Migration beyond self-determination? On Inés Valdez’s Democracy and Empire

This chapter examines the challenge that claims for global justice have been said to pose for the nation, and the value of national self-determination in particular. A debate has arisen between defenders of global justice and defenders of national self-determination, with the latter camp sometimes arguing that although some forms of global justice are valuable, the call for global equality, if realized, would seriously endanger any meaningful form of self-determination (and as such, global egalitarianism must of necessity be 'postnational' in form). The first section sets out the apparent opposition between the two positions. The second section looks a little more closely at the arguments of defenders of self-determination and examines just why, in their view, their concerns rule out global egalitarianism as a theory of global justice. The third section shows why the view that a concern for national self-determination rules out global egalitarianism as an account of global justice is mistaken for a number of reasons, as I have argued in more detail elsewhere (Armstrong, 2010). Actually, global egalitarians are able to carve out space for self-determination in a variety of ways. The fourth section concludes by asking whether they should. It is claimed here that there are good reasons to reserve room for legitimate forms of self-determination. But my argument will give limited relief to nationalists, because the forms of self-determination that are likely to be valuable to individuals worldwide are likely only partly to overlap with national forms of government.KeywordsDistributive JusticeNational ResponsibilityGlobal JusticeGlobal EqualityBrute LuckThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

Self-efficacy and self-determination have an important role in realizing the success or the success of an individual. The success or the success of achieving the target can be a work or personal targets the objectives of the individual. A dieter OCD have self-efficacy and a strong determination to be able to run a few stages in the diet of OCD. Stages was done so that the desired objectives can be achieved. This study aims to look at the form of self-efficacy and self-determination which is owned and shown by dieters OCD. Forms of self-efficacy and self-determination are analyzed through content analysis methods now to see testimonials submitted dieters OCD in social media. By analyzing the content of the testimony dieters OCD in social media are expected to understand the forms of self-efficacy and self determination. Implications for companies of this study was the manager can identify the forms of self-efficacy and self-determination of employees through a response, or testimony through employee communication forums, social media used by employees, as well as specific social media using corporate intranet. Managers can identify forms of self-efficacy and self-determination of employees, will be able to produce the right decisions in the management of human resources. Keyword : Self Efficacy, Self deteminasi, ContentAnalysis

Assembly means many things in politics, but it tends to mean some things more than others. In common parlance, peaceful assembly evokes acts of counterpower or protest. Conversely, in many countries, the assembly is also an institution of representative government. However, a global historical survey of assembly underscores more variety in assembly’s form, practice, and meaning, including popular assembly as a form of self-government. This chapter asks why this understanding of assembly that cleaves to popular sovereignty is diminished in contemporary political thought and practice. Ideas of politics that have dominated modernity privilege state authority and the legitimate use of force, the institutions of representative government and individual liberty. Within mainstream traditions, popular assembly is pushed beyond the boundary of ordinary politics, while assembly, as an act of protest, is pushed right up to this boundary where it is tamed as an individual right and policed for peacefulness. Paradoxically, this partial tolerance of episodic protest assembly is one means of legitimating state rule and representative government. Seen in this way, assembly’s continued threat to dominant politics arises less from its threat of disorder or violence than from its radical political promise. The distinctive political power of assembly is that it reprises the essence of popular sovereignty and hints at the heretical possibility of self-government. Re-centring assembly in political theory foregrounds how assembly’s extraordinary qualities are both constitutive of the boundary of the political ordinary and its biggest threat.

Liberalism, conceived as the philosophical and political framework of Western modernity, emerged in opposition not only to the Old Regime but also to egalitarian democratic experiences. From Antiquity to the French Revolution, forms of self-government were reinterpreted through a liberal rationale aimed at containing, rather than expanding, popular sovereignty. Inspired by the U.S. Constitution, a state model was consolidated with checks and balances, bicameralism, and the supremacy of representation over direct participation. Democracy was incorporated by liberals reactively and restrictively, as a functional response to popular pressure, stripped of its substantive meaning. This paper critically examines liberal hegemony, showing its structural incompatibility with genuine popular sovereignty. It argues that the apparent convergence between liberalism and democracy is a discursive strategy that legitimizes political exclusion and preserves elite control over pwer.

Holocaust topologies: singularity, politics, space

Critical dissections of neoliberalism’s de-democratizing effects are ubiquitous today, both in the academy and in para-academic popular venues. Inès Valdez’s Democracy and Empire (2023) is a bracing rejoinder to this tendency and a welcome respite from its propensity to ‘mourn a form of popular politics that both lacked a radical critique of capitalism and related despotically to racial others’ (p. 58). My aim in these comments is to further radicalize Valdez’s criticisms. Shorn of their attachment to national elite projects of exploitation and imperial domination, I argue, appeals to popular sovereignty lose whatever force they once had. In a postcolonial world, in which the climate crisis, resource wars, and the world historical event of mass migration mark everything, calls for collective self-determination evaporate into a moral fog that obscures our vision without giving us any force by which to carry emancipatory projects forward.

This paper links the debates on constituent power and European independence movements in order to develop a theoretically compelling and empirically grounded conception of constituent power, as well as to assess in how far constituent power contributes to the meaning of political independence. In its first part, it builds upon recent republican contributions to the debates on corporate, joint and collective agency and argues that, even on individualist grounds, constituent power can convincingly be understood as a surplus of collective agency that corporate agency cannot encompass. In the second part of the paper, these preliminary theoretical considerations are confronted with the debates about Scotland's constitutional future and the 2014 independence referendum. This examination suggests further differentiation, but also facilitates insights into the interplay of the constituent power of the people with corporate forms of agency, as well as into changes of constituent peoples. In the final part, the paper inverts the perspective of inquiry to show that, once one is conscious of the complex relation between popular sovereignty and sovereignty that conceptions of corporate and collective agency help us to grasp, constituent power also proves to be an element of a compelling political conception of political independence.

By comparison with early modern theorists of sovereignty like Bodin and Hobbes, Rousseau understood that ‘the most absolute authority is that which penetrates to man's innermost being, and affects his will no less than it does his actions’ (DPE, 251). If a genuinely popular sovereign authority is to prevail over its rivals and control its government, Rousseau argues that it must succeed in doing two things simultaneously: it must both generalise the will that directs it and concentrate the powers that enforce it. On the one hand, the more general a will, the more equitable are its concerns and the more imposing its commands: ‘the most general will is also the most just’ (DPE, 246), and by definition ‘the more the State expands, the more its real force increases’ (SC 3:2). On the other hand, Rousseau accepts that ‘interest and commiseration must in some way be constricted and compressed in order to be activated’ (DPE, 254), and he recognises in any struggle for sovereignty ‘the people's force acts only when concentrated, it evaporates and is lost as it spreads, like the effect of gunpowder scattered on the ground and which ignites only grain by grain’ (SC 3:8). Appreciation of the tension between these two requirements helps to shed light on the way some of Rousseau’s Jacobin followers conceived of the relation between popular sovereignty and executive authority, and it remains a helpful way of clarifying some of the recurring challenges confronted by emancipatory political organisations all through the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In the final part of this article, I will try to illustrate what’s at stake in these tensions through brief discussions of two very different French figures who might be said to dramatise the opposing poles of Rousseau’s legacy: Jean Jaurès’ defence of a revolutionary reformism mediated by maximally ‘generalised’ state institutions, and Pierre Clastres’ fascination with maximally ‘concentrated’ societies organised in wholesale opposition to the emergence of state power.

The benefits of secession are a constant force for the endeavor. They can be understood as benefits either for the elites or for the community in general. For the narrow class of political elites, the material and prestige advantages associated with an independent state are extensive. Secession sometimes represents an acceptable means toward achievement of these advantages. The case of Nigerian politics during the last decade before formal British withdrawal illustrates the point. Furthermore, for the community as a whole, secession can represent the fulfillment of dreams inspired by the principle of national self-determination. Grounded in nineteenth-century notions of popular sovereignty, the doctrine established an intimate connection between the nation and the political organization of a state. It originally proposed that the basis of legitimacy must depend on the people's desires, rather than the ruling monarchs. Although this political ideal remains elusive, it has captured the imagination of numerous subjected communities.As a result, it has made foreign rule not only objectionable, but at times untenable as well. The principle of national self-determination has therefore provided both the catalyst and the justification for demands for territorial adjustments and political change, usually in the form of unification, irredentism, or secession. Returning to our metaphorical scales, in the balance of the costs and benefits associated with the decision to secede, both factors – elite self-interest and popular self-determination – weigh heavily in favor of the attempt.

This article reveals the hold that German history and constitutionalism had on Indian federalists in the interwar period. A range of federalists from Indian princely states and British provinces, eager to see India become a federation rather than a unitary state fashioned on the English model, looked to Imperial Germany for constitutional lessons. They saw in German history and constitutionalism a federal solution to the so-called “Indian problem,” wherein the rights of the states would be primary over those of individuals or groups. This German-inspired federal tradition, I argue, departed not only from political pluralism and association-based federalism, but also from the nationalist vision of placing individual rights over state rights. This article presents an alternative genealogy of comparative constitutional thought in India, and examines a post-national worldview that sidestepped the nation-states. By bringing a comparative approach to bear on political and constitutional histories, it escapes the national insularity that often characterizes such histories in colonial India, and places them in the comparative and global context of the interwar circulation of federalist ideas. German-inspired federal ideas of the period offer a counterpoint to corralling futuristic visions of India, and its founding, on the twin axes of anticolonial nationalism and popular sovereignty to the exclusion of state-centric ideas articulated by the princely states.

We study some perturbative and nonperturbative effects in the framework of the Standard Model of particle physics. In particular we consider the time dependence of the Higgs vacuum expectation value given by the dynamics of the StandardModel and study the non-adiabatic production of both bosons and fermions, which is intrinsically non-perturbative. In theHartree approximation, we analyze the general expressions that describe the dissipative dynamics due to the backreaction of the produced particles. Then, we solve numerically some relevant cases for the Standard Model phenomenology in the regime of relatively small oscillations of the Higgs vacuum expectation value (vev). As perturbative effects, we consider the leading logarithmic resummation in small Bjorken x QCD, concentrating ourselves on the Nc dependence of the Green functions associated to reggeized gluons. Here the eigenvalues of the BKP kernel for states of more than three reggeized gluons are unknown in general, contrary to the large Nc limit (planar limit) case where the problem becomes integrable. In this contest we consider a 4-gluon kernel for a finite number of colors and define some simple toy models for the configuration space dynamics, which are directly solvable with group theoretical methods. In particular we study the depencence of the spectrum of thesemodelswith respect to the number of colors andmake comparisons with the planar limit case. In the final part we move on the study of theories beyond the Standard Model, considering models built on AdS5 S5/Γ orbifold compactifications of the type IIB superstring, where Γ is the abelian group Zn. We present an appealing three family N = 0 SUSY model with n = 7 for the order of the orbifolding group. This result in a modified Pati–Salam Model which reduced to the StandardModel after symmetry breaking and has interesting phenomenological consequences for LHC.

The end of the 20th century marked a triumphant moment for liberal democracies, which sold their vision of governance on the basis of their strong markets, economic redistribution to their citizens, and a robust constitutional order. But today democracies young and old, fragile and resilient alike are under threat—not from military conflict, nor from autocracies beyond their borders, but primarily from within. New tactics employed by would-be autocrats, whether in Hungary, India, Brazil, or the United States, exploit cracks that have emerged in democratic institutions since the 2008 financial crisis. Why have democracies weakened, how has populism emerged in its place, and what are its implications for the long-term future of democratic governance around the world? Democracy Unmoored: Populism and the Corruption of Popular Sovereignty examines these questions in three parts. The first addresses the recent ascendancy of populism around the world, arguing that populism has emerged as democracies have grown less able to deliver on their promises and the economic, social, and cultural narratives underpinning democracy unraveled amidst economic dislocation, migration, and demographic change. The second explores how populists govern when they take power and the intralegal ways that populists wield democratic institutions against democratic governance. The third and final part offers suggestions to better insulate democracies against the populist tide, including the application of ordinary tools of criminal and administrative law; improving state capacity, checks on the executive and citizen participation; and exploring novel electoral frameworks.

Against recent contributions to the debate about the constituent power of the people, the article proposes to reorient the debate by analytically distinguishing three dominant arenas of political struggle – democratic, social and national – in which the vocabulary of ‘the people’ and its constituent power is invoked. The invocation of the ‘will of the people’ and its constituent power in these arenas is associated with different assumptions, risks and implicit ideational trade-offs that must be laid bare. A contextual approach to constituent power counsels caution in dignifying pro-democratic constitutional transformations with the name of ‘the people’. It invites those who theorize constituent power with social struggles in mind to rebalance their attention to constituent power – and devote more attention to imaginaries and strategies that minimize moral hazards implicit in the vocabulary of peoplehood and to maximize the likelihood of the new order’s survival. Finally, a contextual approach rejects the role for constituent power in national struggles, arguing that constitutional theory is incapable of arbitrating between competing assertions of popular sovereignty. In the final part of the paper, I defend the contextual approach against the theoretical interventions currently on offer, and gesture towards its potential in crafting aprovincializedconstitutional theory.

This thesis analyzes the historical marginalization of the Altindag gecekondu (squatter) region in Ankara, Turkey from the 1920s to the 1970s in the context of capitalist urbanization. The analysis is developed through a critical exploration of the social history of the police that becomes pivotal for the materialization of state power on the urban margins. Deploying a dialectical analysis of the historical matrix of the police, class, and urban space, the thesis reveals the contradictory character of police power shaped by various forms of social, spatial, and political contestations. A tripartite, historically constituted, analytical framework is offered for a radical critique of police power comprised of distinct forms of struggle that reflect the fundamental concerns and foundational contradictions haunting modern police science in the management of capitalist modernity: (1) struggles over urban space; (2) struggles over forms of subsistence; and (3) struggles over a moral order. The thesis explores how these three forms of struggle historically condition the making of social criminality as a practice of subsistence and the production of popular illegality which manifests as an inarticulate and subversive form of moral order on the urban margin. The thesis further explores the cathartic association of social marginality with radical politics in the context of the gecekondu struggles in the 1970s. This reading of police power exposes a relational perspective that acknowledges the historical agency of subordinate classes in the formation and contestation of capitalist modernity. Finally, it is argued that a dialectical critique of police power provides a significant political and theoretical medium through which a radical critique of capitalist modernity from below can be formulated.

This article surveys a representational pattern in Egyptian cinema since the 1990s that both counters Hollywood's Orientalist binaries and produces alternative imaginations of Arab Americans. Egyptian filmmakers, I argue, have confined the filmic imaginations of Arab Americans within the parameters of Egyptian identity. While embedded in nationalist articulations of class, gender, and generation, and presented within multilayered critiques of materialism, power, and nostalgia, the Egyptian American characters in the surveyed films are either denigrated as American or celebrated as Egyptian. Thus, the Egyptian cinematic form of subversion, I contend, fails to navigate away from reversing Hollywood's polarizing portrayals.