Contemporary Political Landscape Research Articles

Towards an Etiology of the Closet: Sexuality Studies “After Sedgwick”

Towards an Etiology of The Closet:Sexuality Studies "After Sedgwick" Kazuki Yamada (bio) The Book of Minor Perverts: Sexology, Etiology, and the Emergences of Sexuality by Benjamin Kahan . Chicago: University of Chicago Press , 2019. 242 pp. $99.00 cloth, $32.00 paper. If after the appearance of The History of Sexuality (1976) many works in sexuality studies could be reasonably described as "After Foucault," then Benjamin Kahan's ambitious work is best described in addition as "After Sedgwick" (115). 1 Self-professed as a "susained exploration of [Eve Kosofsky Sedg wick's] work and thought in order to understand its impact," The Book of Minor Perverts explicitly positions itself as a study that aims to more fully describe, if not cut, the "Gordian Knots" that still remain unresolved and undertheorized in the field of sexuality studies in the wake of Sedgwick's critical insights in her 1990 Epistemology of the Closet (118). Fittingly, Kahan's central preoccupation in this book is to more thoroughly investigate what Sedgwick herself was hesitant to excavate: the story of the "invention of the homo/hetero binary," which she almost mockingly called the Great Paradigm Shift (116). For Kahan, the Great Paradigm Shift is a narrative of sexual etiology that posits the diachronic emergence of a sexual modality where desire has no cause beyond the gender-based object attractions which we are born with. In turn, The Book of Minor Perverts earnestly posits that if we hope to more deeply understand the history of the modern sexual etiology of congenital homo/heterosexuality and unravel its full consequences, there is no [End Page 435] more room for Sedgwick's hesitation in being attentive to the alternative sexual etiologies and "thousand aberrant sexualities" that the homo/hetero binary has historically "effaced" (8)—including those suggesting an acquired sexual etiology rather than a "born this way" explanation. Kahan's work instead emphatically urges readers to seek a way forward in what he describes as "historical etiology" amidst a contemporary political landscape where the homo/hetero binary is beginning to come undone (25), and in the process of doing so constructs a compelling foundation for how sexuality studies might proceed long after Sedgwick and Foucault. The Book of Minor Perverts is composed of seven chapters. Other than the introduction outlining the book's central concerns and methodology and the concluding afterword, each chapter focuses on one specific sexual etiology, balancing discussions of each etiology's technical mechanics with close readings of their manifestations and modifications in a diverse range of literary works (a dynamic Kahan calls "vernacular sexology" after Stephanie Foote). In this sense, Kahan's work very much follows Sedgwick in recognizing the value literary studies offer to historical and critical analyses of sexuality, and simultaneously joins a growing body of recent historical scholarship that is attentive to fin de siècle sexology's literary character even while the precise relationship between literature and sexology remains somewhat undertheorized. Readers familiar with the history of sexology will be most comfortable in chapters 1, 2, and 5, even as their arguments and approaches challenge dominant disciplinary, archival, and narrative demarcations. Chapter 1 traces the "uneasy" crystallization of situational homosexuality in the 1930s to earlier etiologies of sexual desire as cyclical and in tune with the seasons (27). By reading sexological theory alongside Thomas Dickinson's Winter Bound (1929) and Lillian Hellman's The Children's Hour (1934), Kahan explores how early twentieth century sexologists longed and failed to return modern heterosexuality's pathological "constant desire" for the "nostalgic past" of a healthy periodicity synchronized with the rhythms of nature. Kahan traces how, in doing so, an etiological framework was inadvertently created where heterosexuality's constancy became the norm against which the periodic and temporary became characteristic of homosexuality's cause, and heterosexuality was established as the congenital, psychologically rooted "always" to which contemporary discourses insisting on homosexuality's congenital nature aspire (29–30). [End Page 436] Chapter 2 continues this thinking around the relationship of environmental etiologies to the origin of congenital theories of sexuality. Collecting such etiologies of sexual situatedness under the term anthropologia sexualis after German sexologist Iwan Bloch (47), Kahan explores through a reading of Thomas mann...

Transnational terrorism: a threat to global security

The beginning of the twenty-first century is characterised by the emergence of a new political landscape significantly influenced by globalisation. The rising interconnectivity that results from this phenomenon implies the need to redefine the concepts of international politics, strategies, threats, and security. In parallel, new technologies have enabled transnational threats to develop and come up as a primary concern for the great powers and global governance. Based on the analysis of previous works and relevant studies on the field (Brown, 2017; Bannelier-Christakis, 2016; Jones, Pascual, & Stedman, 2009; Garcia, 2006), this essay explores the emergence of transnational terrorism and the expansion of religious extremism as major threats for states and individuals nowadays. While searching to answer the question of how to address terrorism and violent extremism, this article analyses diverse positions, measures, and consequences that have originated in a context of global insecurity. The increasing interdependency between internal and external security has called states to develop new strategies to maintain stability and order. The article emphasises the need to build partnerships and enhance collaboration at all levels to meet the challenges posed by transnational terrorism. In this context of growing insecurity, nations are urged to cooperate with different actors to protect their sovereignty and strengthen human security. Is the contemporary political landscape characterised by insecurity and disorder?

Transnational Populism, Democracy, and Representation: Pitfalls and Potentialities

Current work on populism stresses its relationship to nationalism. However, populists increasingly make claims to represent ‘the people’ across beyond national borders. This advent of ‘transnational populism’ has implications for work on cosmopolitan democracy and global justice. In this paper, we advance and substantiate three claims. First, we stress populism’s performative and claimmaking nature. Second, we argue that transnational populism is both theoretically possible and empirically evident in the contemporary global political landscape. Finally, we link these points to debates on democracy beyond the state. We argue that, due to the a) performative nature of populism, b) complex interdependencies of peoples, and c) need for populists to gain and maintain support, individuals in one state will potentially have their preferences, interests, and wants altered by transnational populists’ representative claims. We unpack what is normatively problematic in terms of democratic legitimacy about this and discuss institutional and non-institutional remedies.

Dissimulation

At the fringes of the platform economy exists another web that evokes an earlier era of Internet culture. Its anarchic subculture celebrates a form of play based based on dissimulation. This subculture sets itself against the authenticity injunction of the current mode of capitalist accumulation (Zuboff). We can imagine this as a mask culture that celebrates disguise in distinction to the face culture as embodied by Facebook’s “real name” policy (de Zeeuw and Tuters). Often thriving in the anonymous milieus of web forums, this carnivalesque subculture can be highly reactionary. Indeed, this dissimulative identity play has been increasingly weaponized in the service of alt-right metapolitics (Hawley).Within the deep vernacular web of forums and imageboards like 4chan, users play by a set of rules and laws that they see as inherent to online interaction as such. Poe’s Law, for example, states that “without a clear indicator of the author's intent, it is impossible to create a parody of extreme views so obviously exaggerated that it cannot be mistaken by some readers for a sincere expression of the parodied views”. When these “rule sets” are enacted by a massive angry white teenage male demographic, the “weapons of the geek” (Coleman) are transformed into “toxic technoculture” (Massanari).In light of an array of recent predicaments in digital culture that trace back to this part of the web or have been anticipated by it, this special issue looks to host a conversation on the material practices, (sub)cultural logics and web-historical roots of this deep vernacular web and the significance of dissimulation therein. How do such forms of deceptive “epistemological” play figure in digital media environments where deception is the norm — where, as the saying goes, everyone knows that “the internet is serious business” (which is to say that it is not). And how in turn is this supposed culture of play challenged by those who’ve only known the web through social media?Julia DeCook’s article in this issue addresses the imbrication of subcultural “lulz” and dissimulative trolling practices with the emergent alt-right movement, arguing that this new online confluence has produced its own kind of ironic political aesthetic. She does by situating the latter in the more encompassing historical dynamic of an aestheticization of politics associated with fascism by Walter Benjamin and others.Having a similar focus but deploying more empirical digital methods, Sal Hagen’s contribution sets out to explore dissimulative and extremist online groups as found on spaces like 4chan/pol/, advocating for an “anti-structuralist” and “demystifying” approach to researching online subcultures and vernaculars. As a case study and proof of concept of this methodology, the article looks at the dissemination and changing contexts of the use of the word “trump” on 4chan/pol/ between 2015 and 2018.Moving from the unsavory depths of anonymous forums like 4chan and 8chan, the article by Lucie Chateau looks at the dissimulative and ironic practices of meme culture in general, and the subgenre of depression memes on Instagram and other platforms, in particular. In different and often ambiguous ways, the article demonstrates, depression memes and their ironic self-subversion undermine the “happiness effect” and injunction to perform your authentic self online that is paradigmatic for social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram. In this sense, depression meme subculture still moves in the orbit of the early Web’s playful and ironic mask cultures.Finally, the contribution by Joanna Zienkiewicz looks at the lesser known platform Pixelcanvas as a battleground and playfield for antagonistic political identities, defying the wisdom, mostly proffered by the alt-right, that “the left can’t meme”. Rather than fragmented, hypersensitive, or humourless, as online leftist identity politics has lately been criticized for by Angela Nagle and others, leftist engagement on Pixelcanvas deploys similar transgressive and dissimulative tactics as the alt-right, but without the reactionary and fetishized vision that characterises the latter.In conclusion, we offer this collection as a kind of meditation on the role of dissimulative identity play in the fractured post-centrist landscape of contemporary politics, as well as a invitation to think about the troll as a contemporary term by which "our understanding of the cybernetic Enemy Other becomes the basis on which we understand ourselves" (Gallison).ReferencesColeman, Gabriella. Hacker, Hoaxer, Whistleblower, Spy: The Many Faces of Anonymous. New York: Verso, 2014.De Zeeuw, Daniël, and Marc Tuters. "Teh Internet Is Serious Business: On the Deep Vernacular Web and Its Discontents." Cultural Politics 16.2 (2020): 214–232.Galison, Peter. “The Ontology of the Enemy.” Critical Inquiry 21.1 (2014): 228–66.Hawley, George. Making Sense of the Alt-Right. New York: Columbia UP, 2017.Massanari, Adrienne. “#Gamergate and the Fappening: How Reddit’s Algorithm, Governance, and Culture Support Toxic Technocultures.” New Media & Society 19.3 (2016): 329–46.Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

The rise of peripheral nationalism in Pakistan and the Pashtun Tahafuz movement

ABSTRACT Pakistan is facing a robust wave of nationalism in the shape of the Pashtun Tahafuz (protection) movement. It is not the first time Pakistan is experiencing the outburst of a peripheral nationalist movement. Since the inception of Pakistan in 1947, it has been confronting the multiple challenges stemming out from the ethnic movements. Pakistan was fragmented in 1971 at the hands of the Bengali sub-nationalist movement. The separatist demands in Sindh and the secessionist demands in Baluchistan have been striking the polity. The Pashtun nationalism is emerging as a new daunting challenge in the aftermath of the war on terrorism in the contemporary political and social landscape of Pakistan. This study will make a multi-pronged analysis of the propensity of peripheral nationalist movements in Pakistan and will dissect the rise of the Pashtun Tahafuz movement and its possible implications for state and society in Pakistan.

Making It Up As He Goes: Trump’s Improvisational Rhetoric and the Hyper-Rhetorical Presidency

Trump disregards the norms of presidential communication by regularly speaking or tweeting off-the-cuff with seemingly little forethought or editorial input. As White House administrations institutionalized presidential speechwriting and strategic communications over the past century, meticulously-crafted rhetoric became the norm. Trump’s improvisational rhetoric is the antithesis of the highly-professionalized, disciplined approach to political communication we have come to expect from the presidency. This essay takes the position that his reliance on improvisational rhetoric is more than a matter of communication; it is a matter of governance. Trump regularly uses improvised communication to make important policy decisions. In doing so, the president conflates rhetoric and governance, presenting his personal decisions to tweet or speak as policy actions taken by the United States government. It is tempting to discount the president’s propensity for policy-oriented improvisational rhetoric as a Trump-specific phenomenon that will exit the White House with him. However, the tendency to collapse the distinction between rhetoric and governing is not anomalous feature of the modern presidency. To illuminate the dynamics that have long normalized the “not normal," this essay develops the construct of the “hyper-rhetorical presidency” by outlining four theses that situate presidential rhetoric within the broader landscape of contemporary American politics. Taken together, these dynamics contextualize and explain Trump’s reliance on improvisational rhetoric as a reflection of an increasingly distorted political order and dysfunctional system of governance.

Bolivia: Assessing the (now Rapidly Evolving) Contemporary Social and Political Landscape

[This is an Introduction by the invited editors and therefore has no Abstract]

Politics of Symbolism: The Making of Birsa Munda’s Statue in Post-colonial Jharkhand, India

Birsa Munda, Adivasi leader (Indigenous people) led a rebellion at the end of the 19th century against the dikus (outsiders) popularly known as Birsa Ulgulan (tumult, rebellion). The movement targeted British officials, zamindars, and missionaries. One of the immediate effects of the movement emerged in the form of protectionary legislation (Chota Nagpur Tenancy Act) and later played an influential role in the making of Jharkhand. In the contemporary social and political landscape, the presence of Birsa Munda in the form of the built environment such as statue is indelible and offers an exciting opportunity to understand the new aesthetic turn. In particular, the author investigates two statues in Jharkhand. These statues that function as “sites of memory” play a significant role in political mobilisation and vote-bank politics. It also offers a possibility to understand the relationship between the state, elites and subalterns. The paper builds upon ethnographic materials collected during the fieldwork and devices a conceptual tool of “material-memory” to offer the specific role of Birsa’s memory as medium of doing memory politics.

A Short Introduction to the Proceedings of the Conference “The Reason of Passions: Emotion and Rationality in the Landscape of (Contemporary) Politics”

A short introduction to the proceedings of the conference “The Reason of Passions: Emotion and Rationality in the Landscape of (Contemporary) Politics”, held over two days at the University of Bergen in November 2019. The conference was organised as a joint effort by the Department of Philosophy of the University of Bergen (UiB), Norway, and the Department of Antiquity, Philosophy and History (DAFIST) of the University of Genoa, Italy.

The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History by Carli N. Conklin

Reviewed by: The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History by Carli N. Conklin Lauren Michalak Keywords Pursuit of happiness, Declaration of Independence, Blackstone, Thomas Jefferson The Pursuit of Happiness in the Founding Era: An Intellectual History. By Carli N. Conklin. (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 2019. Pp. 241. Cloth, $40.00.) We live in cynical political times. It's easy—common even—to ascribe base motives or rationales to people's actions, particularly in the realm of politics and law. This cynicism is not reserved to our contemporary political landscape; it filters into our view of historical actors. Carli Conklin brilliantly and persuasively compels us to buck this trend and to take seriously the words inscribed in one of the foundational documents of the United States: the Declaration of Independence. Conklin does not ask us to abandon our critical assessment of the founders' intentions; rather she charges us to ground our understanding of these actors in their own times and conceptions of themselves. In a short but thorough examination of a key phrase in the Declaration—"the pursuit of happiness"—Conklin reminds us that context matters. Conklin argues that "the pursuit of happiness" had substantive and broadly understood meaning in the late eighteenth century. This meaning drew together four different elements: "English law and legal theory, the history and philosophy of classical antiquity, Christianity, and the Scottish Enlightenment's focus on Newtonian science" (8). Together, these elements reflect an understanding that the pursuit of happiness was [End Page 370] a process that sought to harmonize man and natural law, through which man strived toward a virtuous life. The result, Conklin asserts, would be eudaimonia, an ancient Greek term for "man's own real and substantial happiness" (8). The happiness that resulted from eudaimonia rested on a virtuous life that united public duty and private rights. Thus, Conklin argues, the phrase embodied "a private right to pursue a life lived in accordance with the laws of nature as they pertain to man and a public duty to govern in harmony with those laws" (134). Conklin pushes back against scholars who have dismissed the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" as either a substitution for Locke's "property" (to avoid raising the issue of slavery and property in people) or as an innocuous rhetorical flourish. In a historiographical essay in the book's appendix, Conklin challenges interpretations of the phrase set forth by William Scott (Locke's property), John Crowley (pursuit of comfort), Jan Lewis (quiet family life), and Garry Wills (Scottish Enlightenment's public virtue).1 For Conklin, these interpretations miss the complexity of the phrase by pigeonholing it to one particular meaning or strand of philosophy. Conklin's work builds on these authors, as well as studies of the process of crafting the Declaration written by Carl Becker and Pauline Maier, to give a fuller sense of how the founders understood "the pursuit of happiness" in a nuanced and uncontested way.2 To demonstrate that this understanding of "the pursuit of happiness" was substantive and broadly accepted, Conklin closely examines and compares Blackstone's use of the term in his Commentaries on the Laws of England and Jefferson's use in the Declaration drafts and its final version (approved by the Second Continental Congress). Conklin acknowledges that Jefferson rejected Blackstone's politics and found previous commentaries on English common law more accurate; yet despite [End Page 371] these differences, the common way that both Blackstone and Jefferson used "the pursuit of happiness" supports Conklin's interpretation of the phrase and her assertion of its broad and common acceptance. She breaks her analysis into three sections focusing on Blackstone and his Commentaries, the Declaration, and the commonalities in usage in both documents across their different contexts. Concise chapters make the book a quick read and potentially useful for undergraduates or graduate students as well as legal and intellectual scholars of the eighteenth century. Six appendices give readers insight into the historiographies of Blackstone's Commentaries and the Declaration as well as reproductions of key passages and drafts of each text. Conklin engages in an intensive textual analysis of the phrase "the pursuit of happiness" and delves into the...

Contentious polities and political polarization in Thailand: Post-Thaksin reflections

This article investigates the performance of identity and the concept of a ‘good’ leader reflected in the discourse of the former Prime Minister Thaksin Shinawatra, a controversial yet significant politician in Thai contemporary politics. The analysis focuses on how Thaksin constructed his political self, and how it redefined the Thai political field and the relevant practices. The article traces the discursive construction of his political identity in the radio program PM Thaksin talks to the people aired in 2001–2005. The findings indicate that Thaksin’s discourse constructed an ambivalent political identity through heterogeneity and dynamic use of ‘we’. Various mechanism of legitimization secured his popularity and created a lasting bond with the people. The discussion argues that while the discourse projecting a leadership style that is both confident and defiant strengthened the bond between Thaksin and his supporters, it increasingly pushed the ‘others’ away, leading to a growing ideological gap and later an adversarial sense among Thais, a fracture that still dominates the contemporary Thai political and social landscape.

On the New-Old Political Concepts: Re-Conceptualizing and Expanding the Views in Studying Politics Following the Impact of Globalization

Abstract The article deals with the differences of pre-global and post-global conceptualizations in political sciences. It investigates the functions of political concepts under the changes globalization caused to political systems, culture and ideology. The paper does not engage with the methodological debates on political concepts, or question the undeniable importance of certain political concepts, but rather it addresses some of the principal concepts for which globalization may be a useful concept with regard to their similarities and differences with the Cold War era. Despite the variety of political concepts as a result of various development phases of society, models of governance and ideological impact to the political processes along centuries, the concepts of power and authority seem to be among those that have survived in terms of the consistency of their relevance. However, the conception of politics through power, authority and leadership has been re-dimensioned significantly under the post-global era. By contrast, although the concept of sovereignty has been one of the initial concepts in the landscape of contemporary politics for many centuries back, following the effects of globalization, it has reduced its relevance significantly. In this view, as a consequence, the article discusses as well as the reconfiguration of the concept of state in a post-global era marked by a period of advancing causes—both trans-border and transnational causes—promoted by post-sovereignty states. Under these circumstances the traditional debate regarding conflict versus cooperation in politics is one of the areas remaining within a status quo dimension in the dioptric view of both pre-global and post-global conceptualizations. With a contrastive methodological approach, the article as well analyzes the development and meaning of the concepts of political equality, justice and liberty as indispensable concepts in modern post-global political processes.

Blockchain as a disruptive technology for business: A systematic review

Blockchain is the latest ‘disruptive innovation’ that has caught scholars’ attention. It is the underlying technology for Bitcoin and other digital currencies. Stakeholders like developers, entrepreneurs, and technology enthusiasts claim blockchain has the potential to reconfigure the contemporary economic, legal, political and cultural landscape. Skeptics claim the concept and its applications remain ambiguous and uncertain. Business scholars began publishing studies on the emergence and impact of blockchain, bitcoin, and related projects in 2014. In this study, we conduct a PRISMA guided systematic review of blockchain research in the business literature from 2014 to 2018. Our results show a rapid increase of studies over the five year period. The findings also convey key insights about the current state of scholarly investigation on blockchain, including its top benefits and challenges for business and society. We found that blockchain remains an early-stage domain of research in terms of theoretical grounding, methodological diversity, and empirically grounded work. We suggest research directions to improve our understanding of the state of blockchain and advance future research of this increasingly important and expansive area.

Believing in the USA: Derrida, Melville and the Great American Charlatan

ABSTRACTThis essay considers the relationship between the prophet and the charlatan, particularly as they figure in the contemporary American political landscape. It argues that at moments of democratic political crisis these figures arise and reveal the vacancy of sovereignty within the democratic model. The essay treats Herman Melville’s The Confidence-Man along with Jacques Derrida’s writings on democracy and the apocalyptic tone as resources in this endeavor. It considers as well why recent worries over the status of facts in the era of “fake news” have led to critiques of deconstruction.

Review of Make America Meme Again: The Rhetoric of the Alt-Right by Heather Suzanne Woods & Leslie A. Hahner (Peter Lang)

In Make America Meme Again, Heather Suzanne Woods and Leslie Hahner highlight the central role that memes play in the contemporary political landscape. Specifically, the authors show the ways in which members of the Alt-right have deftly used memes to forward their political agenda, to recruit new members, and to move the so-called “Overton window” rightward to expand the acceptable field of political discourse. In their schema, memes are not simply distractions from important political issues; rather, they function rhetorically and work to constitute the political field. The authors trace the origins of the Alt-right to the murky depths of the internet and show how discourses that emerged from these shadowy depths were able to appeal to a wider audience and cohere around mainstream political discourse. The authors carefully outline the ways that memes circulate, the rhetorical strategies that the Alt-right uses to deploy them, and the ways they work to disavow any charges of racism or extremism that critics might level against them. For Woods and Hahner, memes are the dominant mechanism through which the Alt-right is able to secure and enact its discursive power. Aware of the bleakness of this particular historical moment, Make America Meme Again provides a cogent argument for the ways the Alt-right has been able harness memetic power while also offering a blueprint through which future scholars and activists might reconfigure the present conjuncture so that the Alt-right does not have a stranglehold over the discursive power of memes in the future.

The ongoing aftermath to the financial crisis and the Great Recession

This article discusses the consequences of the financial crisis that started in 2008 in the West, and particularly in the United States, as a manifestation of neoliberal capitalism’s multiple failures. In doing so, it focuses on the scholarly contributions of Manuel Castells and his colleagues in two important books: Aftermath: The Cultures of the Economic Crisis (2012) and Another Economy is Possible (2017). Both books are collective works led and edited by Castells. Also included in the review is a third book by Castells, Rupture: The Crisis of Liberal Democracy (2018), which can be read as a statement on some of the political consequences of the 2008 financial crisis and a report on the current crisis of liberal democracy. The contention is that Castells et al. make an important contribution to the socio-economic literature on the financial crisis, its consequences, and the interpretation of the societal changes that ensued and are key to understand our contemporary world. Such contribution, as observed in the three books under review, can be summarized as follows: (1) Castells and colleagues provide cases and examples from around the world in a broad comparative fashion, thus expanding our understanding of a crisis that was essentially a crisis of the West with ramifications in other countries but never a truly global crisis. (2) The approach of Castells and his colleagues is interdisciplinary and goes beyond purely economic arguments to include sociological, political and cultural ideas and insights that help us understand the complexity of the historical period under analysis; readers develop an awareness of the systemic character of the crisis, where all events were closely interrelated; in particular, both micro and macro processes leading to the crisis converged into a mutually dialectical and reinforcing relationship that warrants the contention by the authors that ‘economies’ are ‘cultures.’ (3) The authors in both Aftermath and Another Economy is Possible focus on the (long) aftermath of the crisis, which is still ongoing as of September 2019 around the world; in fact, one of Castells’ main points is that the financial crisis brought about irreversible societal change, ongoing and clearly visible today, as it triggered a significant restructuring of global informational capitalism. (4) The authors provide a focus on one of the reactive consequences of the crisis: alternative economic practices developing in the aftermath of the crisis, under the premise that we might be witnessing the rise of a new economic model based on new, alternative values. (5) Castells provides a discussion (in Rupture) of aspects of the contemporary political landscape a decade after the outset of the financial crisis and the Great Recession.

How to run an efficient political machine: the billionaire Andrej Babiš and his political-business project

Abstract This paper contributes to the debate on entrepreneurial parties with the empirical example of the Czech ANO party. The authors focus on selected aspects of the internal organisation and functioning of the party, emphasising the points where business methods and practices are transferred to the environment of party politics. The empirical part shows how the leader has built loyalty inside the party, and analyses its methods of control and coercion that are similar to the human resources recruitment techniques used in businesses. The authors investigate such matters as the vetting of candidates for public offices, the significant barriers created against those wishing to join the party and the party leadership’s strict control over membership. The article also describes the development of ANO’s electoral-professional services and the creation of mass media support. In conclusion, the authors discuss the broader future for the internal workings of entrepreneurial parties – including their lack of intra-party democracy – and their relationship with the changing landscape of contemporary party politics.

Archives of empire

ABSTRACTSouth Africa has, in recent years, been witnessing the unraveling of narratives of collective being and becoming that are hinged around Apartheid as the singular institution of power to be overcome. In this paper I argue that while Apartheid has provided one of the enduring examples of racial exclusion in the twentieth century we need to think more carefully about histories of empire and their endurance in the present. I trace the archival grain of empire in the various projects of gentrification that have marked the landscape of South Africa’s major cities in recent years. I argue that the transformation of these spaces contains the palimpsestic traces of South Africa’s imperial histories and as such should compel us to take serious how what I call archives of empire continue to mark post-Apartheid spatiality and subjectivity. The #RhodesMustFall and #FeesMustFall student movements began some important archaeological work around reading how we make sense of our contemporary struggles and predicaments and as such should be taken seriously as having staged theoretical interventions in our contemporary social and political landscape.

Rebooting Roseanne: Feminist Voice across Decades

Rebooting Roseanne: Feminist Voice across Decades

Between the Desire for Law and the Law of Desire: #MeToo and the Cost of Telling the Truth Today

ABSTRACT This article examines the kairotic beginnings of the #MeToo movement in order to understand what we are to make of this moment. It shows that commentaries about #MeToo unfold as a debate over the desire for law and the law of desire, ceding the contingent kairotic moment in which we might remake our contemporary political landscapes. As such, I argue that movements dedicated to ending sexual violence must reimagine the scene of address in which demands for justice might be spoken and their speech recognized as the truth. This project is complicated, however, by a post-truth era in which telling the truth matters little because truth itself has been devalued. Through this lens, we can see that the cost of telling the truth in the terms of the established debate is the creation of a form of identity politics that reinforces post-truth logics rather than intervening in them.