Forms Of Political Authority Research Articles

En nombre del desarrollo, el interés nacional y el bien común: violencia legítima y derecho penal del enemigo en tiempos de antiterrorismo

El artículo analiza la reconceptualización de la noción de enemigo interno en el siglo XXI, así como las reconfiguraciones actuales del uso del derecho penal del enemigo como mecanismo de represión, criminalización y castigo a los movimientos sociales en Guatemala, desarrollando interrogantes y líneas argumentativas que se podrían aplicar a otros países latinoamericanos. El análisis se enmarca en el rol que en la actualidad juega el monopolio de la violencia “legítima” en la razón de Estado, así como en el progresivo posicionamiento de las corporaciones multinacionales y su lex mercatoriafrente a la soberanía estatal, no como simples agentes económicos, sino como mecanismos de autoridad política.Recibido: 04 septiembre 2019Aceptado: 24 febrero 2020Publicación en línea: Artículos en prensa 03 abril 2020; Núm. 5 (2020) 26 junio 2020

Community Resilience and Urban Planning during the Ninth-Century Maya Collapse: A Case Study from Actuncan, Belize

To remain in place in the immediate aftermath of the ninth-century Maya collapse, Maya groups employed various resilient strategies. In the absence of divine rulers, groups needed to renegotiate their forms of political authority and to reconsider the legitimizing role of religious institutions. This kind of negotiation happened first at the local level, where individual communities developed varied political and ideological solutions. At the community of Actuncan, located in the lower Mopan River valley of Belize, reorganization took place within the remains of a monumental urban centre built 1000 years before by the site's early rulers. I report on the changing configuration and use of Actuncan's urban landscape during the process of reorganization. These modifications included the construction of a new centre for political gatherings, the dismantling of old administrative buildings constructed by holy lords and the reuse of the site's oldest ritual space. These developments split the city into distinct civic and ritual zones, paralleling the adoption of a new shared rule divorced from cosmological underpinnings. This case study provides an example of how broader societal resilience relies on adaptation at the local level.

Democratic compatibilism

ABSTRACT The argument that democratic authority is superior to other forms of authority on the basis of its respect for the personal autonomy of citizens faces a fatal problem that I term the problem of negligible influence. No individual citizen can expect to exert any meaningful influence over political outcomes in a mass democracy. How can democracy, therefore, be said to respect autonomy where this autonomy is conceived of in terms of the ability to govern one’s own life? This paper draws on free will compatibilism to overcome this problem. The problem of negligible influence is outlined, and it is shown how existing approaches within the literature fail to adequately respond to it. I then develop a view – democratic compatibilism – that responds to the problem in two stages. First, I show that personal autonomy does not in fact require that individual citizens have any causal control over political decision-making and, second, I show that the conditions which personal autonomy does require are more likely to be fulfilled under democratic authority than under alternative forms of political authority.

Sylvan Memories of People, Place, and Trees in Nangodi, Northeastern Ghana

AbstractPeople's relationships with trees reflect the landscape histories associated with distinctive forms of political and religious authority and the moral imaginings of people in Nangodi and its environs in the Upper East Region of Ghana. Their memories of particular trees serve as historical evidence of overlapping yet specific forms of political authority exercised by chiefs, earth priests, past colonial officers, and present-day Ghanaian government officials. In Nangodi, individual family ancestral tree shrines, clan tree cemeteries, and sacred groves associated with earth priests and chiefs coexist with the Red Volta West Forest Reserve and with a succession of tree-related development initiatives. While these relationships are often considered as separate claims to political authority, spiritual power, or scientific knowledge, this paper argues that these relationships of people and of trees are better conceptualized as historical accumulations that represent intersecting and contested forms of authority and political rule continuing into the present. Indigenous tree species such as ebony are associated with sacred groves controlled by chiefs, silk-cotton trees with earth priests’ cemeteries, and baobab trees with particular families coexist with foreign teak trees associated with colonial forestry. This situation suggests how institutions of governance as well as the actions of individuals have environmental consequences. A consideration of historical memories of people and trees in places such as Nangodi enables a rethinking of political and environmental dichotomies, and complicates the social dynamics of` the preservation and destruction of trees and forests around the world.

Förändring och kontinuitet i det svenska politiska landskapet

Change and continuity in the political landscape. Politico-sociological perspectives on the general election in Sweden 2018The political landscape in Sweden has undergone considerable changes in recent decades. The number of political parties in the Swedish parliament has increased from five to eight, and the socio-economic issues of the traditional political right–left scale has been challenged by socio-cultural issues relating to lifestyle and identity. Notably, the radical right has had significant electoral success in Sweden based on an ethno-nationalist and anti-immigrant rhetoric. The corporatist model has increasingly been challenged by new forms of political authority, participation and representation. Yet, new political actors such as social movements and civil society actors, think tanks and policy professionals, are becoming increasingly engaged in the political processes. Moreover, traditionally marginalised groups including the young, women and individuals of migrant background are represented to a higher degree in political bodies than before. In this article, we introduce the articles of Sociologisk Forskning’s special issue on the Swedish political landscape and give an overview of the main developments of politics and society in the country.

The changing political landscape of Sweden

The political landscape in Sweden has undergone considerable changes in recent decades The number of political parties in the Swedish parliament has increased from five to eight, and the socio-economic issues of the traditional political right–left scale has been challenged by socio-cultural issues relating to lifestyle and identity. Notably, the notion of Swedish exceptionalism and the particularities of its welfare state is lingering despite findings pointing in the opposite direction e.g. with the increased electoral support for the radical right, and its ethno-nationalist and anti-immigrant rhetoric. The corporatist model has been challenged by new forms of political authority, participation and representation. New political actors, such as social movements and civil society actors, think tanks and policy professionals, are becoming increasingly engaged in political processes. The long-term trend suggests that traditionally marginalised groups, such as the young, women and groups of migrant background, are represented in decision-making forums to a higher degree than before. Yet, current conditions need further analysis. In this article, we provide a background to Sociologisk Forskning’s special issue on the political landscape of the parliamentary election in 2018.

Less is More? Publicness, Management Strategy, and Organizational Performance in Mental Health Treatment Facilities

In this study, the authors seek to identify mechanisms of publicness present within mental health treatment facilities and, subsequently, explore the constraints these mechanisms impose on facilities’ capacities to achieve public outcomes. Through grounded insights from senior managers in this field, political authority, namely through governmental funding and regulation, is identified by 43 of 46 respondents as being an influence on publicness. Authors then uncover the conditions during which publicness, in the form of political authority, constrains organizational achievement of public outcomes. In leveraging managerial perspectives, two distinct constraints emerged: publicness often inhibits organizational efficiency and produces mission drift within these facilities. Findings suggest that managers, under certain conditions (and where legally feasible), may provide greater effectiveness in fulfilling organizational goals and objectives and in achieving public outcomes by maintaining or decreasing an organization's publicness. Fundamental to effectively managing publicness is understanding the mechanisms germane to both public outcome attainment and failure—the latter of which is explored here.

Representation as a political-theological concept

In his 1923 work, Roman Catholicism and Political Form, Carl Schmitt claims that representation is a complexio oppositorum (a unity of opposites) and incarnates a hierarchical form of political authority, which is alternative to liberalism. This article shows that Carl Schmitt’s interpretation of the political theology of representation is based on a misreading. Schmitt selectively overlooks some meanings of the theology of repraesentatio to build his decisionistic political agenda. An investigation of the original conceptual meanings of representation in Tertullian, the first Christian author who theorized representation and established many of its subsequent theological meanings, shows a different picture. At its inception, representation already included mechanisms of plurality and participation, which anticipated, and perhaps motivated, the absorption of the representation vocabulary within democratic discourse and practice. Political theology is a valuable field of inquiry to prove the claim that there is no participation without the logic of representation.

Whose legitimacy? The EU and Russia in contest for the eastern neighbourhood

ABSTRACTThe impact of external actors on political change in the European neighbourhood has mostly been examined through the prism of elite empowerment through externally offered incentives. The legitimacy of external policies has received less scrutiny, both with regard to liberal powers promoting democracy and illiberal powers preventing democracy. This article investigates the conflicting notions of legitimate political governance that underpin the contest between the European Union (EU) and Russia in the Eastern neighbourhood. It proposes four mechanisms of external soft influence that take into account the EU’s and Russia’s actorness and the structural power of their norms of political governance, and consider their effects on domestic actors and societal understandings of appropriate forms of political authority. It finally traces the EU’s and Russia’s soft influence on political governance in Ukraine. It maintains that through shaping the domestic understandings of legitimate political authority and reinforcing the domestic political competition, the EU and Russia have both left a durable imprint on Ukraine’s uneven political path.

‘Factivism’: A New Configuration of Humanitarian Reason

ABSTRACTNew actors and ideas about poverty management and humanitarian assistance have arisen in recent years. The underlying context of this shift includes a growing awareness of the limitations and failures of both military forms of humanitarian intervention and unfettered market-based solutions to aid and development. This paper explores the particular form that global humanitarianism is taking in this millennial context. I argue that a new configuration of humanitarian reason is emerging that draws on both neoliberal and pastoral rationalities of governance. The former can be associated with efficiency, transparency, and quantitative evidence, while the latter is articulated with individual compassion, devotion, and Christian duty. Using the celebrity humanitarian Bono and his rhetoric of ‘factivism’ as an illustrative example, the paper explores the way that this message is transmitted through geosocial discourses and networks. It indicates some of the ways that the personal and media dissemination of this new ideology of charismatic, yet rational care helps to weave pastoral rationalities into forms of political authority.

Public Capitalism: The Political Authority of Corporate Executives

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Três imagens do contrato social: Estado, moralidade e direitos humanos

This paper examines three different “images” of the social contract. The first image concerns the reasons for our accepting the existence of some form of political authority which has the power and the legitimacy to create laws and impose sanctions upon its citizens. The second image of the contract concerns reasons for our accepting the requirements of morality and the acquisition of a sense of justice. The third image concerns the reasons for the establishment of limits for the interference of state power in our lives. These limits are characterized in terms of human rights. The third image of the social contract elucidates in which sense human rights are universal rights, but it denies that there are any innate or natural rights. Keywords : contractarianism, state, morality, sense of justice, human rights.

‘Singing oneself into a nation’? Estonian song festivals as rituals of political mobilisation

AbstractThis article argues that Estonian song festivals were a powerful ritual of political mobilisation. Throughout their history, however, they had to be accommodated to narratives of ruling regimes. Taking Patrick Hutton's concept of such events as a ‘moment of memory’ with which images of the past are being reconstructed in a selective way, song festivals are on each occasion made to suit present needs. During the history of Estonian nationhood, these needs have been guided first and foremost by forms of political authority: during years of independence, the festivals were to serve different purposes than under imperial or Soviet Russian rule. Thus, the concept of ‘singing oneself into a nation’, popular in Estonian history textbooks, is only partly true. Although the performance of the festival changes only slightly through the years, its political significance changes enormously.

The EU as a New Form of Political Authority: The Example of the Common Security and Defence Policy

This article puts forward the argument that the EU should be understood not as a nation-state in the making but as a new type of polity that could offer a model of global governance. It uses the example of the Common Security and Defence Policy (CSDP) to illustrate the argument. It suggests that CSDP is designed to make a contribution to global security rather than to protect borders using military force, as in the case of classic nation-states. It proposes that CSDP should be explicitly based on the concept of human security and should acquire human security capabilities that include both military and civilians operating according to human security principles in a way that is more like law enforcement than fighting wars. To achieve this, the CSDP would require stronger political backing and this would mean increasing the representativeness and accountability of the EU. By the same token, an effective CSDP would increase the legitimacy of the EU.

Nietzsche, Genealogy and Political Authority

Tamsin Shaw has suggested that Nietzsche's concerns included the ideological capacity of the state. I show that some support for this interpretation can be drawn from Nietzsche's own views about the threat to moral and intellectual independence posed by modern forms of political authority. If taken seriously, his insights allow us to appreciate how independent political judgment, and hence individual autonomy, can be systematically imperiled by the operation of the modern state apparatus. In light of this discovery, I begin to construct a genealogical theory of legitimate authority that citizens can deploy in order to check state power. I argue that genealogical narratives have the power to impugn the normative authority of purportedly binding decisions and orders. Such narratives do so when they reveal a fault in the justificatory reasoning offered by state representatives in defense of their actions. At the heart of this theory there lies an account of the ways in which officers of the state can, and cannot, permissibly offer reasons in the course of justifying their decisions to citizens.

BOOK REVIEW: Gordon, David M. NACHITUTI'S GIFT: ECONOMY, SOCIETY, AND ENVIRONMENT IN CENTRAL AFRICA. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. 2006.

Reviewed by: Nachituti's Gift: Economy, Society, and Environment in Central Africa Robert Ross Gordon, David M. 2006. Nachituti's Gift: Economy, Society, and Environment in Central Africa. Madison, Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press. xii + 301 pp. $ 60.00(cloth). The so-called "fisherman's dilemma" is a well-known problem of forms of economics that places private property at the center of management systems of the natural environment. Fishermen obviously want to conserve stocks so that next year they can continue to fish, but it may be more "rational" for them to take all they can, as they have no guarantee that some other fishermen will not do just that, so that that their refusal of income at this [End Page 118] point does not have the desired consequences in the future. The standard answers to this dilemma, in terms of the imposition of individual rights over resources ("property") cannot work in open waters, or indeed rangeland, and other forms of communal management have to be found, at least where the danger of overfishing exists. In this book, David M. Gordon describes the working out of this dilemma in the rich fisheries of the Luapula Valley, including Lake Mweru, on the border between Zambia and the Democratic Republic of Congo (Katanga Province). The book happily straddles the customary periodization in terms of the presence or absence of colonial rulers, but nevertheless the forms of political authority and technological change have had crucial consequences, at various times, for how the valley's fish have been exploited by the valley's humans. Successive rulers have seen the valley as a source of power and income. In precolonial times, it must have been just about the most thickly populated, and thus attractive, regions of the southern savanna, and came under the control of the Kazembe Lunda, in forms of rule justified by a number of myths, including that of Nachituti, a self-willed woman, whose marriage to the Kazembe Lunda legitimized their rule. Gordon analyzes this myth with care and skill, as he does the shift to colonial domination, in which the unitary valley was divided, as it has remained. It was with the introduction of colonialism that the management systems which had been developed under the aegis of the Kazembe began to break down. The various chiefs no longer had the power to hold the lagoons shut until they had given the word that fishing might begin. The successive Kazembe kings lived under British rule, while the economic power was on the Belgian side, both because fish was primarily marketed to feed the laborers on the Belgian Copper Belt—the Northern Rhodesian mines served beef, rather than fish, as protein—and because the valley was much closer to centers of Belgian power than to those of British power. As a result, the Belgians introduced large-scale mechanized fishing, run primarily by Greeks, which would, in the early 1950s, result in a major economic disaster. The mudfish mpumbu was effectively exterminated by overfishing at its spawning runs, partially because of the expatriates' motorized boats and partially because the colonial-organized elimination of crocodiles from the lake meant that larger nets could be used without being broken. A species that had made up close to half of the Union Minière's (a major copper mining company in Congo) purchases had disappeared as a commercial proposition. What this has meant, over the subsequent decades, has been a reorientation of the fishing effort toward the smaller species within the lake and the swamps. There was the increased human exploitation of species that have not suffered under the potential for overfishing, either because their spawning grounds could in general be protected or because, like the tiny chisense, their reproductive cycle was so short and so prolific that they could hardly be destroyed by heavy predation—and they may have benefited from an increase in the lake's vegetable plankton as artificial fertilizer from the surrounding hills leached into its waters. Since chisense could easily be [End Page 119] caught and traded, the result has been a shift in gender relations, as individuals previously excluded from the trade for lack of capital—in other words, women...

King Arthur and the Myth of History by Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman (review)

LAURIE A. PINKE and MARTIN B. SHICHTMAN, King Arthur and the Myth of History. Gainesville, University Press of Florida, 2004. Pp. 262. ISBN: 0-8130-2733-0. $59.95. King Arthur and the Myth of History is a well-researched and theoretically sophisticated work that examines how the figure of King Arthur has been appropriated and manipulated 'historically.' Indeed, one of the book's key strengths is its deft treatment of both history-writing and historicism: Finke and Shichtman deal not only with responses to events produced within particular cultural moments by those identifying themselves as writers of'histories' or 'chronicles,' but also with the critical discourse of historicism and the 'production' of Arthurian history. The authors contend that Arthur has frequently been used as 'a potent, but empty, social signifier to which meaning could be attached that served to legitimate particular forms of political authority and cultural imperialism' (p. 2). As they move from the medieval to the modern period, they make their case by means of a pyramid-like organizational structure that allows them to focus on three major periods of cultural crisis. The base of the pyramid (Chapters 1-4) examines the explosion of interest in the Arthurian legend that occurred with the Norman colonization of England in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. In separate chapters, the authors discuss the Arthurian portions of William of Malmesbury's. Gesta Regum Anglorum, Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia Regum Britannic, Wace's Roman de Brut, and Lagamon's Brut. Building on this foundation, Finke and Shichtman move on and up to the fifteenth century and the Wars of the Roses to address John Hardyng's Chronicle and Caxton's print of Malory's Morte Darthur. Finally, at the top of the pyramid, they bring their discussion of history and historicism into the twentieth century by examining the intersection of Arthurian and Nazi ideals in Jean-Michel Angebert's The Occult and the Third Reich: The Mystical Origins of Nazism and the Search for the Holy Grail and Trevor Ravenscroft's Spear of Destiny: The Occult Power Behind the Spear which Pierced the Side of Christ. Another strength of this book is its blend of solid historical contextualization with innovative theoretical literary analyses. To show how the figure of Arthur functions as 'symbolic capital' in various texts at different times, Finke and Shichtman make effective use of theoretical frameworks offered by Pierre Bourdieu, Jean-Joseph Goux, and a number of postcolonial theorists. Some of their most interesting arguments draw upon the work of Benedict Anderson, particularly his theorization in Imagined Communities of the rise of nationalism-a concept they critique and modify to demonstrate the complex formation of individual and collective identities these 'histories' of King Arthur enact. Their use of theory is sophisticated yet judicious; it never threatens to overwhelm or diminish the important historically-grounded work that is the book's core. In fact, the first four chapters are so thorough in their description of the historical context in which the early Arthurian chronicles were written-and so meticulous in their summary of recent critical thinking about the agendas behind the composition and dedication of these texts-that King Arthur and the Myth History could be said to offer a history of Arthurian historicism. It is, however, much more than this. The careful construction of this groundwork allows the authors to paint a larger and more complex picture of how Arthur has been used historically than would otherwise be the case. The first chapter offers a prime example: here the authors show how the story of a fifth- or sixth-century ruler came to be explosively popular in the twelfth century. Finke and Shichtman begin their investigation with an analysis of William of Malmesbury's Gesta Regum Anglorum, a work many historians and critics have taken at 'face value,' especially in comparison with the work of his near-contemporary Geoffrey of Monmouth, whose Historia Regum Brittanie is almost universally hailed as at once fraudulent, propagandistic, and hugely entertaining. …

The power of representation: democratic politics and global governance

The notion of democracy has been invoked in the past decade by both opponents and proponents of global governance. Many in the so-called ‘anti-globalisation’ movement have underlined the inherently unaccountable, opaque and unrepresentative nature of global governance, whilst those more sympathetic to the pluralising dynamics of the phenomenon have emphasised the potentially democratic aspects of this new form of rule, especially with reference to the incorporation of a putative ‘global civil society’ into the structures of global governance and the accompanying diversification of sources of international political authority. Yet both critics and advocates also tend to agree that there are two basic challenges to (on some accounts, causes of) global governance: the global capitalist market and the concomitant system of sovereign states. The disjunctures generated by the operation of these two structures of power, so both liberal defenders of global governance and their radical, anti-capitalist contenders argue, have created the conditions for decentralised, multilateral mechanisms of socioeconomic and political management of world affairs, that is, ‘global governance’. It therefore seems that the question on both sides of this divide, is not so much whether to do away with transnational, multilateral forms of political authority altogether (although that is certainly one aim in some quarters of the anti-globalisation movement) but rather, how to render these democratic, that is, how to democratise global governance.

Democracy In Cyberia

Democracy In Cyberia Christopher C. Robinson (bio) Darin Barney, Prometheus Wired: The Hope for Democracy in the Age of Network Technology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). Beth E. Kolko, Lisa Nakamura, and Gilbert B. Rodman, eds. Race in Cyberspace (New York: Routledge, 2000). David R. Koepsell, The Ontology of Cyberspace: Law, Philosophy, and the Future of Intellectual Property (Chicago: Open Court, 2000). In the fourth chapter of his book, Prometheus Wired, Darin Barney advances a bold thesis. He observes that students of the relationship between Information Technology and politics miss the transformational effects of the Internet on political institutions. What is argued in the literature on politics, law, and communications technology is that the global character of the Internet defies national attempts to regulate transactions and other activities. The solution advanced most often is an international agency or world confederation with a mandate to control Internet activities and products like child pornography, hate speech, or gambling. Barney asserts, to the contrary, that such images of the relations between government and networks miss the point: The Internet is itself the new form of political authority in the world. There has been a transfer of power, heretofore unnoticed, and any thought that national sovereignties can combine to regulate cyberspace is hopelessly anachronistic and illusory. This provocative assertion is not the thesis that Barney pursues ultimately. Indeed, his main claim in Prometheus Wired is that the radical promises of the Internet — the idea that all old knowledge and political categories like national sovereignty, pluralism, and citizenship have been rendered otiose — are inflated, empty, and hide the truth that traditional political theory has much to offer an analysis of this technology and its social consequences. Underlying this explicit thesis is the question I wish to explore in this essay: How different is cyberspace from “real-time” space? That is, should cyberspace be perceived as entailing an ontological, epistemological, and political sea change? Or should it be seen in a continuum with our traditional notions of a physical and political world? There are differences between real time and cyberspace, to be sure; but do these differences add up to a dividable world? The projections of those technophiles who see the Internet as a liberation from all strictures imposed by the frictional world are part of a larger culture of metaphysical escapism that is as understandable as it is untenable. Whether we are discussing Plato’s form world or the various attempts by mathematicians and logicians to fashion a symbolic language that is detached from the imprecision and prejudices of natural languages, escapism has been a consistent theme across human cultures.1 Cyberspace does afford users a variety of “Ring of Gyges”-type escapes from the world of real time. I can, for example, participate in a variety of role-playing fantasy games where my avatar’s character — an alter ego of my own design — can accumulate all sorts of prestige, weapons, and powers. If I wish, I can leave my gender, age, ethnicity, sexuality, physical infirmities, social status, and reticence at the threshold of cyberspace and thrill in expressing myself as a completely different identity. Through chat rooms I can become a member of different communities, confess intimate secrets and desires to anonymous “friends,” have cybersex, or perpetrate virtual acts of violence. But just how different are these activities from the real time world? Could I not commit my imaginative flights from my true life to paper and write stories and novels? Would a relationship with a pen pal be as fulfilling as a chatroom conversation? Is cybersex anything more than mutual masturbation (at this point in the technology)? We move between these realms with relative ease. And there are areas of imbrication. For instance, I have a student who made almost twenty thousand dollars last year by playing fantasy games, acquiring weapons and powers in these games, and then selling these virtual properties on e-Bay. Real cash for a fantasy wizard’s wand! Viewed differently, all this student has done is trade time — the time it takes him to find these desirable game tools — for money paid by people who have the means and enjoy the role-playing, but do not have...

Class, Masculinity, Manners, and Mores

The politics of public space are often conceptualized in terms of social geography. Scholars have shown how the crowd’s invasion of municipal spaces, the transgression of local ethnic boundaries, or the rituals of particular street festivals have structured political protest. Public space can also be discussed in more general terms. Space has always served as a means of pressuring state or local authority, an arena in which subaltern groups—women, workers, sansculottes— expressed and enforced their moral economies. By the nineteenth century, these immemorial uses of public space had undergone significant change. In many cases, riots and charivari were complemented by soldierly public marches, quiet meetings, and well-disciplined strikes.This respectable use of public space was linked to subaltern groups’ increasing exploitation of a new form of political authority: that of public opinion and public debate, the realm of the “bourgeois public sphere.”