regularize their status, both undocumented and liminally legal young adults face increased vulnerabilities to poverty and social exclusion. Liminally legal youth, however, are in better positions than their undocumented peers during early adulthood because of state‐delimited rights associated with their legal status.     

Russian lesbian mothers: Between “traditional values” and human rights

Abstract

Contemporary Russian state ideology has turned towards instituting “traditional family values,” an official turn that increased legal and social discrimination against queer families. The concept of “traditional family values” in the contemporary Russian state discourse refers to the “naturalness” of the heterosexual family, consisting of two parents and their biological offspring. This discourse eliminates the possibility of public lesbian parenting. Following the idea of the conceptualizations of queer temporalities in different geo-cultural contexts, I examine the impact of recent oppressive legal changes in Russia on reproductive choices, everyday parenting strategies, and social interactions among lesbian mothers. In this work, I seek to show more than the obvious harm caused by the “anti-gay law” in terms of its effects on lesbian-headed families. To do so, I analyze the strategies applied by Russian lesbian mothers to tackle the rapidly changing state ideologies and legislative landscapes. I do this by discussing the ways in which lesbian mothers in Russia “manipulate” their social status to avoid possible official or unofficial homophobic actions directed towards them and their children. For example, they may come out selectively, carefully choosing the people to whom they openly present their identity. I argue that to adhere to “ordinary” or “normal” family life, lesbian mothers in Russia use several survival strategies. One of these strategies relates to speculation about immigration to the “West.” That is, some lesbian families prepare all of the necessary documentation, secure valid visas, and attend special workshops where they receive legal and informational support on asylum seeking and emigration from Russia. Another set of strategies for maintaining family identity relies on the decision to come out as a co-mother during interactions with official institutions or to choose other identities; for example, godmother or sister of the birth mother of a child. An additional important strategy for lesbian mothers relies on drafting documents that maintain their rights in severe circumstances. This set of actions focuses on legally supporting the parental rights through the use of loopholes in the Russian legislation and drafting documents that maintain their rights to child custody and their partner’s property.     

Determinanten regelkonformen Verhaltens am beispiel des Strassenverkehrs

The main role of traffic police enforcement can be seen as preventing road users from committing offences, which can be related to road crashes and injuries. As the operating principle underlying the impact of police enforcement a deterrence effect has been discussed repeatedly, whereas from a sociological perspective the importance of “Norm Internalisation” has been emphasised. Thus, the present paper aims at comparing the influence of “Norm Internalisation” and the variables constituting the deterrence effect on the compliance with rules in road traffic. Based on a secondary analysis of data from a project on behavioural determinants of police surveillance carried out by the “Institute of Applied Transport and Tourism Research” (IVT) on behalf of the Federal Highway Research Institute (BASt) an operationalisation of the construct “General Norm Orientation” is developed. In several subsequent steps of statistical analysis patterns of correlations with variables from Opp’s “Theory of Law Obedience” are revealed. Results show a sufficiently high internal consistency (α = 0,82) of the scale “General Norm Orientation” and significant correlations with variables from Opp’s theory. The directions of these correlations are as expected and confirmed by multivariate analyses. Results are discussed with respect to their implications for influencing road users’ behaviours.     

Contemporary anarchist and anarchistic movements

Although the period of highest activity for anarchist movements peaked in the early 1990s, such movement continues in the present. Contemporary antiauthoritarian movements are a product of the 1950s and New Left, as well as the USSR's demise. Antiauthoritarian movements are either explicitly anarchist or implicitly anarchist (thus, simply “antiauthoritarian,” “autonomist,” or “libertarian‐socialist”). Anarchist identity is diverse, although anchored around an opposition to dominant culture, institutions, and hierarchical norms. The values and goals pursued revolve around a principled adoption of horizontalism, direct action, antiauthoritarianism, decentralization, anticapitalism, and mutual aid. These anarchist movements are unique movements, yet they also run parallel to certain movements—in both the adoption of anarchist strategies and membership overlap—such as antifascist, global justice, and squatter movements. Confrontational and playful street tactics combine with strategies of reclamation of radically egalitarian space, in opposition to hierarchical society. Despite their association with violence, contemporary anarchist movements are fairly nonviolent; however, many anarchists do not disavow the selective use of violence. Thus, massive efforts of social control through police and mass media attempt to moderate, disrupt, and suppress anarchist movements.     

The Political and Civic Lives of Public Sector Workers: Unions and “Public Service Motivation”*

Public sector employees are highly engaged in civic and political life, from voting to volunteering. Scholars have theorized that this political activity stems from “public service motivation,” or the selection of publicly oriented individuals into public work. We build on this work by analyzing the role of public sector unions in shaping participation. Unions are central mobilizing organizations in political life, and one in three public sector workers are unionized. Special supplements of the Current Population Survey provide data on various forms of participation, sector, union membership, and union coverage. Logistic regressions find that unionized public sector workers have much higher odds of engaging in a range of activities compared to non‐union public workers, including protest, electoral politics, and political communication. Union membership impacts service work to a lesser extent, suggesting that unions are more central to political lives. These findings have implications for the consequences of union decline, including the class, race, and gender composition of who participates in democratic life.     

INNOCENT VIOLENCE: SOCIAL EXCLUSION,IDENTITY, AND THE PRESS IN AN AFRICAN DEMOCRACY

The violent attacks on African immigrants and refugees in marginal settlements surrounding South Africa's largest cities in May 2008 occasioned a rush of mostly well-intentioned attempts by journalists, public intellectuals, and government officials to discover the causes and find the cures for the outbreak. This article interrogates the glosses of “xenophobia” and “social deprivation” that were all too quickly applied to explain the attacks in public representations of this sorry episode in South Africa's post-apartheid history. The account of the focal events is based on a thorough sifting of press reports; victims', perpetrators', and police testimonies; government and civil society spokespersons' interventions; and field research. Rather than providing a monovocal, hierarchical argument for one or another analysis emerging from the reportage, this article juxtaposes complex and conflicting local accounts, justifications, forces, and circumstances to provide an intriguing if ultimately at this early stage irresolvable image of these tragic events. The implications for South African social identities, institutions, and democratic order, however, are at the end all too clearly illuminated.     

中国残疾人事业法治建设三十年之回眸与前瞻

《残疾人保障法》实施30年来,中国残疾人事业法治体系和权利保障机制不断发展完善,促成了残疾人平等享有全面小康生活,也为世界人权话语丰富了“人类命运共同体”内涵,拓展了基于人权的发展路径。在全面建设社会主义现代化新时期,要进一步完善残疾人权利保障的法治体系,需要坚持融合发展原则,注重社会治理和社群赋能策略,在法律能力、无障碍、教育就业和司法保护等领域进行制度革新。     

The elephant in the room: media ownership and political participation in Hong Kong

In Hong Kong’s open and law-abiding society, applying the political principle of “one country, two systems” presents a challenge to the Chinese government, particularly regarding its efforts to control media ownership. Focusing on the structure of media ownership in Hong Kong, this paper describes the ways in which the Internet – especially social media – has empowered activists and alternative media by providing a means of avoiding censorship and social control. This paper also describes the Chinese government’s use of political power and capital to censor and shape the media landscape in Hong Kong in order to dampen public interest in politics and influence public opinion. Finally, this paper attempts to identify potential solutions to this problem.     

Women’s Political Firsts and Symbolic Representation

ABSTRACT

The extent to which politics is still a “man’s game” is made evident every time a top political office has a female holder for the first time. These incredibly revealing moments may give a new social meaning to women in politics—women’s political presence—and women and politics—gendered social constructions about women’s capacity to rule. This article explores the types of gendered mediation underpinning the representation of first-ever women serving in historically male-dominated political offices in Spain. It shows that gender media frames are pervasive, which may lead to an effective annihilation of women’s symbolic representation.     

Visibility as Resistance by Muslim Americans in a Surveillance and Security Atmosphere

Based on ethnographic data on South Asian Muslims in Los Angeles and analysis of publications of the largest Muslim organization in North America, this article shows how Muslim Americans manage their hypervisibility in the post‐9/11 security atmosphere, which has intensified after ISIS terrorist attacks at home and abroad. At the individual level, Muslim Americans try to distance themselves from the “Muslim” label, which associates them with “terrorists.” Instead, many self‐categorize into the seemingly more favorable “moderate” identity, which could sometimes render Muslims politically passive. Contrastingly, Muslim organizations strive to construct a “Muslim American” identity that can allow Muslims to engage in mainstream politics by reframing Islam as compatible with American values. Theoretically, this article engages with the scholarship on security, surveillance, and visibility to show how the observed's visibility is not always only repressive but can also be used to resist imposed categories. However, findings reflect how the racialization of Muslims and the security regime give these strategies a double edge—while providing some advantages, these do little to dismantle Muslims’ hypervisibility and the security atmosphere. Overall, findings shed light on the contemporary issue of Muslim identification—not just in terms of how others see Muslims but also how Muslims see themselves.