Political Community Research Articles

Empowering Digital Democracy

This article examines the role of digital technology in enabling and enhancing democratic practices and forms of governance. It contributes to emerging debates on democratic innovations by proposing a novel theoretical account of decentralized participatory democracy. To develop our account, we draw on the experience of two EU-funded projects, D-CENT and DECODE, which produced innovative citizen participation platforms and digital public infrastructure. Bringing democratic theory into conversation with critical data studies and the new municipalism movement, we theorize how these projects advanced three political aims: organizing political communities to build collective power, empowering citizens through direct participation in decision making, and transforming political institutions. The article then analyzes the strengths and limitations of these projects to draw lessons for policy makers and practitioners for future digital democratic experiments.

The COVID-19 Pandemic Through the Environmental Discourse: the State, Civil Society, the Problems of Development

This paper examines the response of political communities to the COVID-19 pandemic. Using methodological approaches such as political globalism, world-system and structural-functional analysis, the author examines the political conditions of nation-states for coping with the pandemic and its consequences. Within this framework, the problem of the systemic crisis of the modern state, the effectiveness of public administration and decision-making systems was also addressed. The focus was on issues of political development, considered in the context of the evolution of democracy, civic political participation, the role of non-governmental organisations and elites, and the relationship between values and goals in the global and national political agenda. The article also touches upon the problem of “infodemics.” The paper concludes with recommendations for adding an environmental component to the concept of national security.

Secession, Right to Decide and the Constitutional Model of Militant Democracy

Advocating democracy and the right to decide over forceful union in the Spanish and European contexts, this paper makes modest theoretical proposals to protect the right to decide and to self-government of sub-state nations or peoples. The peaceful solution of conflicts involving contested claims over territory and national sovereignty calls for a pluralist concept of democracy, recovering the centrality of self-determination as the self-assertion of a people, a political community that has been systematically denied the freedom to decide on its own political status and aspiration. Constitutional law based on popular sovereignty often neglects the question of the definition of the demos as the prefigured and axiomatic constituency. If the Constitution is further interpreted as precluding any claim to self-determination by a constituency, and any debate about that claim then an undemocratic model of militant constitutionalism ensues. That militant scheme is not so much about protecting democracy as it is about imposing a national model, a pre-defined demos. This contribution seeks to revisit the claim of sovereignty of the Catalan process and the constitutional doctrine of the Spanish judiciary precluding the Catalan Parliament from engaging in political debates on the right to decide, in relation to the issue of the militant democracy model

“Mixed nation!” introducing a conceptual framework for the (im)possibilities of racialized belonging among Black mixed-race youth

ABSTRACT The authors draw from multiple research projects and their own lived experiences as motherscholars raising Black mixed-race children to inform the development of a conceptual framework to analyze the politics of belonging specific to Black mixed-race youth. Authors draw from John Crowley’s definition of the politics of belonging as “the dirty work of boundary maintenance” (1999, p. 30; Yuval-Davis, 2006) to conceptualize the boundaries in question as a politicized community of belonging in the U.S. context. The authors critique perspectives on belonging that assume sameness or agreement as a space to belong. Instead, they draw insight from Black mixed-race youth who have pushed them to think about diverse spaces as openings for belonging as they explore the central question of this paper: Where do Black mixed-race youth find a sense of belonging?

Brexit and the Premier League: perspectives from a boundary-making approach

ABSTRACT In the aftermath of Brexit’s referendum polls, there were many predictions as to what its impact would be for the United Kingdom. While its socio-economic consequences have often featured as the main topic of discussion, this may lead to people overlooking its significance regarding its redefining of the British political community. One social field in particular which may see these dynamics play out is sports. More particularly, looking at England’s favourite pastime, football and its top division, the Premier League, can be quite revealing in understanding how sports can contribute to defining the nation. Following from this idea, the theoretical framework of boundary-making processes is applied to the Premier League and its Brexit contextualisation. The findings from this approach demonstrate the government’s underlying efforts in redefining the country’s political community away from Europe through the sports regulation changes associated with Brexit. However, these are also found to be mitigated by the influence of external actors.

'Conspiracy theories should be called spoiler alerts': Conspiracy, Coronavirus, and affective community on Russell Brand's YouTube Comment Section.

This paper examines how conspiracy theories anchor affective communities through an analysis of the YouTube comment section for the actor and comedian turned political influencer Russell Brand. Comparing videos before and after Brand's shift to covid scepticism, I explore like counts, reply networks, and other commenting patterns in a dataset of 217,157 comments and conduct an in-depth analysis of 2000 top comments. The findings show first, a shift toward right-wing viewpoints; second, a reduction in comment length and comment replies alongside an increase in likes; third, a sharp rise in proclamations of Brand fandom; and fourth, a steep increase in references to conspiracy. The in-depth analysis reveals that comments focused not on narrating the content of conspiracies but on celebrating conspiracy as the basis of a political community and as a defence against accusations of paranoia. I argue that conspiracy theories can function as formal categories that anchor affective communities.

Translocal lessons from transitional justice in Colombia: Truth, art, and memory to advance human rights and transform societies

This article highlights the expansion of traditional concepts of transitional justice in Colombia to include an emphasis on human rights and the empowerment of marginalized communities. It describes how grassroots truth processes, collective art projects, and memory work have been essential to a transitional justice experiment that challenges dominant national narratives and power structures. It argues that Colombia’s experience may provide lessons for other political communities across the globe that are struggling to address legacies of past injustice, ongoing structural violence, and a rise in xenophobic nationalism. More broadly, it examines how this experiment might inform a model for political imaginaries based on social connections across differences—one that can compete with the power of nationalist myths of singular community. Importantly, it suggests the opportunity for horizontal borrowings via translocal networks of innovative human rights practices worldwide, not necessarily mediated by Global North institutions. This illustrates the contention that human rights globalization can operate through local advocacy.

Is a sense of community based on similarity? The perception of shared values and citizens’ EU identity

ABSTRACT Does the perception of sharing values strengthen the EU citizens’ sense of belonging to the European Union? The present study uses the concept of social identity derived from social psychology to explore this question. It assumes that the perception that EU citizens share the same value orientations with each other strengthens identification with the EU’s political community. To empirically test this thesis, two-level regression models are conducted on the basis of survey data from the 2019 Eurobarometer (EB 92.3). The empirical results show that the subjective perception of being similar in terms of value orientations is positively associated with EU identity.

Seeing like police: Surveillant practices and scopic skills in Recife, Brazil

AbstractDrawing on public–private circuits for urban surveillance in Recife, Brazil, this article unpacks how camera operators and ordinary residents are sensorially attuned to what constitutes a threat to urban order, from the perspective of state security governance. Through the notion of sensory enskilment, the piece delves into how surveillant civilians learn to distinguish such threats in digitally mediated urban sightings. By attending to the development of scopic skills in everyday surveillance contexts, I shed light on how security events become visible and legible across communities of practice, contributing to the formation of policing subjectivities and the maintenance of broader regimes of vigilance. The analysis draws on qualitative research on two sets of sites that cultivate civilians' visual skills around urban security: video‐surveillance control rooms managed by the security secretariats of Recife and Pernambuco, and WhatsApp groups dedicated to the policing of specific territories. This article seeks to deepen recent debates on how vertical and lateral forms of surveillance shape political communities and sociospatial divides.

Hegemony Approach and Political Struggles over a New Political Order: The Case of Turkey

Abstract This paper proposes an analytical framework that employs a hegemony approach to political transformations, which bring about significant changes in the fundamental norms and values of a political community, as well as in the organizing principles of the social and economic system. The hegemony approach, drawing inspiration from the works of Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, provides political theorists and social scientists with conceptual tools for analyzing struggles over political power. The paper argues that attempts at hegemonic formations, when extended to political transformations, involve articulations around social antagonisms, the construction of the people, establishment of political frontiers, and mobilization of the demands of excluded and oppressed groups. The Justice and Development Party, led by Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey, serves as a unique case study to illustrate this approach.

Jews and German Politics: The Case of Habsburg Moravia, 1867–1918

AbstractIn the Austrian province of Moravia, Jews, most of whom spoke German, continued to participate in and support the German political community until the end of the Habsburg monarchy. Unlike in nearby Bohemia, German liberals in Moravia did not abandon the Jews as the franchise expanded and antisemitism grew. Indeed, the German Progressive Party continued to attract voters in the cities of the province and did not resort to antisemitism in order to do so. Although there were only a small number of Jews in the province—just over 40,000—they played a large role among the voters in the urban curia. After the Moravian Compromise of 1905, when German parties no longer had to compete with Czech parties, Jews often formed the majority of all voters for German parties in the small market towns of the largely Czech-speaking south and central part of the province. The perception of the need for Jewish support in elections created a situation in which the German liberals did not turn to antisemitic politics and the Jewish/German liberal alliance remained strong.

Neoliberal nationalism and immigration policy

ABSTRACT Contemporary nationalism in the West tends to be understood in ethnic terms and associated with a bottom-up reaction to disliked effects of globalization, in particular migration. But there is also a top-down nationalism that is inherent in states` boundary-policing and – constituting membership policies. This paper draws the contours of a state-level neoliberal nationalism. Its imprint can be found in social policy, citizenship policy, and – the focus of this paper – immigration policy, in particular for the highly-skilled. Neoliberal nationalism combines diversity and meritocracy, and thus a modicum of cultural and economic liberalism. The prefix ‘neo’ flags the refashioning of political community from solidarity-based to contract-based, conditional on individual contribution and strict reciprocity.

Death and Prefiguration

This essay, part of a roundtable celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Charles V. Carnegie’s Postnationalism Prefigured (2002), explores the theoretical effects of Carnegie’s insistence that we release ourselves from the thrall of liberal Western sovereignty. It addresses Carnegie’s prescient interventions in relation to three canards of political philosophy—race-based notions of belonging, the centrality of secularism to modern notions of political community, and particular discourses of autonomy and self-determination. The author argues that what Carnegie shows us is that the modernity of control and containment is continually one or two steps behind the countermodernity of subalterns, and that autonomy is rooted not in the race-nation-territory triad but in the everyday movements within, across, and beyond it.

Three Reconstructions of ‘Effectiveness’: Some Implications for State Continuity and Sea-level Rise

Abstract Small Island Developing States (SIDS) are uniquely threatened by rising sea levels. Not only does the retreat of their coastlines place them in danger of losing maritime territory; the concurrent possibility of their landmasses becoming either uninhabitable or completely submerged also threatens their very existence. According to one understanding of the law that governs the continuity and extinction of states, political communities that permanently lose ‘effectiveness’—typically understood as sufficient governmental control of a relatively determinate territory with a permanent population—must lose their statehood as well. In this article, I provide three reconstructions of effectiveness, each of which rests upon a different normative rationale. My contention is that, regardless of which reconstruction one adopts, the continuity of submerged SIDS is eminently supportable, notwithstanding the arguments frequently made in favour of their formal extinction.

The Liturgical Transformation of Political Community

ABSTRACT With reference to Andrew Linklater’s The Transformation of Political Community, this article explores how liturgical practices contribute to the critique of the exclusionary bias baked into the dominant international system. It begins by regarding the system as not a given but a series of standpoints, each of which bears the capacity for interpreting and transforming political reality. This article then looks at the directions that a liturgical transformation of political reality can take. It will explore the implications of a liturgical ontology of participation, before looking at how the liturgy redefines terms of citizenship and provides an avenue to engage with difference.

Akademische Mobilität: Rumänische Studierende an deutschen und österreichischen Universitäten

Without ever reaching the level of the exchanges recorded before the First World War, the study mobilities in Germany for the Romanian students were still at the top of their list, after those in France, during the interwar period. The decrease in the number of young people who left for studies abroad (a process specific to the first years of the third decade) was due to the post-conflict economic and financial crisis, to the German reluctance to grant mass visas to foreigners, and to the prejudices (identifiable in the political and cultural community) regarding the antagonism highlighted during the war. Eager to regain its influential position in the European academia and in apparent competition with France, Germany made concrete steps from the mid–20s to reprise contacts and create an international system of exchanges. However, the legislative and systemic differences between Bucharest and Berlin made it very difficult to have closer relations. As late as 1935, the two countries concluded bilateral agreements meant to promote academic, cultural, and scientific exchanges. On the other hand, Vienna was almost absent from the Romanians’ list of options. The dissolution of the empire led to the fall of the capital (this process began in the early 1920s, of course). Furthermore, whereas in the early interwar years the Austrian universities still enrolled young people from the former provinces of the dual monarchy or students that used them as a gateway to the German universities, in the early 1930s Bucharest recorded no more requests for this space from the Romanian students.

The Rise of Communal Politics: Representing “Peasants” in Non‐electoral and Electoral Politics, Bengal 1920–1930s

AbstractThis article explores the representation of peasants in colonial India, during the 1920s‐1930s undivided Bengal. It examines how the historically marginalized and underrepresented rural population came to be constructed as objects of representation. It traces the development of representative claims made by various political parties and groups, both within and outside formal institutions of power, on behalf of rural society. The article discusses the challenges of categorizing the diverse rural population using the term "peasant" as an analytical category in the context of colonial Bengal. It highlights the dominance of the urban intelligentsia in provincial politics until the 1920s‐1930s, which neglected rural issues. It then explores the emergence of different claims to represent peasants in electoral politics, with a particular focus on the political debates surrounding the Tenancy Reform in Bengal. Drawing on secondary sources and colonial archives, it raises questions about how substantive representation of peasants occurred, who championed their representation, and how they formulated their demands. Overall, the article sheds light on the complex dynamics of peasant representation. By examining the rise communal peasant politics in 1920‐1930s Bengal, it contributes to a deeper understanding of the complexities of rural mobilization and the interplay between class and communal identities.

Virtue Ethics and the Ecological Self: From Environmental to Ecological Virtues

This article examines how a non-anthropocentric virtue ethics can truly avoid an anthropocentric bias in the ethical evaluation of a situation where the environment is at stake. It argues that a non-anthropocentric virtue ethics capable of avoiding the pitfall of an anthropocentric bias can only conceive of the ultimate good—from which virtues are defined—in reference to an ecological self. Such a self implies that the natural environment is not simply a condition for human flourishing, or something that complements it by adding the proper good of animals, organisms or ecosystems. Fulfilment is not that of a human self, but that of an ecological self: the natural environment or nature is not an external but an internal good. Therefore, the virtues or character traits that such an ecological self must nurture and develop leads us ultimately to distinguish—without opposing them—three different forms of virtue ethics applied to the environment, depending on whether it is anthropocentric or non-anthropocentric and whether nature is considered extrinsically or intrinsically. Such distinctions are also crucial to determine how we conceive of the political community and the collective goals that virtuous citizens assign to it (for instance, to preserve biodiversity, to tackle climate change, and so on).

Tendencies of Contemporary European National Communities’ Development in Context of Fourth Industrial Revolution and Globalization Processes

The article is dedicated to the issue of the development of national communities in Europe in the context of the influence of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and globalization, which mutually influence each other. The impact of these phenomena on the national communities of unified Europe has diverse consequences. In the context of globalization closely linked to Industry 4.0, as well as the phenomena of antiglobalism and Euroscepticism as reactions to it, the trends in the development of national communities in modern European states are highlighted. In Western European countries, the predominant process observed is the fragmentation of national communities. In Central and Eastern European countries that were under the influence of the USSR and became members of the EU and NATO at the turn of the 20th and 21st centuries, the reaction to globalization and Euro integration processes resulted in the rise of Eurosceptic and anti-globalist nationalism. In Ukraine, facing aggression from Russia and considering EU and NATO countries as allies, insufficient integration into the processes of globalization and the Fourth Industrial Revolution leads to predominantly Euro-optimistic tendencies in the trends toward national revival, without fostering skepticism towards globalization. It is demonstrated that the Fourth Industrial Revolution and globalization, mutually influencing each other, create conditions for weakening the role of national states both on the international stage and in the sphere of domestic political development. Social changes resulting from these processes have given rise to antiglobalism and Euroscepticism in EU countries, acting as corrective factors for globalization processes. Alongside regional separatism, political communities in Western Europe seeking separation remain within global and supranational structures. Desiring national revival through distancing from the past and integration with advanced countries of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, Ukraine maintains an open, inclusive character, supporting European and Euro-Atlantic integration.

Design of Network Management of International Relations, Including the Economic Sphere (рart 2)

In the second part, the authors explore the ideas of the actual network organization of the world community and emphasize that network regulation of international relations was supposed to be considered in the context of equal participation in the network of all potential actors: from the state to NGOs and NGOs, including TNCs/MNEs and TNBs, as well as various between-people’s (UN, OECD, IMF or WB, etc.) and public organizations (various unions and religious, political communities, including extremely radical ones). In modern conditions, the network management of international organizations and international economic relations is most revealing at the EU level, where the ongoing foreign and foreign economic policy is not connected either with the national interests of the EU countries or with the ability to provide for the vital needs of citizens of the EU countries. The authors focused their attention, while exploring the networkization of international economic relations, on the development of the process of gradual transition by management of the creation of global GDP based on augmentation and its transfer to the competence of artifi cial intelligence (AI). As a counterversion of the networking of international relations and international economic relations, the authors consider the position of countries that defend the promotion of a multipolar confi guration of the world community, since polycentrism presupposes the development and strengthening of the Westphalian system, but taking into account modern trends in the development of the world community. Multipolarity de facto denies the proposed concept of networkization of the Moscow Region.