Common Political Project Research Articles

The multivocality of the nation: political imagination and transformation in the emergence of African Nationalism

AbstractAt key moments in history, political understanding and action are irrevocably transformed. What makes such moments of transformation possible? This article examines the emergence of African nationalism in South Africa, following the multivocal appeal to African nationhood made by proto-nationalist leaders and intellectuals. In doing so I examine how new political imagination can reconfigure the structure of political relations and create powerful new possibilities for political organizing and action. African proto-nationalist leaders were ‘intermediary intellectuals’ who used African nationhood to speak to three different political logics of their key audiences: a ‘progressive nationhood’ to their white colonial audience, a ‘unifying nationhood’ to their missionary-educated African audience, and a ‘traditional nationhood’ to their rural African audience. African nationhood thus had a multivocal appeal which allowed proto-nationalist leaders to bring otherwise divided audiences to support a common political project. By bridging these divided communities, proto-nationalist leaders were able to combine resources and strategies from once separated domains into novel forms of political power. Transformation in political understanding was thus a critical enabler of innovation in organization and action because it built a political project where new connections between African and colonial worlds were made politically ‘thinkable’. Speaking to the scholarship on political repertoires and the sociology of anti-colonial intellectuals, this study has broader implications for the role political ideas play in political transformation.

Redrawing the lesbian: The memory of lesbian feminism in Kate Charlesworth’s Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide

Kate Charlesworth’s graphic narrative Sensible Footwear: A Girl’s Guide (2019), part memoir and part documentary of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, and intersex life and activism in the United Kingdom from 1950 to 2019, remembers the time when the LGBTQI+ and feminist movements met and influenced each other deeply, namely in lesbian feminism of the 1970s and 1980s. Drawing on feminist historiography and memory studies, this article discusses the role the figure of the lesbian has played in the collective memory of lesbian feminism. With a focus on the expressive capacities of comics, it examines how the work revisits this figure at a time when women’s and LGBTQI+ rights face a backlash led by anti-gender campaigners, some of whom draw on discourses associated with lesbian feminism. It concludes that the work challenges dominant narratives about the relationship between lesbian, queer, and trans feminism and enables a reconsideration of these movements as parts of a common political project.

Public-Private Drift and the Shattering Polity

Abstract This paper approaches the public-private law problem by describing what it calls “drift.” Drift is the tendency of what is thought traditionally to be private law to become public (public drift), and the tendency of what is thought traditionally to be public law to become private (private drift). Though it is possible to distinguish public and private drift conceptually, drift is in practice a unified phenomenon: public and private drift go together. Drift is manifested not only in formal, legal developments, but also in the informal processes by which public law frameworks now influence private ordering, private rulemaking, and private relationships, as well as the way private authorities have been entrusted with the responsibility to implement those public law frameworks. The paper describes various contemporary examples of drift, explains drift’s comparative ascendancy today, and speculates about possible future developments for drift. Drift in public and private law may not be driven primarily by anything innate or conceptually necessary in the disciplines believed to constitute private or public law. Drift is instead a political byproduct, the issue of social and cultural anxieties concerning the absence of anything like a common political project, anxieties that drive powerful actors toward manufacturing imaginary commonalities that they press with confounding certitude. The powerful exploit and manipulate areas of law that properly pertain to the public and private domains, repurposing them for new uses, because their regular use is ineffective in achieving their political objectives. The paper deliberately selects examples of drift that exhibit what would be conventionally described as conservative and progressive valences (in the meteoric rise of public nuisance, in the strategy of statutes like Texas’ S.B. 8, in the mixed public-private response to COVID-19, in the controversies about social media speech control, and others) to illustrate the universality of the phenomenon. Drift is a response to a perceived political void or emptiness in which public-private partnerships of powerful actors emerge to fill the void, capture the institutions of power, and coerce people’s behavior into certain ideological grooves.

The Democratic Limits of Populist Politics

The Democratic Limits of Populist Politics

The Political and Economic Dimensions of Everyday Life: The Conflict as a Political Institution of a Landless-Cooperative in Brasil

Abstract Taking as a case study a cooperative belonging to the Landless Movement (MST) of Brazil, this article analyzes the place of conflict and the relationship between the economic and political dimensions of daily life. It presents an analysis on the way to balance the political principles and practices of cooperativism and the constraints imposed by the market economy, by trying to understand how the political experiences of the subjects participate in establishing a social order around a common political project, under permanent construction.

Knowing, Understanding, Living, Dissenting and Countering: The Educational Moment in the Enhancement of Democratic Citizenship

Education is commonly considered to be a transformational practice that contributes both to forging the personality of individuals and to promoting social entanglements. For this reason, education always has a normative character that rests on a particular concept of what humanity and society should be. However, educational policies and practices are frequently unaware of these theoretical presuppositions, and for this reason, they frequently appear to act in a naive and superficial manner. This is particularly the case for citizenship education, which, if superficially implemented, risks being distorted into a form of civic education that reproduces established norms and social relations, without promoting any meaningful social change. Thus, the first part of this article aims to deepen the notion of citizenship, in particular by studying what the concept of ‘consensus’ means, conceiving of it not as a synonym of social resignation, but rather as a collective conspiracy towards a common political project. Accordingly, the article defines the basic characteristics that education should always possess to effectively promote a democratic and participative citizenship education. In particular, it identifies five constitutive contrasts in relation to the ways in which information is transmitted, reasoned, emotionally perceived, and then discussed and countered both by individuals and society. The article therefore presents an overall theory of education, seen as a momentous practice of dialogue and common action that opens the way for a democracy in progress.

Singularidad y despersonalización en los poemas homéricos

Proponemos una reconsideración de ciertos problemas homéricos prestando especial atención a dos asuntos: la acumulación de riqueza y la pretensión de igualdad en el seno de un colectivo. En primer lugar, se aclara en qué consiste por de pronto la riqueza; en segundo lugar, se considera en qué sentido la empresa de los aqueos es un proyecto común; por último, se expone en qué medida tanto lo uno como lo otro tienden a producir homogeneidad, despersonalización y descualificación, lo cual pone en marcha la pérdida de los límites y, por tanto, de la propia pólis.

Riflessi della crisi dell’eurocentrismo nella frammentazione geografico-politica del continente

After the Congress of Wien, the XIX century saw a rise of nationalism that united people that were joined by a common political project and territory in the formation of European nation states. The end of the First World War was followed by the fragmentation of large multinational empires that created additional nation states. After 1945 and even more so at the end of the Cold War however, this process was followed by the formation of ever-smaller states. These states prevailed to maintain a new identity toward the process of globalisation of politics and the world economy. The last decades have also seen an increase in micro nations, virtual bodies without international recognition and often without a territory. This is the project of a few individuals trying to circumvent the rules of international law and to start financial activities at the margins of the law. They are also alongside a dozen microstates that survived the process of aggregation of the XIX century. Today, they have created tax havens, which is a reason for the destabilisation of traditional sovereign states and the spirit of solidarity that created the European Community in the second half of the “short twentieth century”.

Do étnico ao pan-étnico: negociando e performatizando identidades indígenas

RESUMO O objetivo deste texto é refletir, com base na teoria dos atos de fala proposta por Austin em 1962, sobre os modos como um grupo de professores indígenas da Amazônia Ocidental, mais precisamente do Estado do Acre, performatizam suas identidades em interações transculturais. Interessa-me aqui focalizar, sobretudo, os modos como esses professores constroem, discursivamente, não apenas suas identidades étnicas, mas, também, seu pertencimento a um grupo que, multiétnico, compartilha um projeto político comum.

Dynamics of identity and otherness within intercultural feminist practices in Italy

ABSTRACTDrawing on fieldwork carried out in 2012–2013, this article explores the dynamics of identity and otherness within selected women’s intercultural associations in Italy in the light of the following issue: how to acknowledge differences among women – based primarily on ‘race’, ethnicity, legal status/citizenship, class and age – while maintaining a common political project. This article focuses on the contexts, which facilitate the formation of such a project by promoting the contesting of rigid categorization of women on grounds of nationality or culture. It first focuses on what is referred to as ‘a starting point a bit displaced’, second on the desire to move beyond divisions on nationality grounds and third on the concept of hybridity as a bridge between women. At the same time, the article confronts those issues that might conceal power differentials among women and argues in favour of a notion of feminist intercultural reflexivity.

The Politics of Interest in International Law

The article examines the substance and form of 20th century positivist international law; in particular the way in which each determines the other. The text describes the turn to interests in international law, which evolved slowly in scope and depth. By examining Lassa Oppenheim’s focus on ‘common interests’ that united states and Hans Kelsen’s focus on the ‘struggle of interests’ that constituted politics, the article studies two phenomena produced by the foundational role taken by interests during the 20th century. First, this role contributed to putting an end to the moral discussion about the treatment of native populations. Secondly, it curbed debate about a common political project for a global order, thus creating conformity characterized by abuse of power – all in the name of the neutrality of positivist law. This article suggests that the work of these two leading theoreticians in the field has contributed to the shaping of the legal theory of mainstream positivist international law, and seeks to foreground discussions about the different theories on the role of law in politics. In this manner it aims to help reconceptualize law in such a way as to bring about a situation in which discussions of a common political project for the international arena are more central.

Political congruence: a conceptual framework and historical case study

The authors introduce the concept of political congruence and apply it to the Amalgamated Engineering Union (AEU), during rearmament and war. Political congruence requires the alignment of union leaders, activists and members with a common political project. This is likely to bring strategic renewal, as was the case in the AEU. A platform of left reform developed as the influence of Communists on the shop floor and among activists developed. The union grew at an exceptional pace and opened membership and participation to women and young workers while adopting a more cooperative stance towards other unions in the industry.

Political attitudes, social participation and social mobility: a longitudinal analysis1

It is often suggested that the political attitudes and social participation which have underpinned the welfare-state democracies have depended on large amounts of upward social mobility. The demographic heterogeneity of the service class, according to this view, induced in them a willingness to lead a common political project seeking to establish a common social citizenship. As the amount of upward mobility stagnates or even begins to fall, it has then further been claimed that there might emerge a degree of ideological closure in the service class that might erode their commitment to civic values. The 1958 British birth cohort study is used to investigate this question. Longitudinal data are invaluable here because they allow us to distinguish between two hypotheses: that upward mobility as such has induced in the service class certain attitudes and propensities to participate, or that the more important influence is the early socialization through which upwardly mobile people went. The conclusion of the analysis is that, although the civic values of the service class have not depended on upward mobility, this is much more true of cognitively able people than of others, and so is dependent on the somewhat meritocratic basis of selection into the salariat.