Contest Of Ideas Research Articles

President James K. Polk’s deathbed conversion: the contest of ideas and market within the mid-nineteenth-century southern evangelical press

ABSTRACT In June 1849, James K. Polk died from cholera in Nashville, less than four months removed from the presidency. Seizing on a sensational column in the New York Herald, the editor of the Tennessee Baptist, J. R. Graves, used Polk’s hasty deathbed conversion to educate southerners about the inherent dangers they embraced when they joined Methodist and Presbyterian congregations. The ensuing debate offers a window into the sectarian edge of Nashville’s religious weeklies, revealing that far from fearing greed or secularization, they embraced competition from other Protestant denominations in a race to build a modern, denominational press that could evangelize the region.

Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe

Reviewed by: Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought ed. by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe Robert Jackson Insiders, Outsiders: Toward a New History of Southern Thought. Edited by Sarah E. Gardner and Steven M. Stowe. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 242. Paper, $29.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-6356-2; cloth, $95.00, 978-1-4696-6355-5.) There is a lot to like in this collection. The contributors are prominent scholars of southern history and literature who represent two generations of thoughtful, dedicated work. Many of the individual essays have particular strengths: Stephen Berry’s essay on Edgar Allan Poe is beautifully written and—rare in an academic piece of this sort—rather dramatic in the telling. Essays by John Grammer and Scott Romine on New Journalism and Reconstruction-era literary revisionism, respectively, are excellent models of the case-study method. Another highlight is Michael Kreyling’s essay, which contrasts the writ-erly approaches of Tony Judt and Michael O’Brien, a pair of eminent British-born historians who passed away in recent years (Judt in 2010, O’Brien in 2015). Kreyling examines their distinct methods on the way to lauding O’Brien’s Conjectures of Order: Intellectual Life and the American South, 1810–1860 (2 vols.; Chapel Hill, 2004) for its difficult balancing act between the rigors of an overarching interpretive frame and the frequently rebellious “subtleties of individuality” (p. 219). An eminent literary scholar himself, Kreyling takes the occasion to meditate on the challenges of reconciling the immensity of the past with the historian’s inescapable fate—“the process by which history becomes writing and inevitably writing becomes history” (p. 203). This is an apt conclusion to a volume whose debt to Michael O’Brien is significant. The editors dedicate the collection to O’Brien, and, indeed, a respectful invocation of O’Brien’s scholarship is a frequent, if not quite compulsory, gesture across the essays. The contributors are divided evenly between history and literature, and they speak to the two disciplines in overlapping ways that mirror much of O’Brien’s own methodology. Southern intellectual history here seems largely contained in these two disciplines; this is a rich, battle-tested interdisciplinary matrix, to be sure, but there does not seem to be much awareness of other disciplines—sociology, performing arts, religious studies, the pure and applied sciences, to name several in increasing scales of magnitude—and what they might contribute to this shared scholarly project. The vision of southern intellectual history that emerges in these pages instead relies most fundamentally on the worlds of print culture and publishing. Two essays, by Beth Barton Schweiger and Jonathan Daniel Wells, address book history. Others deal with individual authors and their publishing contexts: Berry on Poe’s tortured relationship to the reputation-imparting Charles Dickens; Timothy J. Williams on Edwin Wiley Fuller and his audience of Lost [End Page 131] Cause enthusiasts; Grammer on Willie Morris’s cultivation of the “Wrecking Crew,” a southern cohort at Harper’s Magazine at the end of the 1960s; and Romine on Edward A. Pollard’s almost comical search for authentic southern identities that would meet the needs of his imagined readership. “The constant in Pollard’s writing,” Romine concludes wryly, “is a conception of ‘all true southerners,’ even if the true southerner in question never survived the next publication cycle” (p. 176). Indeed, even Michael T. Bernath’s essay on the complex situation of northerners who worked as schoolteachers in the South near the beginning of the Civil War, and whose mere presence frequently whipped up violent conflicts based more on local class antagonism than regional or racial identification, emphasizes this point. Bernath characterizes such figures as “public intellectuals” (although his discussion of their actual thoughts and ideas is minimal); and he concludes that the contest of ideas that played out in local newspapers in response to their presence “shows the central role that print played in antebellum southern life” (pp. 49–50). Another remarkable aspect of this volume is the almost complete absence of Black or other nonwhite subjects. Many, perhaps most, of the essays address slavery, segregation, and racism itself...

From ménage à trois back to pas de deux? Ministerial advisers, civil servants and the contest of policy ideas

The institutionalization of the role of ministerial advisers in most parliamentary democracies has transformed what was once à pas de deux between ministers and senior civil servants into a ménage à trois. This article assesses the impact of ministerial advisers on the contest of policy ideas. It makes a theoretical case for paying closer attention to this issue than has thus far been the case, and assesses civil servants’ perceptions of advisers’ influence on contestability. The core conclusion, which is at variance with much of the scholarship on ministerial advisers, is that advisers pose a greater threat to policy contestability than to civil service impartiality.

Securing the 'Rules-Based Order' in the Indo-Pacific: The Significance of Strategic Narrative

The rules-based order is under challenge on a number of fronts. China as a rising power is naturally a major challenger, and its rise has created significant uncertainty about the kind of order that will prevail within the Indo-Pacific into the future. Other external forces at play — from the shifting nature and multipolar distribution of power across the region, to the emergence of new demands and sites for political contest, and the impact of new threats including climate change — are all exerting different pressures on the rules-based order. Add to this the fact that rules are not intended to be static fixtures of global order. They shift and evolve to meet the needs and expectations of those that set, enforce and comply with them. Amid this context of re-ordering, this paper argues that there is a more significant contest underway in the Indo-Pacific: the contest for strategic narrative. It is a contest of leadership, influence and ideas, whereby success is ultimately demonstrated through the ability to set the political agenda, while also framing the rules and terms of compliance for that agenda; thus, shaping the future of regional order in the Indo-Pacific.

Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now ed. by Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman

Reviewed by: Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now ed. by Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman James Kuzner (bio) Review of Hillary Eklund and Wendy Beth Hyman, ed. Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare: Why Renaissance Literature Matters Now. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2019. xv + 271 pages. $110 (hardcover). Teaching Social Justice Through Shakespeare felt urgently needed in 2019. Writing this review in the summer of 2020—on the eve of an election and in the midst of not only an inequality-exacerbating pandemic but also the most recent season of racist violence in the United States—the urgency feels so much the greater. Eklund and Hyman have assembled an extraordinary array of essays, ones that draw Shakespeare into discussions of (among other things) race, gender and gender identity, disability, incarceration, and environmental devastation. Taking a cue, in a sense, from Ayanna Thompson and Laura Turchi’s Teaching Shakespeare with a Purpose: A Student-Centered Approach (2016), Eklund and Hyman contend that although teachers do and should engage in “helping our students evaluate evidence, parse rhetoric, and engage in a thoughtful contest of ideas”—and although this, in itself, may have political value—we “must also use our expertise to promote justice in more direct ways” (2). Most of the collection’s essays, accordingly, focus on doing just this. The book is full of insights about successes, failures, and sheer possibilities for furthering social justice in postsecondary classrooms, and [End Page 115] should be read by anyone in position to continue this critical work by way of Shakespeare. The collection includes an introduction, twenty-one essays organized into five sections, and an afterword. The first section, “Defamiliarizing Shakespeare,” features essays that show how authors work to unsettle a sense of Shakespeare as “something students may suppose they already know” (11). Because students sometimes approach Shakespeare as a familiar—and unchallengeable—authority, Adhaar Noor Desai decenters both Shakespeare and himself as classroom authorities, encouraging students to “riff” on a given word or phrase in a play, to trust their interpretive instincts, and, in that way, to “claim Shakespeare for themselves” (28). Sawyer Kemp, exposing limits to upholding Shakespeare as a familiar authority on transgender issues in particular, highlights how Shakespearean moments of passing (Rosalind as Ganymede or Portia as Balthazar, for instance) in fact trade in a “magical transvestism” (38) that is “incoherent with the experience of anyone attempting to transition today” (37). Rather than look to Shakespeare as modeling the experience of transition, Kemp rightly argues, we need to think of better ways “to visit the past to serve the present” (43), ways that could involve tracing striking parallels between, say, Hamlet’s travails and the current transgender struggle. Allison Hobgood, a third example from this section, works to defamiliarize Shakespeare by practicing what she calls a “pedagogy of disorientation,” one that “encourages everyone, including teachers, away from fear, stoic ‘empiricism,’ and the need for mastery toward immersive, deeply affective, real-time experiential learning” (49). One way such pedagogy manifests, for Hobgood, is by involving a wide range of recent Shakespearean adaptations. In the case of Macbeth, Hobgood includes not only Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood, but also Manga Shakespeare and Courtney Carbone’s Macbeth #killing it from the OMG Shakespeare series, and in so doing Hobgood found herself better equipped to discuss mental illness with students. They could better explore “not only whether or why Macbeth ‘loses his mind’ over the course of the play, but also how we are encouraged, through stigmatizing cultural narratives and biases, to understand atypical mental functioning and behavior as ‘abnormal’ ” (51). Decentering Macbeth itself makes for the productive sort of disorientation that helps students question their sense of what “normal” is and means. The collection’s second section, “Decolonizing Shakespeare,” is foremost concerned with issues of race and, particularly, of whether and how Shakespeare might be de-linked from white supremacist aims. Jason M. Demeter, [End Page 116] for example, describes how he designed a class aimed at challenging Shakespeare’s status as “the exclusive property of a white majority culture” (67). To do so, Demeter paired Shakespeare’s plays with works by (among others) James Baldwin, August Wilson, Carlyle...

(Re)construyendo el patrimonio cultural: de muelle portuario a paseo turístico-recreativo

Ingeniero White, localizado en el sudoeste bonaerense (Argentina), surge como nodo ferroportuario en el contexto del Modelo Agroexportador. Producto del devenir espacio-temporal se identifican una serie construcciones vinculadas al ferrocarril y el puerto. Actualmente, se lleva a cabo un concurso de ideas para poner en valor uno de los antiguos muelles de esta área. En este contexto, el objetivo de la investigación consiste en analizar desde una mirada crítica la propuesta de refuncionalización del antiguo muelle de elevadores en la localidad, los actores sociales implicados y los discursos asociados en torno a la (re) construcción de este lugar como sitio patrimonial, turístico y recreativo. A partir de un enfoque de investigación de carácter cualitativo, basado en el análisis de documentos y en entrevistas a informantes clave, se evidencia la configuración de un discurso por parte de los agentes dominantes, estructurado a través de la participación ciudadana y de una noción integral del patrimonio cultural, que queda plasmado en los instrumentos de planificación, pero que en la realidad se desvanece.
 Palabras clave: Patrimonio cultural; Discursos patrimoniales y turísticos; Muelle de elevadores; Ingeniero White.

The Economists and Monetary Thought in Interwar New Zealand: The Gradual Emergence of Monetary Policy Activism

The emergence of monetary thought in New Zealand after 1914 has not been subject to extensive analysis. This paper remedies this deficit for the interwar period. The focus is upon the propagation of monetary ideas in New Zealand and their intellectual sources. We apply a heuristic in which different monetary doctrines are situated along a continuum between extreme monetary policy ‘activism’ and extreme ‘minimalism’. In the 1920s, New Zealand economists betrayed a minimalist bias across several dimensions: money supply regulation, the role of money and the international monetary transmission process in the business cycle, and the operation of bank-credit allocation mechanisms. Incipient activism in the work of Condliffe and Belshaw was countered by Niemeyer's case for a minimalist central bank. Fisher adopted an anti-reflationist, forced savings approach to the 1930s crisis. Copland, Tocker, Belshaw and Hight downplayed these consequences. Extended debate over Reserve Bank legislation generated new meanings for the phrase ‘monetary policy independence’; it also turned most economists against extreme activism that prevailed from 1938. Throughout the interwar period, New Zealand entertained a vigorous contest of monetary ideas inherited from the work of Keynes, Hawtrey, Cannan, Robbins, and Hayek, though adapted to local conditions.

PUBLIC POLICY AND RELIGIOUS CONFLICT IN INDONESIA: THE CASE OF AHMADIYAH

among conflict cases is Ahmadiyah sect as struggling minorities who spreading their influence in the middle of Sunni Islam majority. The conflict escalated and manifest in violence during the 2000s. The government eventually enacted Joint Ministerial Decree (SKB 3 Menteri) in 2008, which constrained preaching activities of Ahmadiyah who being accused of heresy. However, the decree did not stop the violence against Ahmadiyah. The conflict of Ahmadiyah was not solely about the heresy that charged on the Ahmadis, but also involving the contest of values, ideas, and authority between the liberal and pluralist Muslim groups versus the conservative Muslim groups. While the policy embodies controversial state as it perpetuates majority domination as well as close opportunities for constructive dialogues between the conflicting parties, this article views it as a resolution to anticipate the worst scenario. Therefore, the state's role as a policy maker is stillneeded to actualize social order, national stability and keep the democratic life under control.

Neoliberalism and social work identity

ABSTRACTThis article considers the relationship between the identity of social work and the neoliberal political project. Reference is made to a small but carefully structured quantitative research study in Auckland, New Zealand which examined the knowledge applied and produced in the practice of social work. This study found evidence consistent with Philp’s [(1979). Notes on the form of knowledge in social work. Sociological Review, 27(1), 83–111] theorisation of a specific ‘form of knowledge’ for social work which is produced and reproduced as a function of relational engagement between social workers and those who are constructed as ‘clients’ in an unequal society. This discourse casts the ‘failing subject’ as socially located and inherently redeemable in direct contrast to populist neoliberal constructions of personal responsibility and moral deficit. With reference to dialectical theory it is suggested that this resilient discourse, embedded in ‘every-day’ practice, is inevitably a source of resistance to the imposition of neoliberal practice and policy design. This resistance provides hope for the progressive voice of social work in the current contest of ideas in relation to the future development of social work.

Rita Felski. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 232 pp.

Previous articleNext article No AccessThe CI ReviewRita Felski. The Limits of Critique. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2015. 232 pp.Davide PanagiaDavide Panagia Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Critical Inquiry Volume 42, Number 4Summer 2016 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/686957 Views: 827Total views on this site © 2016 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

The Early Middle Ages of Samuel Beckett

Beckett's investigations in the history of philosophy are well represented in his notebooks of the late 1920s and early 1930s, which provide a close record of his reading in ancient, medieval, and modern philosophy, as well as in history, literature, and psychology. Numerous scholars – Daniella Caselli, Anthony Uhlmann, Dirk Van Hulle, Matthew Feldman, and David Addyman among others – have carefully delineated the relationship between Beckett's note-taking and his deployment of philosophical sources in his literary texts. Whilst the focus quite rightly tends to fall on Beckett's absorption of Presocratic, Aristotelian, Cartesian, and post-Cartesian philosophy, there are important strands of early medieval philosophy that find expression in his literary work. The philosophy notes housed in the library of Trinity College, Dublin, provide insights into Beckett's reading in medieval philosophy, drawing almost exclusively from Wilhelm Windelband's History of Philosophy. The epoch spanning from Augustine to Abelard saw central concepts in theology and metaphysics develop in sophistication, such as matters of divine identity and non-identity, the metaphysics of light, and the nature of sin. The influence of the Eastern Church Fathers (Gregory of Nyssa, Basil of Caesarea, Maximus the Confessor) on Western metaphysics finds expression in the figuration of light and its relation to knowing and unknowing. This eastern theological inflection is evident in the ‘Dream’ Notebook, where Beckett's notes demonstrate his careful reading of William Inge's Christian Mysticism. These influences are expressed most prominently in various themes and allusions in his early novels Dream of Fair to Middling Women, Murphy, and Watt. The formal experiments and narrative self-consciousness of these early novels also respond to the early medieval transformation of textual form, where the precarious post-classical fruits of learning were preserved in new modes of encyclopaedism, commentary, and annotation. Beckett's overt display of learning in his early novels was arguably a kind of intellectual and textual preservation. But the contest of ideas in his work subsequently became less one of intellectual history and more that of immanent thinking in the process of composition itself.

Relationship between Creativity, Personality and Entrepreneurship: An Exploratory Study

In the entrepreneurship field, the study of entrepreneurial opportunities has been a topic of interest, however, the origin and nature of these opportunities, from the perspective of the person who identifies them, has not been sufficiently studied. The aim of this study was to explore the relationship between the preference of the person in the creative process when he identifies an entrepreneurial opportunity and how he organizes and processes the information to take advantage of that opportunity. Another objective is to analyze the personality traits associated with the creative process and thinking style. To explore these relationships, the responses of 183 people who participated in a contest of business ideas were analyzed. Statistical analysis showed that the strongest relationship between the creative process and thinking style was between Sufficiency of Originality and Ideator variables. The same variables also showed the greatest association with the personality traits of those who participated in the study. Other relationships between the creative process, thinking style and personality traits and their implications are also shown.

Book Review: A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor, by Nelson Lichtenstein

Book Review: <i>A Contest of Ideas: Capital, Politics, and Labor</i>, by Nelson Lichtenstein

Introduction to a good idea: Chaos theory of careers

The chaos theory of career (CTC) has a very special relationship with the Australian Journal of Career Development. In 2003, Pryor and Bright published the theory for the first time in the Australian Journal of Career Development (Pryor & Bright, 2003a) and the Australian Journal of Psychology (Pryor & Bright, 2003b). One decade has passed; the CTC is flourishing, and, now, in 2014, this special issue of the journal is a celebration of the theory’s status, and also acknowledges the outstanding achievements of the CTC’s chief theorists: Professors Robert Pryor and Jim Bright. A good idea is one that can be translated from its abstract tenets into testable hypotheses and workable practices. Researchers want to discern real empirical effects and practitioners want to generate real outcomes for their clients and students. Indeed, Pryor and Bright have brought a good idea to the field of career development. They have promulgated the CTC, articulated its core tenets, and demonstrated its pragmatic value. This achievement is evident in their book, The Chaos Theory of Careers: A New Perspective on Working in the Twenty-First Century (Pryor & Bright, 2011). Some say that politics is the contest of ideas. The same can be said of the social sciences. In the turbulent mix of science and practice, good ideas come and go. If a good idea’s hypotheses fail the test of evidence, and if it does not work in practice, then its fate is an inexorable decline into the Underworld for good ideas, thence to wait for some intellectual Orpheus to bring it back into the world of ideas—never looking back, but looking forward to a new future, once again in the great contest of ideas. This is not the fate of the CTC. The CTC is very much alive and well as a theory, and, accordingly, this special issue of the journal attests its currency and capacity to generate other new ideas, perspectives, and practices. However, there is no time for complacency. Although the CTC has accreted a substantive literature in its favour, adherents of the CTC must continue testing its pragmatic truth-value, empirically and practically. I entreat you to read the papers in this issue with especial intent and focus. Repay a debt of gratitude to Pryor and Bright by using their CTC to generate hypotheses, design studies to test their veracity, and formulate new forms of practice. As you do so, our field, career development, will be all the richer for your engagement with, what is, a good idea.

A contest of ideas: capital, politics, and labor

A contest of ideas: capital, politics, and labor

An identity‐based understanding of intergroup conflict

As conflict has at its basis a contest of ideas, values or resources between two or more groups, a comprehensive understanding of intergroup conflict must take into account the psychological processes that make groups and group behavior meaningful. Because individuals value and internalize identities relevant to their social, geographic, economic, historical and political positions, any devaluation, loss or imposed change to one of those identities is likely to be particularly threatening. The Social Identity Approach formulates an understanding of how these identity‐based motivations interact with social structures to predict intergroup conflict. Importantly, it also provides an explanation of how procedural justice mechanisms can be utilized to guide conflicting interests to common cooperative goals that can be accepted and pursued. By having representation and participation of relevant actors in the development of a shared identity, as is this case when nation states are formed or re‐created, threat is reduced, legitimacy built and the basis for positive intergroup relations created.

USING IDEAS TO ADVANCE PROFESSIONS: PUBLIC SECTOR ACCRUAL ACCOUNTING

This study investigates a contest of ideas that took place between public sector accrual accounting (PSAA) and Government Finance Statistics (GFS) in the Australian state of New South Wales. The debate, its context and its course is historically analysed from a neo‐institutional theory perspective, employing both documentary and oral history sources. Important in PSAA's win over GFS were: phantom images of PSAA success; a dominant politician; discourse control directing attention to the balance sheet; and, normative isomorphism from professionally qualified public sector accountants. Understanding public sector accounting change requires analysis beyond technical change; in this case the actors and their motives overwhelmed the technical.

Democracy and the Divine

Democracy and the Divine Anne Norton (bio) When I spoke at the roundtable on “We are all democrats now,” I spoke from notes, drawing on several aspects of the work I’m now engaged in. In writing the paper after the fact, I have tried to make a virtue of a lack. Surely my thinking has altered because of what was said there. I am especially mindful of a call and a warning. Neve Gordon’s call for us to think again about anarchism spoke to my own silent thinking and reading. Antonio Vasquez-Arroyo reminded us to remember that democracy has enemies and that we must be steadfast and unrelenting before them. Wendy Brown’s title for this panel, “We are all democrats now” has a fierce irony. There are few democrats now, fewer still, I suspect, in the academy. Philosophers we might have trusted have fled from the defense of democracy. Derrida’s late work exiled democracy to an uncertain, always deferred future. Democracy could be found only in the company of the rioting shebab of the banlieux, who were, those rogues, that canaille, too “close to democracy.” Their society was suspect.1 Democracy had to be saved from these, the poor and disenfranchised, who were closest to it. Derrida’s project should be familiar to us, since it has been seen often enough. His advice followed the example set by the Turkish, Argentine Chilean and Pakistani militaries: to save democracy from itself by taking up arms against the democrats.2 Derrida was hardly alone in this. The democratic politics of Muslims in Europe and the Middle East have been opposed by philosophers from Rawls to Zizek; few questions have so united this intellectually diverse assembly. They do not, however, provide adequate reasons for us to accept it. We might instead align ourselves with the democratic canaille, and see the stone that the builders refused again, become the cornerstone. We might begin by reconsidering our enmities. The threat to democracy does not come not from Islam have claimed, from demagogues or technology or the decline of moral virtue in the citizens. The greatest threat to democracy, to our democracy, (the only one we may properly concern ourselves with) is liberalism.3 In this country, at this time, the most dangerous enemies of democracy are liberals: those liberal theorists and liberal activists who distrust democracy and wish to constrain it. Derrida’s unease with a Muslim, all too Muslim democracy sent democracy into exile, but his earlier work shows us where its enemies are. Liberalism has acted on democracy as a supplement in Derrida’s sense. Liberalism adds only to replace. Liberalism and republicanism were once presented as supplements to democracy in the simple sense. They comprised provisions and procedures that would protect the rights of minorities and dissidents from governmental repression and the tyranny of the majority; protect democracy from demagoguery. Sheldon Wolin shows in Democracy, Inc. how the institutions and practices that Americans regarded as furnishing defenses against totalitarianism—and other forms of authoritarian domination—have failed liberal democracies. We have had confidence that the free market, modern science, and technological innovation would protect democracy, and prevent the concentration of power in the hands of a few. This confidence was hardly rash, it is supported by a theoretical canon, by the disciplines of history and political science, and by the common sense—and experience—of many generations; but it is tragically misplaced. These have not only failed to defend us: they have become the means and media of what Wolin calls “inverted totalitarianism.”4 Reliance on the free market to spread wealth (and power with it) has concentrated power in private hands. The free press, under the conditions of the (nominally) free market becomes gatekeeper and censor. Rather than serving as a vehicle for the expression (much less the contest) of diverse ideas, the press comes to define the inadmissible and absurd that lie outside a small range of opinion. That range of opinion shown by the press and the broadcast media is far narrower than the range of opinion in civil society, or among the people. Science and technology, including the social sciences, which were once...

Presidential Debates and Electoral Fortunes of Political Parties in Ghana's 2008 Elections

This paper discusses the two presidential debates in Ghana, organized by the Institute of Economic Affairs (IEA-Ghana) in Accra and Tamale before the 2008 general elections. The debates provided an opportunity for the presidential aspirants of the four main political parties with representation in parliament to engage in a contest of ideas. Using findings of a survey of 100 respondents, representing a cross-section of the Ghanaian population, the paper argues that presidential debates have a negligible role in positively affecting the electoral fortunes of political parties and contribute little to whipping up support for their presidential aspirants, especially among the undecided voters. Their role in consolidating Ghana's democracy, particularly in ensuring dialogue and participation of the people in decision-making, however, remains largely positive in spite of the several flaws and challenges that characterize their conduct in Ghana. The study therefore, recommends measures to ensure successful conduct of presidential debates in Ghana in a manner that fully contributes to democratic consolidation and encourages voters, especially the undecided ones, to objectively make a good decision as to which presidential aspirant or political party to vote for in future.

Reflections on the American War on Terror: A Corrective from the Pages of History

Reflections on the American War on TerrorA Corrective from the Pages of History Richard Drake (bio) The American government’s official policy statement on terrorism ignores the historical literature on the subject. The book-length document released by the United States Department of State on April 30, 2007, Country Reports on Terrorism 2006, contains not a single reference to any of the classic or modern studies of terrorism. The State Department’s Country Reports begins with a strategic assessment that celebrates America’s advances in the war on terror. The authors point to the progress that has been made in producing security improvements, reducing terrorist capabilities, and eliminating key terrorist leaders. They lament the problems that remain: Iran, Syria, Iraq, Afghanistan, the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, Lebanon, al Qaeda and its affiliates worldwide. Indeed, no part of the world is free of terrorism or the threat of it, with the [End Page 67] Middle East, North Africa, and South and Central Asia the regions most at risk. State sponsors of terrorism—chiefly Iran, Syria, and Cuba—are said to provide critical support for nonstate terrorist groups. Nuclear, radiological, biological, and chemical weapons of mass destruction (WMD) attacks from terrorist groups could occur at any time. Uneasy lies the head that wears a superpower’s crown. What is to be done about the manifold threats of terrorism? In Chapter 5 of Country Reports, we receive an answer to this question. In addition to eliminating terrorist leaders and safe havens, “we must address the underlying conditions that terrorists exploit.” The conditions favoring terrorist activity are as follows: lack of economic opportunity and political participation, ethnic conflict, ungoverned space, and political injustice. In commenting on what the United States is doing about the underlying conditions that give rise to terrorism, the State Department authors reveal their ultimate concern: radical Islamic terrorism. All of the other terrorist threats against the United States amount to very little. Europe and Latin America, once hotbeds of terrorist activity, rate only passing mention by the State Department now. The section of Country Reports that deals with underlying causes (in Chapter 5) concerns Islamic societies exclusively. To eliminate these causes, the authors present a program called the Middle East Partnership Initiative as the paramount means of spreading democracy, women’s empowerment, and economic prosperity in the region. In addition, they tout America’s special aid programs for Pakistan and Saudi Arabia as effective counterterrorism measures. Most importantly, “the United States recognizes that the global and generational challenge of countering terrorism is, at its heart, a contest of ideas and values, and that America is more secure when people around the world share the same hopes and freedoms.” Unrecognized by the United States, at least in the pages of the Country Reports, are the particular conflicts that have sparked the firestorm of anti-American sentiment in the Islamic world. The authors immediately move from their statement about the generic conditions favoring terrorism to a listing of America’s counterterrorism measures. Clearly, they missed a step in their analysis. Here is where the approaches of the classic historians, [End Page 68] beginning with Thucydides, can be of help to them in establishing the proper ways to define the threats of terrorism (Drake 2007). If we begin with the premise that terrorism is a particular form of warfare, the efficacy of Thucydides’s explanation for all wars becomes readily apparent. In the introduction to the History of the Peloponnesian War, he lays down the rule that wars result from general and particular causes. For the Peloponnesian War, he establishes a context by analyzing Greek history from the end of the Persian Wars to the outbreak of hostilities between Athens and Sparta, a period of about 50 years. These two powerful states contended for supremacy in Hellas, intermittently clashing with each other. An attempt to establish a meaningful truce did not hold for long: “As to the reasons why they broke the truce, I propose first to give an account of the causes of complaint which they had against each other and of specific instances where their interests clashed: this in order that there should be no doubt in anyone’s mind about...