Liberal Vision Research Articles

The Boston Declaration 2025: Plan and Pledges for Progress in Global Neurosurgery

Global neurosurgery has been described as the clinical and public health practice of neurosurgery with the primary purpose of ensuring timely, safe, and affordable neurosurgical care to all who need it. Global neurosurgery activities in the form of mission trips, educational partnerships, and research collaborations have been in place for decades. Still, there have been no central organizing efforts to improve the harmonization of these endeavors until recently. The 2016 Bogotà Declaration on Global Neurosurgery was the first meeting of global neurosurgery practitioners from low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) and high-income countries (HICs) to organize a consensus statement around the global gaps in neurosurgery care and goals for its future development. Since then, interest in global neurosurgery has grown dramatically among neurosurgeons, trainees, nurses, and allied professionals. Global neurosurgery has emerged as a distinct academic subspecialty within neurosurgery. However, recent evidence demonstrates that wide gaps remain in access to safe, timely, and affordable neurosurgical care. Quite as important is the current dominance of global neurosurgery discourse by HIC actors. The Boston Declaration seeks to further define a unified vision of progress as global neurosurgery continues to grow and evolve. This ambitious initiative will review existing evidence, employ on-the-ground expert experience, and seek broad inclusivity and transparency to formulate a new set of goals for global neurosurgery and a structure that shifts the agency to LMIC actors. We propose a path to developing a new consensus statement and action plan, the 2025 Boston Declaration for Global Neurosurgery.

Secure in Diversity? Transborder Ethnicity, Transnational Minority Activism, and Ontological (In)Security in the European Union

Abstract The liberal vision of the early 1990s envisaged the eastward extension of the Western European security community formed during the Cold War, based on intergovernmental cooperation and integration around the shared norms embodied by the European Union (EU), Council of Europe, and Organisation for Security and Cooperation in Europe (OSCE). Yet, transborder ethnic ties have remained a security concern within the “New Europe.” As well as the external challenges posed by Russia’s aggression against Ukraine, growing transborder nationalism exhibited by Hungary and other states has also become a focus of tensions within the EU. These intra-EU concerns, I argue, should be understood primarily as an issue of ontological security and as part of a multilevel security dilemma implicating states, EU institutions, and national minorities as security-seeking non-state actors. The article focuses on the Federal Union of European Nationalities—a transnational umbrella NGO that in 2013–2021 led an unsuccessful European Citizens’ Initiative named “Minority SafePack” (MSPI) calling upon the European Commission to legislate on firmer guarantees of minority rights within EU member states. Applying the ontological security lens to the study of MSPI, I illustrate how it reflects specific claims voiced by transborder kin-minority activists consistently over the past century, before analyzing the counter-securitizing arguments deployed against it by states. Although MSPI was approved with a large majority within the European Parliament, the Commission ultimately rejected it. I consider why this was the case, as well as the implications of the rejection for the in varietate concordia concept that supposedly undergirds the European project.

Beatrice Unbound: Adaptations of Shelley’s The Cenci

This essay considers three twentieth-century re-imaginings of Shelley’s The Cenci : Artaud’s play Les Cenci , Bernold Goldschmidt’s opera Beatrice Cenci , with a libretto by Martin Esslin, and both the play and opera versions of Beatrice Chancy by George Elliot Clarke with music by James Rolfe. Shelley and his adaptors in thinking through the figure of Beatrice take up what Shelley sees as the struggle of “oppressor to the oppressed.” Shelley writing during the reactionary restoration after the Napoleonic Wars, Artaud writing between the World Wars, Goldschmidt composing as a refugee from the Nazis, and Clarke seeking to illuminate the practice of slavery within Canada, all explore both oppression’s devastating impact and the possibility of a resistance to tyranny. Artaud’s version, which places Count Cenci as father at its center, altered the reception of Shelley’s play, influencing later adaptations and even the way we read Shelley’s play itself. In the end, that Shelley offers the most radical and ultimately feminist vision of a way beyond the patriarchal society that ensnares all these various Beatrices.

Ecological Imperialism and Indigenous Resistance: A Postcolonial Ecocritical Analysis of Selected Indian English Novels

This paper examines the representation of environmental degradation and critique of postcolonial development paradigms in two contemporary Indian English novels: Amitav Ghosh's The Hungry Tide (2004) and Indra Sinha's Animal's People (2007). Employing a postcolonial ecocritical framework, the study analyzes how these works articulate the environmental consequences of development in India, challenge Western models of progress, and highlight indigenous environmental perspectives. The research reveals that both novels effectively portray multi-faceted environmental issues, from biodiversity loss in the Sundarbans to long-term impacts of industrial pollution in urban areas. They offer pointed critiques of anthropocentric development models while presenting indigenous knowledge as a valuable alternative for sustainable human-nature relationships. The study contributes to postcolonial ecocriticism by demonstrating how Indian English literature engages with and critiques the environmental costs of postcolonial development. It underscores the potential of literature to provide nuanced, culturally-specific insights into complex environmental issues, challenging dominant narratives and proposing alternative visions of progress.

Navigating the transition: Unraveling the EU's different imaginaries for a just future

The European Union has translated the imperative of Just Transition into a comprehensive mix of instruments. In this way, the EU formulates its future visions of a just and sustainable European society. However, researchers have not yet examined the mix of instruments as an object of “making of futures”. To understand these future visions and the practical implications for the implementation of the instrument mix, our paper draws on the concept of imaginaries. Through a typological content analysis of the instruments, we reveal that the instruments are rooted in two distinct imaginaries. The Impact Mitigation Imaginary conservatively seeks to mitigate the negative impacts of transition on the socio-economic status quo. The Social Justice Imaginary, by contrast, progressively aims for a more equitable society during the transition. Considering also the implementation aspects of the instruments, we show that the instrument mix is inconsistent and only partially credible. We conclude that the implementation of the mix shifts the negotiation between progressive and conservative visions of a just and sustainable future to the national level with its own (power) interests. In this process, several implementation challenges may arise.

How churches make education policy: the churchification of Hungarian education and the social question under religious populism

ABSTRACT Since 2010, Hungary’s authoritarian populist government has radically redefined church-state relations, promoting the governance narrative of building an ‘old-style Christian democracy’. Public education has been reconceptualised within a religious framework and outsourced to religious actors. This article explores how key religious organisations engage with the government’s religious populism and govern their expanding school networks. Given the immanent tension between nativist Christian-conservative identity politics and Christian teachings about the church’s social mission, I focus on how Christian church elites have engaged with the education of underprivileged communities. Four characteristic types of strategic involvement are identified based on church education policies and their legitimacy discourses concerning their (lack of) engagement with the social question. Despite using different approaches to navigate political pressures, both the nativist illiberal and inclusive liberal visions of religion and their corresponding policies have reinforced the structures of segregated education and legitimised the government’s education policy.

Non-aligned common front: strategic imaginaries of the new international economic order (NIEO)

ABSTRACT Fifty years after the Sixth Special Session, the Progressive International (PI) has declared a strategy of "renovating the NIEO". However, key questions remain about the decisions that created and led the original campaign. The NIEO's draft declarations were brought to the UN General Assembly by the leaders of 95 states, caucused as the G77. Their solidarity was necessarily pluralistic, drawing on Marxist and Liberal visions of what Adom Getachew called “post-imperial worldmaking”. This raises the question of how this global "common front" was possible, and what the PI might do differently this time. As a partial explanation, I compare two of the project's strategic imaginaries, showing that they were successfully synthesised in practice. As this legacy inspires the PI's focus on the possibilities of sovereign debt crises, the NIEO continues to play an important historical role. It alludes to possible options, or alternative futures, of world order and global development.

Liberal visions of multiculturalism and majoritarianism

Liberalism advances democratic rights and representation through three principles. First, it seeks to protect individuals from abusive state power. Second, it shares an affinity with the epistemology of the Enlightenment, where an objective world can be discovered and observed. Third, it limits “tyranny of the majority” through civil liberties that counter the weight of public opinion and political rights that enable political competition of ideas. Rapidly evolving demands for recognition in the United States have advanced a broad critique of liberalism, highlighting the boundaries it imposes on representation as well as its limited success protecting rights. This essay traces disenchantment with liberalism to two very different sources: first, many progressives who resent how the jurisprudence of equal opportunity obscures efforts to achieve actual equality reject “anonymity” under the law—removing a core civil rights principle for promoting fairness. Such demands for more explicit rights and representation conflict with the majoritarian model’s application of liberalism, which biases cultural assimilation over multicultural integration. Movements for recognition increasingly challenge both assimilation and the institutional devices of multicultural integration. The other source of tension around recognition comes from the right, where populists have set out to revive nativist ideas of coerced assimilation or outright homogenization through exclusion (ie, non-recognition). Such failures of representation have promoted subjectivist views as a credential for contesting facts. The paper argues for “pluralist solidarity” as a tool for reconciling multiculturalism with new rights and demands for recognition emanating from liberalism’s traditions of individual liberty. This device aims to help separate the quest for recognition and dignity from the subjectivity that contributes to post-truth politics.

Constructing an Antislavery Hero: The Portrayal of Toussaint Louverture in British Abolitionist Texts, 1803–1863

ABSTRACT Shortly after Toussaint Louverture died in 1803, a literary tradition emerged in British abolitionist texts which portrayed the character of Toussaint in heroic terms. This article takes five texts written between 1803–1863 to demonstrate how Toussaint was constructed as an antislavery hero and what the motivations were behind this construction. The hero can be understood as a lens through which Toussaint’s character, and the character of the whole Haitian Revolution, was flattened. The hero was a frame that made him knowable and understandable to European audiences, but that also erased both the mass of enslaved people that formed the grassroots of the revolution in Haiti, as well as the many aspects of Toussaint himself that were not deemed to fit the hero narrative. This literary tradition arose because the mainstream of the nineteenth-century British antislavery movement opposed and feared rebellions led by enslaved people, believing on racist grounds that they were violent, uncontrolled, and anarchic, and at odds with the new liberal vision of empire that most British abolitionists wanted to create.

Collaboratively reimagining higher education: enacting posthuman feminist practices

ABSTRACT Helping people to better understand and respond to the complexities and multiplicities of twenty-first century realities requires higher education systems to break free from persistent hierarchical binaries and knowledge silos. Rosi Braidotti’s posthuman feminist vision, rooted in radically relational ways of being, offers a generative lens for reimagining higher education. As scholar-educators working in academic spaces, we have responded to Braidotti’s call to engage in creative experimentations for disrupting Humanism’s individualistic, competitive, and cogni-centric framings of learning and teaching. In this dialogue, we co-authors share stories about how ruptures in our experiences as educators led to rethinking theories from our field of adult learning through posthuman feminist concepts. We discuss how the theoretical resonances we found inspired us to reimagine our own research and teaching practices in ways that present possibilities for how posthuman feminist lenses can help us collaboratively reimagine higher education.

College, Knowledge, and Class

The author proposes a Marxian class analysis of undergraduate education in U.S. four-year residential colleges and universities, highlighting the role of student labor in the production of courses, degrees, and campus life (college) and in the production of academic learning (knowledge). Undergraduate students are theorized as direct producers within two overlapping class structures: academic feudalism (college) and academic communism (knowledge). The concept of academic communism is argued to be normatively compatible with Marxian and liberal visions of higher education: the Marxian commitment to abolish class exploitation and the liberal commitment to academic freedom. As a constructive response to intensifying criticisms of undergraduate education as we know it, a Marxian view of college and knowledge offers an ethically grounded defense of the core mission of U.S. higher education, centered on undergraduate students and faculty members as coproducers of academic knowledge.

Virginia Woolf s A Room of One s Own: A Foundational Feminist Vision in Euro-American Thought

Virginia Woolf’s seminal work, A Room of One’s Own, published nearly a century ago, is reexamined in this study as not only a feminist manifesto but as a feminist vision that anticipated some of the key features addressed in subsequent Euro-American feminist philosophies. Divided into three sections, the research offers a close analysis of Woolf’s text and its prescient insights, discussing separately the particular focal concerns of British, American, and French feminism, and elaborating on the ways these were envisioned and addressed as early as 1929 in Woolf’s visionary text. The study utilizes Showalter’s typology to analyze Woolf’s text and to organize elaborations on the points Woolf addresses and envisions that became fundamental within subsequent Euro-American feminist criticism, including the correlation between economic and social conditions and intellectual freedom, the necessity of women’s inclusion in the literary canon, and the significance of feminine discourse and gynocriticism. By highlighting Woolf’s remarkable foresight, this research positions A Room of One’s Own not only as a foundational feminist text but also as a profound feminist vision that continues to inform feminist thought today. This re-examination of Woolf’s work contributes to on-going academic discourse surrounding feminist theory and literary criticism.

Letter Writing as a Time-Traveling Method for Other World Making

Abstract: This paper proposes letter writing as a method to elicit visions of liberation and identify everyday acts of resistance that breathe life into these visions. By creating a liberatory space for the letter writer to reflect on the past and envision a socially just world, letter writing becomes a time-traveling method. To illustrate an example of the use of this method, the paper shares results from a study that used letter writing to explore the relationship between freedom dreams and everyday resistance. The participants were nineteen Latina women who were each instructed to write a letter to a loved one about their desires for social change and their daily efforts to achieve those visions. One of the major themes identified was that women in the study were engaging in a daily pedagogy of resistance to (re)connect their children to roots-that is, histories of oppression, their cultural heritage, and the Earth, in order to create a more socially just world. We conclude by suggesting that letter writing offers seeds of possibility to articulate new ways to breathe outside of the logic of racial capitalist settler coloniality.

Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar. Still Mad: American Women Writers and The Feminist Imagination, 1950-2020

Sandra M. Gilbert, Susan Gubar. Still Mad: American Women Writers and The Feminist Imagination, 1950-2020

Small work pleasures and two types of well‐being

AbstractDoes wage labor contribute to well‐being beyond providing an income? Well‐being can be understood in eudaimonic terms as the happiness derived from a socially valued life or in hedonic terms as the experience of pleasure. The eudaimonic–hedonic divide is replicated in competing progressive visions of the place of work in a good life. Laborist theories stress the centrality of paid work for a meaningful life. By contrast, for post‐work theories, pleasure is important for well‐being, and work is generally not expected to be pleasurable. Surprisingly, many of the participants in my study of diverse US job seekers described one or more of the jobs they had held as “fun.” Fun connotes enjoyment without deeper meaning, a hedonic rather than eudaimonic account of nonfinancial work rewards. What made a job fun were small work pleasures: enjoyment of the tasks and feeling competent at them, enjoyment of the physical work environment, or enjoyment of social relations on the job. These small pleasures could be found in both standard and nonstandard, precarious jobs. This study indicates the need for a labor politics that improves hedonic well‐being on the job. It also expands an “anthropology of the good” to include ordinary enjoyment.

Dialectical Order-Making through Ambiguity: Contestation Is the Norm in International Peace and Security Maintenance

Abstract What kind of order and contestation dynamics emerge if the initial institutional bargain includes liberal, partially liberal, and nonliberal visions of order? This contribution to the special issue locates the liberal ideational and institutional properties within the crisis management domain and analyzes contestation dynamics and their impact. My argument is twofold. First, liberal visions of order (e.g., based on human rights and self-determination) have coexisted alongside other aspirations focusing on the right of nonintervention and privileged political communities because post–World War II conflict management is rooted in the legal ambiguity of the Charter of the United Nations (UN). This ambiguity (low legalized institutionalization) gives space to different interpretations of what counts as peace, enforcement, threat, and the relationship between the UN and regional organizations (low liberal embeddedness). Second, ambiguity and competing visions of order sustain persistent contestation, which produces dialectical ordering within and outside the UN. Within dialectical ordering, order-challenging contestation occurs when actors disengage from the global level or when their vision of order becomes globally hegemonic. While order-challenging attempts in the realm of crisis management exist, they have remained unsuccessful so far. Seen from this perspective, there has never been a liberal international order in conflict management—only liberal attempts to impose a liberal order on an ongoing dialectical order-making process. So far, other order-challenging attempts, such as Russia’s sphere of influence or China’s developmental peace approaches, have also remained unsuccessful. Contestation remains the norm.

Combating domestic violence in West Bengal, India: Gendered norms and legal regulations

Domestic violence has long been a major concern for women's organisations globally. Despite decades of progressive legislation in India since the 1980s, this paper underscores the persistent and structural nature of domestic violence, which afflicts lives across gender identities. The study draws on findings from a survey of 2193 aggrieved women and select case studies across 13 districts of West Bengal who have accessed the Protection of Women from Domestic Violence Act (PWDVA), a civil law enacted in 2005 to give protection to victim-survivors from domestic violence (as opposed to punishing the perpetrators). The paper argues that even ‘radical’ legislation such as the PWDVA helps survivors manage and endure violence rather than eliminate it from their lives. In doing so, the legislation offers a coping strategy to the aggrieved rather than a means through which deep-seated social structures of patriarchy that perpetuate domestic violence can be challenged to ensure gender justice. Our study indicates that there is a greater degree of precarity among women survivors with psycho-social disabilities and members of gender-sexual minorities. The majority of actors in the socio-legal ecosystem who should be upholding survivors’ right to live a life free from violence instead place them primarily in the heterosexual patriarchal family. The feminist vision behind the enactment of PWDVA, which valued the assertion of a survivor's rights as a citizen of a democratic country to lead a life free from violence, is eschewed in favour of preserving the institution of family and marriage over gender justice.

Confucian Liberalism With/out Mou Zongsan: On Roy Tseng’s Confucian Liberalism

Abstract In his recent book, Roy Tseng provides one of the most systematic accounts of modern Confucianism that is liberal and moderately perfectionist. Tseng also offers a comprehensive analysis of Mou Zongsan’s political philosophy with special attention to its Hegelian-liberal dimension. This paper critically examines whether Tseng’s constructive and interpretive goals are integrated seamlessly. Its central claim is that while Tseng has succeeded in developing a morally attractive vision of Confucian liberalism through the creative reinterpretation of Confucianism in communication with Hegelian idealism, it is dubious that his extensive investigation of Mou’s political philosophy was necessary for achieving this goal. More specifically, it challenges Tseng’s claim that the idea of Confucian democratic civility is the central component of Mou’s vision of Confucian liberalism by showing that Mou never committed himself to the distinction between moral virtue and civic virtue, the baseline assumption for the possibility of Confucian democratic civility.

Prison Abolitionism and the Liberal Imagination

Abstract One of the most controversial political demands to emerge from the mass protests of the summer of 2020 was the abolition of police departments and prisons. This review article takes stock of the rationale behind prison abolitionism and of the philosopher Tommie Shelby's The Idea of Prison Abolition, a recent effort to initiate a dialogue between Angela Davis, the intellectual vanguard of contemporary abolitionists, and Shelby's own style of liberal political philosophy in the tradition of John Rawls. Although it shares a name with the successful nineteenth century movement to end slavery, today's abolitionists have much broader and far-reaching aims. The antislavery movement claimed to be bringing liberal society in line with liberalism's own values by abolishing chattel slavery, but Shelby's argument reaffirms that the prison, for its part, actually has a deep conceptual and historical compatibility with liberalism. Prison abolitionists, conscious of the connections between liberalism and incarceration, therefore, level their attacks not only at imprisonment but against liberal society as a whole. The close entwinement of liberalism and incarceration and deep disagreements about the meaning of basic terms like reform and criminality mean that long-term collaboration between liberals and abolitionists is probably unrealistic, both theoretically and politically.

The Value and Prospect of the Needham Question: A Historiographical Reflection and Elaboration

Abstract: This article revisits the classic Needham question by reassessing its heuristic value, analytical pitfalls, and historiographical significance. It also examines the definition, logic (internal and external), and modernity of science before providing a macro-comparative view of its early modern development at both ends of Eurasia. This article advocates a more eclectic approach to the history of techno-science that combines different sets of seemingly dichotomous variables with the aim of explaining its diversified change in different spatial-temporal contexts. It concludes by calling attention to the enigma of China’s techno-scientific resurgence over the past several decades, which constitutes a modern sequel to the Needham puzzle that foregrounds its growing contemporary, futuristic, and global relevance. Needham’s powerful narrative on cross-cultural dialog, earnest desire to fuse Eastern and Western science as well as optimistic vision of human progress are the most important intellectual legacy of his pioneering work.