Analyzing Politics and Change in Women's Organizations

Research on women's political action too often passes over women's organizations that do not officially adopt a feminist ideology and do not explicitly set out to change gender power relations. Based on implicit notions that such women's organizations are nonpolitical (or less interesting), the research often supports a false dichotomy between feminist and nonfeminist organizations rather than illuminates women's common political ground. This study addresses women's collective action, politics and change by focusing on the case of Nicaraguan Mothers of Heroes and Martyrs - women who lost a son or daughter in the revolution or Contra War. Although some members in Matagalpa critiqued male domination, the organization itself did not set out to challenge the gendered division of labor; indeed, their collective demands relied upon and in many ways reinforced traditional gender identities. I argue that such movements are important to feminist political analysis. As I demonstrate in this article, an organization's lack of an official feminist ideology does not mean that individual members do not express interests, identities and ideals that challenge the gendered status quo. Such research, however, requires a nuanced approach, recognizing women as both accommodating and resisting gendered social structures. Thus, this study challenges the dominant feminist-feminine dichotomy by demonstrating that women's collective action is not only per se political (and politically important) but may also challenge as well as reinforce gendered power structures.     

Dynamic multilevel governance for sustainable transformation as postnational configuration

Modern societies are increasingly having to cope with profound socio-political transformations, such as the transition from fossil energy production and consumption to more sustainable energy systems. Transformations ignite dynamics, processes, and forces, which induce new challenges for traditional structures and orders because major changes in society and politics are shifting from established manners, customs, and modes of behavior to new norms and values. Transformations cause epistemological uncertainty and complexity and challenge ontological fundaments and ethical convictions. National structures alone are not adequate to the task of handling the corresponding challenges because the capacity of domestic politics and regulations is too weak to achieve eligible political outcomes that can guide and structure transformations. In this light, I argue for a form of dynamic multilevel governance as a postnational configuration that has the capability and power to reform and transfigure institutions, structure and agency, hierarchies, cultural fabrics, socio-technical systems, and infrastructures toward new social and political orders. I theoretically and normatively conceptualize and justify three major governance framework conditions as hallmarks of dynamic multilevel governance, namely inclusiveness, adaptiveness, and distributed and differentiated deliberation. These capabilities produce reflexive authority with transformative and structuring power to tackle transformation issues. My notion of dynamic multilevel governance relies on thoughts in new institutionalism, network theory, deliberative democracy theory, discourse ethics, and different concepts of governance. I combine theory, normative justification, and institutional feasibility.     

Education,Civic Patriotism,and Democratic Citizenship: Unpacking the Education Effect on Political Involvement1

Previous research argues that political involvement not only reflects instrumental concern with political outcomes, but also involves normative motivations such as commitment to collective ideals. Consistent with this view, Americans with a strong sense of “patriotism” have been found to exhibit higher rates of participation than those with weaker attachment to their country ( Huddy and Khatib, 2007 ). However, citizens with high levels of formal education seem to be an exception. Despite scoring lower on conventional measures of “patriotism,” well‐educated Americans are among the most politically active segments of the population. In this article, it is hypothesized that formal education fosters an alternative, civic form of patriotism that conventional measures are unlikely to capture. Rather than reflecting attachment to a particular nation, civic patriotism is rooted in values and beliefs associated with democratic citizenship. Using data from the 2004 General Social Survey, it is found that civic patriotism helps mediate the education effect on two types of political engagement: grass‐roots activism and voting in elections.     

Finding the Truth in Politics: An Empirical Validation of the Epistemic Political Efficacy Concept

Self-efficacy theory suggests that one’s perceived ability to successfully find facts may motivate political information seeking. A telephone survey of voters in a presidential campaign attempted to further validate the concept of epistemic political efficacy (EPE), or belief one can discover the “truth” in politics, and applied it to modern information-seeking behaviors. This study of North Carolina registered voters (N = 605) demonstrates that EPE adds predictive power beyond commonly used measures such as individual political efficacy for contemporary media use variables like online information seeking and partisan cable viewing. EPE was a stronger positive predictor of online information seeking than individual political efficacy. In addition, viewing partisan cable shows had a stronger relationship with EPE than mainstream TV news viewing, and EPE significantly predicted MSNBC viewing, even after controlling for partisanship. In a word, voters who are high in the belief that political facts or “truths” exist take steps to find and understand them.     

Privilege and precarity: public scripts and self-censorship in shaping South African social science

South African social science’s close relationship with politics and policy have long provided a source of vitality and intellectual direction. Although one of the field’s greatest strengths, intimacy with socio-political and economic transformations engenders solipsism and stagnation. Ironically, it also compromises scholars’ political autonomy and intellectual ethics by blinding analysts to the emerging socio-political formations which will shape the country’s future. As demands for decolonisation and academic transformation continue, the pressures for political alignment will only grow. Drawing on over a decade of inquiry into the formal and informal governance of human mobility into and within South Africa, this article reveals the contours of such isolation and conceptual complacency. From this we can find direction for satisfying the “dual imperative:” contributing to progressive policy while maintaining scholarly autonomy. While not disengaging from politics, we must work to destabilise the language of it even where it means potential isolation from officials, peers, and personal profits. Doing so can protect social science’s autonomy while opening new opportunities for understanding the world in which we live and new tools for challenging those who seek to describe, theorise and change it. Doing otherwise risks converting the South African academic project into a policy think tank or self-referential echo chamber.     

Local Motions: Surfing and the Politics of Wave Sliding

Tapping into the politics and rhythms of surfing, this paper embodies a “set” of waves that seeks to erode the sedimentation of Hawaii's modern political orders. By foregrounding a more fluvial and dynamic sense of the political, this paper treats surfing not only as a heterotopic site of agency, but also as an opening for an “other” kind of politics.     

WikiLeaks: Between disclosure and whistle‐blowing in digital times

The 2010 WikiLeaks' disclosures of U.S. war logs were the first megaleaks to shake the world of international diplomacy and political elites. Since then, more leaks followed, from the Snowden to the Panama Papers. As this phenomenon continues to evolve, a significant body of scholarly work has analysed the emergence, the struggle, and the history of WikiLeaks .This article aims to provide a cross disciplinary overview of the research that has explored the rise and the legacy of the disclosure platform and whistle‐blowing website WikiLeaks. It identifies four scholarship approaches to research focusing on Julian Assange's platform in order to understand its impact on various aspects of the media and of public life. The approaches considered range from the effect WikiLeaks has had on traditional journalism to the platform's challenge to power in the realm of the balance between openness and secrecy in domestic and international politics; further scholarships use WikiLeaks as a case study to understand the relationship between media and social movements and to study the platform's ethics and the legal consequences of its operations. The impact of WikiLeaks's revelations still poses relevant questions the media, politics, and regulators must address in such a pivotal time that sees a change in news consumption and an increasingly bitter debate between online privacy and transparency. The conclusion reflects upon current development of what the author calls “new digital culture of disclosure.” Future research should explore questions about the opportunities, challenges, and obstacles for this emerging culture of disclosure. What are the socio‐political‐economic conditions that have enabled this new culture? Are these leaks becoming a renewed example of democratic accountability? Is this culture of disclosure replacing public interest journalism in times of crisis?     

Feminism and the socialist tradition … undone?

This article proposes that Butler's recent writing encourages understanding of an intersection of forces, specifically the undoing of feminism and the socialist tradition. This occurs as the traces or residues left behind by these now outmoded movements are seemingly taken into account, so that they are all the more repudiated and discounted. Re-regulation takes place by these means in the fields of sexuality and kinship. There is also a crisis in the politics of hegemony through processes of disarticulation, as queer politics breaks its earlier ties with socialist feminism through narrowly presenting claims of entitlement in terms of being for (or against) marriage. If radical democracy is itself radically insufficient (so that it remains open and necessarily unrealizable), nonetheless this produces vulnerabilities. Butler leads us in this context towards Levinasian ethics, as both other than and prior to politics. This permits, through the encounter with the face of the other, a steadfastness and defiant presence and proximity in terms of being for the other, while that other – for example, the woman of Afghanistan – is being sought as the subject of liberation by western hegemony. Thus, ethics can be expansive of the ‘sheerly political’.     

‘Entering the territory of incitement’: oppositionality and Africa South

Africa South was an anti‐apartheid journal edited by Ronald Segal which was published in South Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. This article explores the historical and political significance of Africa South and considers its implications for an understanding of ‘oppositionality’ in the post‐apartheid present. The central challenge which Africa South offered to its own context was its transnational perspective. Africa South was an important meeting place in the global routes of the developing pan‐African movement. It is also noteworthy for its effort to bring disparate areas of history and experience – both within the African continent and across the African diaspora – into revealing alignment with one another. The principle of conjuncture, I argue, initiated an important analytical move: the opportunity for illuminating comparison, the re‐conceptualisation of an often fragmented political and social landscape and an unusual glimpse of the whole. In tension with this totalising vision is the journal’s generic eclecticism, its flexible political identity and its collaborative construction. In both its unity and its fragmentation, Africa South offers an important point of departure for activist journalism and oppositional intellectual endeavours in the present.     

Gandhian fictions: rereading Satyagraha in South Africa

From 1923–24, Mahatma Gandhi wrote his recollections of South Africa from a prison cell in India. This text, Satyagraha in South Africa, was intended to be ‘helpful in our present struggle’ to liberate India, as well as ‘a guide to any regular historian who may arise in the future.’ An emphatically transnational text, Satyagraha in South Africa relies upon the mode of allegory to place South Africa and India in relation to each other. As it encourages comparison, however, it discourages common cause. Gandhi places Africans as the anterior sign in a larger system of signification: South African politics prefigures Indian anti-colonial victory to come, but the African native also represents the innocent natives of India writ large.

Without the political didactics of Hind Swaraj, the journalistic interventions of Indian Opinion or even the philosophical aspirations of My Experiments with Truth, this fictionalised history has rarely been the centre of attention. Satyagraha in South Africa, however, reveals Gandhi’s understanding of imperial geography, as he places South Africa and India in a single frame but fails to imagine them as inhabiting the same historical present. This understanding is reflected in his political decisions, as he fails to connect Indian anti-colonial agitation with struggles elsewhere.     

Commodities in action: measuring embeddedness and imposing values

Recent approaches in political economy look at the effects of technology and social values on economic action. Combining these approaches with those of economic anthropologists, this article poses that the way the economy is instituted can be understood by looking at reasons actors have for participating in actor‐networks of production, distribution and consumption. Using the author's research on American recycling, this article first shows that much of the‘making’or instituting of the economy happens outside the market, through political machinations, contracts and standards. Second, it suggests that these relationships impose value upon goods differently than do market relations. The details of the recycling‘chain’show the ways actors shape the network and demonstrate that the social values that add‘economic value’to goods are not uniform, but are highly contextual. Starting from Mark Granovetter's notion of 'social embeddedness', the article explains that the measure of social embeddedness is not as important as the values imposed upon other actors through social structure in the economy. It calls for a close observation of economic action in the locales within which production takes place to understand better the‘actions‐at‐a‐distance’where the politics of technology, social movements and power create the empirical, instituted economy.     

Transnational connections and anti‐colonial radicalism in the Royal Indian Navy mutiny, 1946

In this article, I explore the spatial politics of the Royal Indian Navy mutiny of 1946 and call for a more maritime sense of ‘the political’. The RIN only existed from 1934 to 1950; it became the Indian Navy after independence. Its mutiny in 1946, which was caused by a number of grievances from anticolonial nationalism to more mundane challenges about the standard of food, continues to be the dominant event in this history. Leela Gandhi (2014) used the RIN mutiny to challenge the binary distinction between elite and subaltern in much Indian historiography by depicting it as an ‘anti‐colonial counterpublic’, or space in which discourses other than the dominant nationalist framings of independence were mobilized. She also regards the mutiny as a potential example of inconsequential ethics in which, instead of worrying about its causes, the mutiny can be read as an experimental space in which democratic politics occurred, rather than one in which people were striving for a ‘successful’ outcome. I argue that, while there is much to be admired in Gandhi's reading of these events, she discounts the maritime nature of the RIN mutiny. In other words, she fails to acknowledge that travelling to different international locations allowed the sailors to learn about democracy and other ideas, which in turn influenced their beliefs about what the future of India, and the RIN, should look like. As a result, I argue for the need to explore in greater depth the important connections that exist between anti‐colonialism, democratic politics and the naval/maritime experience.     

Citizens' Perceptions of Politics and Ethics in Public Administration: A Five-Year National Study of Their Relationship to Satisfaction with Services, Trust in Governance, and Voice Orientations

In recent decades organizational politics (OP) has become agrowing field of interest in managerial studies. To date, themajor scholarly effort has been dedicated to the explorationof intraorganizational politics based on employees' perceptions.However, one of the important aspects of this phenomenon isthe way in which it is viewed by the external organizationalenvironment—by customers, clients, and as far as governmentalagencies are concerned, by the general public as well. Thisarticle examines citizens' perceptions of organizational politicsand ethics in public administration systems. It focuses on therelationship between these perceptions and several key outcomesof modern bureaucracy such as satisfaction with services, trustin governmental institutions, and the resulting voice orientationsand actions by the public (i.e., political efficacy, politicalparticipation). The data for the study were gathered from ahalf decade's worth of national surveys in Israel. The resultspoint to meaningful direct and indirect relationships betweenorganizational politics and ethics in the public sector, satisfaction,trust, and voice orientation. The article ends with a discussionof the theoretical and practical implications of the findingsand suggestions for future studies.     

Youth mobilisations and political generations: young activists in political change movements during and since the twentieth century

This paper uses political generations theory to examine the main youth mobilisations during and since the twentieth century: pre-1939 fascist and communist movements; the student movements of the 1960s and 70s; movements that challenged colonial and neo-colonial rulers in less developed countries and young people's involvement in the revolutions that saw the end of communism in East-Central and South-East Europe in 1989. Conclusions from this review of the past are used in considering the likely significance of subsequent outbursts of political activism among young people: the ‘colour revolutions’ and other instances of youth mobilisation in former Soviet republics and other ex-communist countries; the Arab Spring and the series of movements that have challenged neo-liberalism – Anti-Globalisation, the Indignados and the Occupy movements. The paper notes that youth mobilisations that have led to the formation of new political generations that have changed their countries' politics then transformed the countries have typically extended over several decades, that initially youthful leaders have sometimes been middle-aged or older before achieving political power and that many of their actions on achieving power have been at variance with their youthful ideals. In conclusion, it is argued that it is still too early to tell whether any of the recent youth mobilisations signal the formation of new political generations.     

Some realities of African agriculture: A reply to professor Tomlinson and professor Bisschop

This paper on the use of performances of oral literary genres in South African political organisations such as Inkatha, in Zulu Royal institutions, and in trade union movements (FOSATU, MAWU, SAWU, and others), is concerned with the use of the past in contemporary political activity, and with the question of whether oral literature will survive as a viable genre. The pressure exerted on oral literature by written genres seems to threated their continued existence, yet oral genres continue to have significant power in contemporary culture and politics. Several examples are presented to show the adaptation of the oral izibongo genre, and other forms of orally‐performed poetry, to contemporary contexts.     

Decency and the Liberal International (Dis)Order: Moral Limits and the Possibilities of a Global Pluralist Politics

This article analyzes the tension between the liberal ideals of freedom and equality and cultural difference. It argues that decency has become intertwined with the fragility of the liberal international order by providing a problematic threshold of international justice. The idea is that as global pressures mount for protecting the human dignity of persons/peoples, they also congeal or harden decency’s political and social constraints (impartiality, neutrality, and basic rights enforcement) on engaging others. Decency as a moral threshold of international justice, the article claims, has become static or a self-reinforcing limitation. This contradictory decency/dignity dynamic of the liberal international order not only explains how states have aggressively asserted their interests by absorbing these constraints, but also how politics can limit the pragmatic potential to bridge the various social gaps in values and belief systems. This article seeks to conceptualize a pluralist ethos that shows how such constraints can be reimagined as, or turned into, the conditions of possibility/freedom that transition us to a global pluralist politics. It concludes with a discussion of the refugee crisis and Islamism, showing how both cases resonate the felt stigmatization and alienation within the liberal international order.     

Political Oppression,Social Change and the Family: A View from South Africa

The obvious continuities between the political and the personal, the public and the private, dominate South African life in a way which may not be familiar to those in the Australian context. South African clinical work with families, much of it in the form of mediated interventions, cannot but operate at the edges of our definitions of both what a family is and what it means to be a mental health worker. In this article I argue that thinking broadly about politics and about our work is essential in the service of developing family and personal growth.