Political Concepts Research Articles

A critical discourse analysis of Chinese diplomatic speeches on China-US relations

Diplomatic discourse embodies the political concepts and stances of a government, from a critical perspective, it may imbed the power and ideology of the particular government. Previous studies have primarily focused on foreign political discourse, but few on Chinese diplomatic discourse especially the English texts, which are vital for the international community to accurately comprehend China’s diplomatic concepts. To fill the research gap, this study critically examined the English transcripts of six speeches on China-US relations by Chinese Foreign Minister Wang Yi based on Fairclough’s three-dimensional model (1995). The findings revealed that by manipulating various language tactics such as China-related agents, “We-group” pronouns, modality resources with low/medium values, and intertextuality resources with positive/negative implications, the Chinese diplomat tried to construct an authority-driven discourse with a persuasive nature, meanwhile, to frame a positive-self and a negative-others image. All these facilitated the speaker to strive for “power to discourse” for China, convince and control his intended audience to share the same beliefs. It was also found that Chinese diplomacy has been greatly influenced by the philosophy of Confucianism, China hence takes a “Confucian approach to diplomacy”. Besides, Chinese discourse always safeguards its development path and the sole leadership of the CPC. From this sense, the power and ideologies the discourse tried to propagate are in fact in the hands of the CPC.

In generative AI we trust: can chatbots effectively verify political information?

This article presents a comparative analysis of the potential of two large language model (LLM)-based chatbots—ChatGPT and Bing Chat (recently rebranded to Microsoft Copilot)—to detect veracity of political information. We use AI auditing methodology to investigate how chatbots evaluate true, false, and borderline statements on five topics: COVID-19, Russian aggression against Ukraine, the Holocaust, climate change, and LGBTQ + -related debates. We compare how the chatbots respond in high- and low-resource languages by using prompts in English, Russian, and Ukrainian. Furthermore, we explore chatbots’ ability to evaluate statements according to political communication concepts of disinformation, misinformation, and conspiracy theory, using definition-oriented prompts. We also systematically test how such evaluations are influenced by source attribution. The results show high potential of ChatGPT for the baseline veracity evaluation task, with 72% of the cases evaluated in accordance with the baseline on average across languages without pre-training. Bing Chat evaluated 67% of the cases in accordance with the baseline. We observe significant disparities in how chatbots evaluate prompts in high- and low-resource languages and how they adapt their evaluations to political communication concepts with ChatGPT providing more nuanced outputs than Bing Chat. These findings highlight the potential of LLM-based chatbots in tackling different forms of false information in online environments, but also point to the substantial variation in terms of how such potential is realized due to specific factors (e.g. language of the prompt or the topic).

What Happens When Empires Die?

ABSTRACT This review article looks at two books, Jonathan Wrytzen’s Worldmaking in the Long Great War: How Local and Colonial Struggles Shaped the Modern Middle East and Hans-Lukas Kieser’s When Democracy Died: The Middle East’s Enduring Peace of Lausanne, and places them in the broader literature on the First World War and the end of the Ottoman Empire. It considers not only how the two books discuss the political formation of the post-Ottoman Middle East but also how they challenge the conventional timeline of the “long Great War,” how and why they include new regions in their discussions about the post-Ottoman Middle East, and how both authors find important lessons in the ways that the post-Ottoman Middle East took shape that are relevant to the present and future of the region.

The Cost of Union: Smuts and the Price for the Rhodesian ‘Province’

ABSTRACT This article discusses the central role played by the prime minister of the Union of South Africa, General Jan Smuts, in the search of establishing a union between Southern Rhodesia and South Africa in the early 1920s. It begins by contextualising South Africa’s and Smuts’s ambition of incorporating Southern Rhodesia into South Africa. Southern Rhodesia’s constitutional future had come into question by 1914 when the British South Africa Company’s administrative term in the colony had ended. Though company rule was extended for another decade, Southern Rhodesia’s constitutional future remained unresolved. The two main political formations which advanced the future position of the country were the Responsible Government Association and the Rhodesian Union Association. The latter received support from Smuts. Smuts would ultimately use it and South Africa’s financial muscle to influence the political process in Southern Rhodesia for his benefit and that of those sympathetic towards the British Empire. The article demonstrates that Smuts’s financial offer to pay out the company for its administrative debts and his generous offer to Southern Rhodesia to join the union to its south failed when Southern Rhodesia was granted responsible government in 1923. This ended Smuts’s territorial expansionist ambition.

Research on the Application of the Internet of Things in Optimizing the Allocation of Ideological and Political Education Resources Using Machine Learning

This paper evaluates the application of the Internet of Things (IoT) in designing smart teaching systems by optimizing ideological and political education (IPE) resources using machine learning (ML). To increase educational reform’s efficacy, we also examine the issues with conventional IPE instruction. This study further develops a cutting-edge, smart framework for teaching ideological and political concepts in the educational setting and changes teaching according to real-life scenarios. Comprising the perception, network, and application stages, the IPE platform is a three-layer IoT architecture. The IoT and internet connections are used by the technology to receive effective IPE instructional activity information in real time. After that, the data are sent over the internet to the data center, where it is used as the initial information for applications, analysis of information, and modeling training. We are able to collect and acquire IPE teaching activity data sets on instructive and educational developments in courses by using IoT devices. The principal component analysis (PCA) approach is used to remove interface characteristics, date, and time elements from the data to increase the evaluation’s correctness. To remove noisy information from the data, the z-score normalization method is used. In addition, this paper suggests a novel efficient Cat Boost method inspired by hunter–prey optimization (AHPO-ECB) for evaluating IPE performance. In this case, the AHPO approach is employed to reduce the misprediction rate of the CB. The suggested model is then used to analyze the predicted performance using a Python program. The results of the experiments indicate that, in comparison to other models currently in use, the suggested AHPO-ECB model performs at the highest level when assessing IPE teaching performance.

Colonial fantasies of invulnerability to climate change

ABSTRACT Despite an ever-growing critical literature, vulnerability retains its place as a dominant concept in climate politics. What is less heavily researched is the concept of “invulnerability,” an idea that feminist and decolonial theory has many tools to critique. After unpacking the material and discursive elements of vulnerability politics, this article focuses on invulnerability as a concept that is an influential yet unexplored set of masculine and colonial fantasies. These fantasies – of modernity, mastery, and continentalism – are critiqued through different critical traditions, which are brought into conversation with climate politics literature. I then discuss the counternarratives of Oceanic thought, following Teresia Teaiwa’s prompt to “island the world.” I argue that this can be done through a focus on care, relationality, and a decolonial politics of resistance. I conclude that resisting the politics of vulnerability requires an engagement with critical feminist and decolonial thought to enable an imaginative piercing of the fantasies of invulnerability.

Emancipatory entrepreneuring as disidentification: A queer-feminist view of becoming a democratic cooperative

Democratizing entrepreneurship itself is by far no guarantee for emancipation: the majority can (over)rule, masculinist dominance or regressive ideologies may flourish, and exclusions occur. By ethnographically following the transformation of a socially engaged agency into a diverse cooperative, we offer a processual study of emancipatory entrepreneuring that is undoing the paternal, family-like, and pseudo-democratic enterprise and creates a diverse cooperative with shared ownership, co-leadership, and queered sensitivities to gender, racism, and affective difference. Our analysis thereby relies on the political concept of “disidentification” and its process of queer worldmaking as developed by José Esteban Muñoz. On this conceptual basis, we redraw becoming democratic as an ongoing in-between process of “decomposing” heroic and patriarchally inclined entrepreneurship and ongoingly “recomposing” democratic entrepreneuring through revising interrelated layers of inequality. By introducing the theory of “disidentification”, we contribute with a queer-feminist conceptual vocabulary to analyze the intertwined political and processual nature of emancipation. Transformation is neither understood as a revolution nor a planned linear change but rather as an ongoing in-between process that subversively recycles former, habitual ways of interacting into undertaking different, more inclusive worldmaking.

The morphology of Putinism: the arrangement of political concepts into a coherent ideology

ABSTRACT Scholarly analysis has been divided as to whether Putinism is a coherent ideology. With the decision to invade Ukraine, this question requires reexamination. This article interprets the evolution of Putinism in morphological terms, tracing how political concepts developed into a distinctive ‘thin’ ideology. After interpreting the original formation of Putinism (2000–2012), I unpack how interlinked processes of securitization and culturization reshaped the arrangement of core, adjacent and peripheral concepts. This was preceded by discursive closure between the Kremlin and its ideological antagonists over critical junctures in 2012 and 2014. An emphasis on the reactive, events-driven dynamic of Putinism reveals how it functions as an immanent morale that reinforces preexisting power networks and strives to win the loyalty of the population. Preserving culture and security has become synonymous with maintaining the very existence of the Russian Federation. With the launch of the ‘Special Military Operation’ in February 2022, this ideology was not immediately transformed but rather deployed on a new and more dramatic level. The ideological reconfiguration examined in this article must be understood as a crucial precursor to the decision to escalate the war in Ukraine, which ris reshaping Russia’s political trajectory in dramatic and unpredictable ways.

The Major Types of Power in the International Arena: Structural Power, Power of Interdependence, “Hard” and “Soft” Power

One of the most ambivalent and complex concepts in world politics is power, which is intangible. There are numerous approaches and interpretations of power. This paper presents the author’s hierarchy of types of power, which includes structural power, complex interdependence, “hard” and “soft power”. For each, the main methodological challenges and prospects for operationalization (including quantitative assessment) of these indicators are presented. It is demonstrated that the distinction between different types of power is conditional. The relationship between the use of one or another power is determined by the national strategic culture. The example of global competition between the United States and China is used to illustrate the distinctive features of the strategies employed by each country to project their respective power.

Professional learning in education: policy and practice in Wales since devolution

In the 25 years since devolution in Wales, professional learning has changed significantly. This article considers the development of Welsh Government initiatives over the last two decades and explores where they might be placed on a continuum between transmissive and transformative approaches. The article also explores recent developments of professional learning through the lens of political, professional and pragmatic conceptions of the domain. Although there is limited empirical research on these initiatives, there is some evidence of shifts in policy and practice in Wales aimed at streamlining and improving the quality assurance of professional learning for practitioners. The Welsh Government’s definition of professional learning is evolving, and a positive landscape formed of professionally led and transformative professional learning may be emerging. However, the article argues that professional learning has some way to go before it is fully integrated into the learning culture of schools in Wales.

Obtaining Effective Political Agency through Informal Access: Using Volumnia from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as a Model

Past studies have examined Shakespeare’s historical plays through the lenses of political theory in multiple ways, focusing primarily on formal access to policymaking — official, structured channels of influence. This paper hereby uses Volumnia from Shakespeare’s Coriolanus as a model to examine the attainment of effective political agency through the perspective of a politician with only informal access to policymaking. Volumnia’s success in preserving the city of Rome contrasts with the failed attempts by other male characters’ sole reliance on formal political channels. Through her interactions with her son Coriolanus, a politician with formal access to policymaking, she exemplifies how effective political agency can be achieved by her use of rhetoric, body language, and indirect influence to manipulate politicians with authority to achieve her private political pursuits. Volumnia’s certified success under a patriarchal narrative exemplifies possibilities for politically marginalized minorities in modern society, especially the female body.

Subaltern citizenship: naturalization and belonging for New Russian citizens from Central Asia

ABSTRACT This article explores the perils of belonging among recently naturalized citizens in Russia from Tajikistan. As citizenship in Russia becomes accessible to ethnicized migrant workers, it becomes subalternized, a process broader than citizenship’s neoliberalization. A racialized understanding of ethnicity, itself a legacy of the Soviet empire, shapes understandings of political membership in Russia. This has influenced both Russian migration legislation, as well as Russian citizenship, as former migrant workers become Russian citizens en masse. This article also explores how recently naturalized citizens embrace the ambiguity of new political forms of belonging within the deeply charged politics of new citizens’ inclusion. Former migrant workers construe their belonging in both Russia and Tajikistan, claiming their transnational lives and rights to motherland/s as active political agents. Ideas of ‘motherland’, however, are not strictly national or territorial: motherland is understood through localized and spatial experiences and memories. At the same time, former migrant workers’ inclusion as political subjects in Russia has heightened the fragility of Russian citizenship itself, whereby citizenship can now be revoked and annulled with as little as a court order.

Groundings in French and Indonesian narrative discourses: linguistic and culture analysis

AbstractThis study conducts a comparative analysis of grounding strategies employed in French and Indonesian narrative discourse. Utilizing both qualitative and quantitative methodologies, the research draws upon a corpus of French and Indonesian novels to examine the linguistic mechanisms utilized to establish grounding in these languages. This research questions the different markers of grounding in French and Indonesian narrative discourses, the types of grounding meanings, the role of culture in grounding, and what elements can strengthen grounding. The results of the textual analysis reveal that French employs the use of tenses, specifically the passé simple and imparfait (past tenses), to convey grounding, whereas Indonesian utilizes affixes, specifically the “me(N)-” and “di-” prefixes, for the same purpose. Further, the analysis illustrates that the “me(N)-” affix can be utilized to express both backgrounding and foregrounding, while the “di-” affix is restricted to foregrounding. Additionally, Indonesian also employs the use of third-person singular pronouns—“dia” and “ia”—to enhance grounding. The contextual analysis also highlights that in Indonesian narrative discourse, there is a tendency to repeat self-names as a form of politeness. This conclusion applies to languages that use tenses (e.g., French and English) as grounding markers and applies to languages that use affixes for grounding markers (e.g., Indonesian and Malay).

Pensamento social latinoamericano em três momentos fundacionais da sua história: Bolívar, Mariátegui e os teóricos descoloniais

In the formation of Latin America, culture, politics, economy, and society were shaped according to European standards as hegemonic values, which destroyed, modified, and violated the ancient traditions of indigenous peoples. Nevertheless, there have always been political ruptures and shifts in the ways of interpreting local reality, offering alternatives and political projects for the structural transformation of society. In this article, we present three moments of Latin American social thought that were counter-hegemonic and foundational for future lines of political action and interpretation of reality, with a focus on overcoming primarily colonial status and heritage. We analyze the pioneering propositions of Simón Bolívar and his utopias of liberation, delve into the critical deepening of José Carlos Mariátegui's thought, based on an unorthodox reading of Marxism, and conclude with the political and epistemic proposal of decolonial thinkers from the Modernity/Coloniality group. We will observe that, although they were very different authors, the theoretical and political challenges they posed focused on overcoming the colonial legacy in politics, knowledge, and the very existence of being.

Revisiting the urban home: A critical approach

We argue here for a more political concept of the home as the space that distinctively enables people to participate in public life by promoting civic orientations we call “resistance” and “yearning.” Because the political potential of home is most keenly experienced in cities, with their complex interplay of private and public spaces on very different scales (house, neighborhood, city), we present the urban home as a model for such politics. Our critical approach is in four parts. First, we reveal three patterns of thought in urban studies that lead scholars to examine housing while rendering the home an apolitical space. Second, we diagram how literary texts fruitfully challenge these patterns of thought in urban studies with their lavish attention to such specific home experiences. These literary descriptions suggest a fundamental politics of the urban home that we elaborate with the help of feminist recuperations of the home by Iris Marion Young, bell hooks, Doreen Massey and others. Third, we offer a more detailed empirical analysis of select texts associated with the “Great Migration” in the U.S. to illuminate this politics, particularly its fundamental orientations of resistance and yearning. To conclude, we propose an interdisciplinary agenda in urban studies that evades conceptual traps to politicize an otherwise neglected space: the urban home.

The Global Network of Liberty: Toward a New Framework for Understanding the History of Political Concepts

The Global Network of Liberty: Toward a New Framework for Understanding the History of Political Concepts

Beyond formal politics: the epistemic facet of business power

Abstract This article introduces “epistemic business power” as a distinct facet of corporate influence. Epistemic business power refers to the strategic communication of firms to influence the perceptions and beliefs of policymakers, experts, media, and the public regarding which issues, goals, norms, methods, and instruments to be politically considered. Rather than influencing decision-making and policy formulation directly, this form of power enables firms to intermediate the anticipatory dynamics of structural forms of business power and shape issue salience as well as the definition and recognition of topics as political problems. The article explores the scope conditions of epistemic business power, detailing the interaction of material aspects, corporate communication and issue salience dynamics. Based on quantitative and qualitative content as well as reception analyses, ownership data and interviews, a case study of the world’s largest asset manager BlackRock illustrates how today’s finance capital can use epistemic channels with regard to fundamental questions about the role of state capacity and private enterprise in capitalist democracies. By foregrounding the political nature of corporate public relations, the conceptual endeavor and its empirical illustration contribute to a deeper understanding of corporate power and its multifaceted role in shaping politics in capitalist democracies.

Politinė sumaištis: ar egzistuoja sensus communis (post)politikoje?

This paper focuses on different concepts of sensus communis and their relationship with the conditions of political reality. An attempt is made to show that Gadamer’s and Arendt’s political conception of sensus communis is too dependent on political conditions and the homogeneity and unity of the community, and thus cannot exist under post-political conditions. The paper seeks to defend Immanuel Kant’s aesthetic conception of sensus communis, demonstrating that the disinterested judgment of beauty exists regardless of political circumstances. Based on this, the paper reviews practices existing in post-politics that attempt to use the aesthetic understanding of sensus communis for the purposes of political unity. It also draws attention to the understanding of sensus communis in different contexts, arguing that the concept and its interpretation often become obscured across various contexts.

A corpus-assisted discourse analysis of socio-cultural values in Chinese and English social stories for autistic individuals

Social Stories are utilised to educate autistic individuals about appropriate social behaviours and politeness in social contexts. Based on the Theory of Mind (ToM), Social Stories are associated with neurotypicality which suggests human brains function in a similar way. Employing corpus-assisted discourse analysis, the study examines and compares the cultural differences between Chinese Social Stories (CSS) and English Social Stories (ESS) through analysing keywords, frequency of lexical items and collocation of the first-person pronoun. The results reveal that CSS emphasise the Confucian values of politeness, filial piety and hierarchical human relationship, while ESS recognise individual preferences, emotions and the value of fairness. The results enrich the knowledge of the discoursal and rhetorical features of Social Stories in different languages and provide theoretical implications for understanding the concepts of normality, politeness and neurotypicality. This article concludes by arguing that society should adopt the neurodiversity approach towards autistic individuals.

CULTURAL POLITICS OF EX-NONMAINSTREAM RELIGIOUS MOVEMENTS MUHDI AKBAR IN THE SELAYAR ISLANDS

<p>Non-mainstream religious movements are a characteristic feature of island regions isolated by the sea. This movement first existed as a societal need at that time. This article attempts to answer the question of how a community of ex-nonmainstream religious movements carries out cultural politics to survive amid the increasingly dominant mainstream religion. This study is based on interview data and observations conducted on several informants. Movement history manuscripts are also a secondary data source in this research. Objectively, it was found that the ex-Muhdi Akbar community carried out cultural politics in three forms. First, they reoriented their movement from focusing on religion and politics to social and cultural ones. Second, open membership regulations and freedom in choosing an official religion means they have a higher emotional bond. Third, accommodation in the government strengthens their position as religious people and does not deviate so that the problems they previously experienced can be minimized. This form of cultural politics is a formula for the success of a non-mainstream religious movement.</p>