The Quebec student protest movement in the age of neoliberal terror

Reflecting on the 2011–2012 youth-led resistance movements in North America, this essay contextualizes and evaluates the Quebec student movement against the increasing influence of neoliberalism on North American and global society as a whole, comparing its strategies and impacts with those of the Occupy movement in particular. The Quebec movement launched a series of protests that awakened society to the prospect of what struggling for a radical democracy might mean, and how crucial free, accessible higher education must be to such a struggle. The key challenge for these social movements will be to continue to develop and circulate their views in the public sphere through forms of political organization that are as coordinated as they are flexible and open to new ideas. Both the Occupy movement and the Quebec student resistance have ignited a new generation of young people who now face the ongoing challenge of developing a language and a politics that integrate a meaningful consideration of public values and imagine the possibilities of a democracy not wedded to the dictates of global capitalism. This emerging public culture should make pedagogy central to its understanding of politics and work diligently to provide alternative subjects, narratives and power relations that contribute to sustainable educational institutions and enlarged public spaces in which matters of knowledge, identity and social responsibility become central to creating a democratic formative culture – here understood as the very precondition for the modes of agency, public values and engaged citizenship required to support any just and inclusive society.     

Mining,social contestation and the reclaiming of voice in Australia’s democracy

ABSTRACT

This article examines social mobilisation against coal seam gas and coal mining in country New South Wales. While environmental concerns are one of the motivations behind recent mobilisations, the alliances that are emerging bring together groups with a diversity of interests and ideological orientation. Disappointment with political elites and concerns with lack of transparency and public accountability, are setting the foundations for new forms of grassroots collaboration. Against the widespread notion of depoliticisation in Western liberal democracies, I argue that the growth in community mobilisation in country Australia reveals a more dynamic relationship with politics, one that requires differentiating the more rigid spaces within political institutions, from the political field more broadly.     

Latin America as political science’s other

ABSTRACT

This article develops a decolonising critique of contemporary Latin American focused Political Science (LAPS) demonstrating the complicity of its politics of knowledge in the reproduction of the logic and rationalities of coloniality. These logics and rationalities are premised upon the dehumanisation of the raced and gendered other who is denied rationality, agency and political subjectivity. I demonstrate the monological and dehumanising epistemological consequences of this through deconstruction of the foundational myths and disciplinary boundaries of the discipline; the legitimate subject of the political; and the knowing-subject of political analysis that foreground contemporary LAPS. I end with a question and a challenge: how might we learn to create a political science otherwise?     

Monitoring social media and protest movements: ensuring political order through surveillance and surveillance discourse

ABSTRACT

Social network sites (SNSs) such as Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube are often claimed to be central in their role as a facilitating medium for contemporary protest movements. Protestors are able to coalesce around particular keywords such as found in the use of ‘hashtags’ on the SNS Twitter, while sympathetic audiences across the globe are able to follow events in real time. While the role of Twitter use in protests has been celebrated as a means of reducing the information asymmetry between protestors and police, this article problematises this view by exploring the ways in which social media data are beneficial to law enforcement agencies and the state. The article examines the extent to which intelligence agencies are able to monitor activists, drawing on the Edward Snowden revelations of widespread SNS surveillance, and the ways in which internet users are altering their online activities as a result of the revelations. Far from challenging the state, social media use and the data it provides offer the state a multitude of resources to extend its reach and to ensure political order.     

Constructing a social space for Alevi political identity: religion,antagonism and collective passion

ABSTRACT

This paper analyses the construction of an Alevi political identity in terms of cultural, social and religious values at a time when the role of religion is increasing in the political life of Turkey. It indicates the emergence of a new form of conflict and hegemonic articulation between Sunnism and Alevism that offers an alternative means of conflict resolution by the Alevi political agents within a radical pluralism and agonistic democracy. It also argues that the social construction of Alevi political identity is both a political project and an ontological question as this identity focuses on religious discourses in establishing a counter-hegemonic culture through mobilizing political ‘collective passion’.     

On ‘outsourcing’ the political in political science

ABSTRACT

Through a critical analysis of some of the most popular theoretical approaches in mainstream political studies, the paper draws attention to the dichotomist interpretations of the political made by political scientists in the context of social movements, either celebrating their ‘truly’ political and radical nature, or deeming them conformist and post-political. It suggests that both discourses, but especially the insistent discourse of de-politicisation by political scientists must be viewed critically as it contributes to what might be called as ‘outsourcing’ the political merely to social movements while reserving themselves the possibility of remaining politically non-engaged. In encouraging discussion on engaged scholarship in political science, the paper proposes that instead of expecting others to ‘reoccupy’ the political, political scientists should politicise themselves – and do so in a close relationship with social movements through the practices of unlearning privileges and solidarity based on the ‘ethics of sharing’, which can help to transcend the binary between political theory and political practice.     

Austrian Muslims Protest Against Austria's Revised “Islam Act”

Austria legally recognized Islam in 1912 and has thus been characterized as a “liberal” country regarding the inclusion of Muslims. But when the law was revision in 2015, it was largely criticized as discriminatory, anti-constitutional, and authoritarian towards the Muslim minority. The paper asks how a number of different social movement organizations and networks have framed their political participation, protest, and activism. It asks what demands were expressed regarding justice, criminalization, alienation, discrimination, and other contested issues. The paper also ponders the implications of political inclusion versus distance from the system for Muslim agency, as the protest movement ranged very widely from state-affiliated institutions to state-independent individuals.     

Race,migration and neoliberalism: distorted notions of Romani migration in European public discourses

ABSTRACT

This article analyzes the migration of Roma based on recent public, academic, policy and political debates in connection with two specific case studies in France and Italy. Moreover, it aims to understand how contemporary racialized discourses and neoliberal social and political forces (re)create Roma as a racialized internal ‘other’ to legitimize subtle anti-Romani politics in Europe. By doing that, it argues that the current migration of Roma cannot be understood apart from the proliferation of the hegemonic neoliberal ideology that facilitates the racialization of Roma and normalizes their social exclusion in Europe. Moreover, it explores the role of neoliberalism in the racialization and subjugation of Roma in Europe.     

South Tyrol: the importance of boundaries for immigrant integration

ABSTRACT

Using South Tyrol as a case study, this article analyses how boundaries between groups and their institutionalisation through power-sharing arrangements affect the politics of immigrant integration. Through a longitudinal qualitative analysis of party manifestos, the article focuses on the period between 1993 and 2013 to evaluate the immigration and integration discourses of political parties, claiming to represent the German and Ladin minorities. It is argued that these parties have deliberately framed immigration as a challenge to the strength of their respective cultures and languages, as well as the array of institutions that support the separate but equal coexistence of South Tyrol's linguistic groups. The consequence of this tendency to ‘think in groups’ is that the main political parties of the German and Ladin minorities are shoring up group boundaries and advancing an assimilationist model of immigrant integration.     

Governing multicultural Brussels: paradoxes of a multi-level,multi-cultural,multi-national urban anomaly

ABSTRACT

Updating our earlier work on Brussels as the paradigm of a multi-level, multi-cultural, multi-national city, and in the context of Brussels’s recent troubled emergence as the epicentre of violent conflict between radical political Islam and the West, this paper sets out the paradoxical intersection of national (i.e. Flemish and Francophone), non-national and ethnic minority politics in a city placed as a multi-cultural and multi-national ‘urban anomaly’ at the heart of linguistic struggle of the two dominant Belgian communities. Brussels is one of the three Regions of the Belgian federal model alongside Flanders and Wallonia. It is also an extraordinarily diverse and cosmopolitan city, in which a mixed language Belgian population lives alongside very high numbers of resident non-nationals, including European elites, other European immigrant workers, and immigrants from Africa and Asia. After laying out the complex distribution of power and competences within the Belgian federal structure, we explore whether these structures have worked over the years to include or exclude disadvantaged ethnic groups. To better understand these processes, we introduce our view of the multi-level governance perspective.     

Clinical globalization: A case study of privately-sponsored HIV research in Mexico

This essay describes the struggle of an indigenous rights activist to obtain ethnic status and political representation for the Waata, former hunter-gatherers who belong to the Oromo-speaking people of East and Northeast Africa. It discusses how this leader is trying to positively redefine the label of 'caste' attributed to the Waata by scholars to explain the ambivalent position occupied by the group in traditional Oromo society. The essay examines how this social activist used a dance ritual which is performed annually by the Waata to commemorate their myth of origin as a way to gain political and moral legitimacy for his campaign. As Abner Cohen's studies suggest, there exists an intrinsic link between cultural performances and political processes in contexts of socio-economic change. The essay explores these interrelated themes of culture, politics and social change through the case of the Waata.     

Labour migration brokerage and Dalit politics in Andhra Pradesh: a Dalit fabric of labour circulation

ABSTRACT

Why and how do labour migrant brokers engage with henchmen of bosses, small-time criminals and violent politicians? What significance do labour brokers’ political relations have in the fabric of labour circulation? This article argues for migration brokerage to be examined along a broad continuum of brokerage to explore the local fabric of labour circulation in the Indian construction sector. Considering migration brokerage as part of a broader landscape of brokerage firstly allows look at how migration brokers concretely navigate the worlds of labour and politics to pursue their activities and to further their own agendas. It secondly offers insight into how the everyday relations between migrant brokers and henchmen of bosses shape the lives of migrant labourers in the urban construction sector. Based on a detailed ethnography of the relation between a Dalit labour maistri and a Dalit henchman of a boss in a context of violent criminal political economy, this article explores the roles of Dalit politics in shaping the Dalit fabric of labour circulation and labour broker’s trajectories in South India. It further looks at the ambivalent production and mobilisation of Dalit identities in the making of an ideal Dalit migrant labourer.     

Poverty and HIV/AIDS in Apartheid South Africa

This article constitutes an attempt to put forward some suggestions towards constructing a framework of understanding the processes of social construction of sexuality and gender identity within the context of the ethnic conflict, and of nationalist/ populist politics in former Yugoslavia. In particular, it focuses on the ways in which masculinist discourse is articulated to the politics of ethnicity in former Yugoslavia, by examining the definition and treatment of women as 'biological reproducers of the nation' through the discourses and policy proposals of moral majority nationalist and pro-life movements in Croatia and Slovenia, and of the nationalist movement and regime in Serbia, and the use of rape and sexual assault against women as 'weapons' in the ethnic conflict in Bosnia and other republics of former Yugoslavia.     

少数民族地区公民政治行为理念的政治学检视与作用力分析

公民的政治行为理念直接影响公民政治参与的水平和政治现代化的进程。由于历史和现实的原因,少数民族地区经济、政治、文化、社会发展相对落后,在一定程度上制约了公民政治行为理念的建设。     

The Socio-Spatial Making and Marking of 'Us': Toward a Critical Postmodern Spatial Theory of Difference and Community

The modernist surveillance of strict, arbitrary borders between 'real space' and 'imagined space' both produces and hides 'Othered' spatialities. While assuming that spatialities are simultaneously real-and-imagined,postmodernspatial theory seeks to recover the identities that emerge in relation to the veiled, lived realms of 'social space'. Furthermore, critical postmodern spatial theory privileges the lived spatialities of left-margined communities as sites of socio-spatial critique. A postmodern identity politics enacts critical postmodernspatial theory by nurturing the developmentof, and solidarity between, 'counterpublics', which are subaltern community spaces where private spatialities of alienation are brought to public discourse.     

From Left to Right: The Changing Identity of the Chilean Political Class

This article examines the changing role of important sections of the Chilean political elites, from a Keynesian and Marxist cultural political and economic ethos, to a post-modernist set of values profoundly influenced by the ideas of free markets and state withdrawal, as proposed by Hayek and Friedman. From strong support for, and identification with, the role of the state as agent of change, social justice and social mobility, significant sections of the Chilean political class have come to accept the globalisation of the world economy and its determination of internal politics. Values such as solidarity and equalitarianism have given way to individualism and selfishness. Whether these changes reflect genuine commitment or tactical adaptation remains to be seen, but they are likely anyway to undermine the legitimacy of the democratic regime which replaced the 16 year dictatorship of the military under General Augusto Pinochet. The lack of real alternative societal models does not augur well for the fragile Chilean democracy.     

问题与对策:少数民族地区公民文化研究

民主政治建设是少数民族地区现代化建设的重要内容,不仅包括制度建设内容,而且也包括政治文化建设的内容。然而,少数民族地区民主建设面临着各少数民族成员民主制度、机制缺乏、民主意识淡薄以及注重宗教信仰、法治意识缺失。要培育少数民族地区民主型政治文化的基础和条件,就不得不建立和完善现代民主制度和机制,充分开发利用各种政治社会化手段。     

Political constructions of a cross-community identity in a divided society: how politicians articulate Northern Irishness

ABSTRACT

A shared identity has been shown to reduce prejudice between conflicting social groups. One such common national category is the ‘Northern Irish’ identity which can be inclusive of both Catholics and Protestants. This study analyses the plenary sessions of the Northern Ireland Assembly to show how the national category ‘Northern Irish’ is framed by politicians. Content analysis shows that it is used more often by centrist parties who tend to frame it positively and as part of their political viewpoint. There is also evidence of the instrumental use of this identity by unionists in line with the ingroup projection model.     

民族地区政治稳定理论探析:内涵、特征与影响因素

民族地区政治稳定问题是民族政治学研究的重要课题,而理解和把握民族地区政治稳定的内涵、特征以及主要的影响变量就是展开此项研究的基础。民族地区政治稳定是指通过国家政治体系和民族地方政治体系的共同作用,与民族地区社会系统实现良性互动,避免和消除该地区潜在的改变现行政治体系的社会力量和政治运动,实现该地区发展的有序性和连续性。在现代社会,民族地区的政治稳定必然是发展中的动态稳定,具有相对性、互动性和可控性的特征,其稳定状况和程度受一系列交叠因素的影响。