Friend Enemy Research Articles

Friend–Enemy Divided Thinking from the Perspective of Intergroup Conflict: Relationship with International Attitudes and Conspiracy Beliefs

The cognitive process of social categorization and perceived outgroup threat leads to the perception of the world as divided into intergroup conflict relations between enemy and friend groups—termed “friend–enemy divided thinking.” This study proposes the concept of friend–enemy divided thinking from the perspective of intergroup conflict and examines how this concept affects (1) political attitudes toward international relations and (2) conspiracy beliefs, which are closely related to intergroup conflict. A survey was conducted in Japan ( N = 735). The results showed that the stronger the friend–enemy divided thinking is, the stronger the conspiracy beliefs are. People with stronger friend–enemy divided thinking felt threatened by national defense and immigration and supported negative policies against international relations. Both conspiracy beliefs and negative political attitudes toward national defense and immigration in international relations were interpreted to be associated with the perception of a hostile intergroup conflict that is heightened by friend–enemy divided thinking.

Socialism sucks: campus conservatives, digital media, and the rebranding of Christian nationalism

ABSTRACT In this blended ethnography, combining fieldwork with campus conservative organizations/figures and digital ethnography of their social media, we explore how capitalism, Christianity, and conservatism are brought together and branded for youth. We argue that campus conservative organizations like Turning Point USA are important sites for mainstreaming, branding, and circulating an assemblage of conservative, Christian, and racialized discourses aligned with Christian nationalism and against the left. We analyze how this ‘friend enemy distinction’ occurs through gendered social media practices, constructing female ‘cuteservatives’, influencers who sell friendship and t-shirts, and masculine heroes who battle a socialist enemy. We explore how these discourses are produced, marketed, and circulated. And finally, through Turning Point’s celebration of Kyle Rittenhouse, we show the dangerous potential consequences of this violent rhetoric.

Self Managed Learning: a hybrid of Progressive and Democratic Education

PurposeThe book has generated a passionate dialogue-disagreement (mostly but not entirely) with the book. Dialogue-disagreement is based on challenges, disagreements and rebuttals between opponents, often belonging to different, even irreconcilable, paradigms. The goal of dialogue-disagreement is not so much to convince the opponent to change their mind but rather to critically examine and problematize the two involved paradigms: the authors’ and the reviewer’s. By taking the generated challenges and disagreements seriously, both irreconcilable paradigms can grow through their replies. Dialogue-disagreement gives the participants–opponents the gift of revealing their own paradigmatic blind spots, which are often invisible from within their paradigms. Dialogue-disagreement is exploratory and based on an agnostic relationship between frenemies, i.e. “friendly enemies.”Design/methodology/approachThis is a critical book review essay of Self Managed Learning and the New Educational Paradigm (Cunningham, 2021).FindingsThe reviewer views Ian Cunningham’s Self Managed Learning educational paradigm as a hybrid of Progressive and Democratic Education, while the reviewer sees his/her Self-Education paradigm as entirely Democratic (and Dialogic). Elsewhere, the reviewer discussed and critically analyzed the Progressive Education paradigm, which generally involves channeling the student’s learning activism and subjectivity toward learning outcomes desired by an educator. It uses the educator’s manipulation of the student’s subjectivity to make them study what the educator wants them to study. In contrast, the paradigm of Democratic Education assumes that the educatee is the final authority of their own education. The educatee decides whether to study, when to study, what to study, how to study, with whom to study, where to study, for what purpose to study and so on. The educatee makes these decisions by themselves or with the help of other people at the educatee’s discretion and conditions. The reviewer charges that Ian’s Self Managed Learning paradigm is a hybrid of both paradigms, with the Progressive Education paradigm taking the lead and exploiting the Democratic Education paradigm.Originality/valueThe book presented a unique, innovative practice worth a critical analysis. The reviewer’s dialogue-disagreement with the book reveals a particular hybrid of Progressive and Democratic Education which is common to some innovative self-directed learning.

The Real Possibility of Physical Killing: A Feminist Critique of Carl Schmitt

AbstractThis article offers a feminist critique of Carl Schmitt, with a particular focus on Political Theology and The Concept of the Political. It addresses a pathos of masculinity that pervades Schmitt's rhetoric and helps to explain the hold that his ideas have on so many thinkers across the political spectrum. It argues as well for the surprising insights that feminists can draw from Schmitt's abstract political concepts. In decentering the infamous friend—enemy distinction and developing instead the existentialist claim about “the real possibility of physical killing,” we can see Schmitt's pathos more clearly, but we can also theorize the political in ways that Schmitt could not. Schmittian existentialism permits us to see the family as a primary political institution, sex and gender as forms of political power, and femicide as a real political problem. This article concludes with a discussion of Andrea Dworkin, in some ways more Schmittian than Schmitt himself, who pursues this principle of political existentialism—“the real possibility of physical killing”—in a radically feminist direction.

Carl Schmitt and Chinese political thought: Relevance for Papua New Guinea and the Pacific

This article considers the relevance of the theories of German jurist Carl Schmitt for understanding Papua New Guinea (PNG) politics and international relations, with a focus on relations with China. In pursuing this analysis, the text gives particular emphasis to Schmitt’s friend–enemy distinction. In order to understand the regional context in which China has a growing presence, this article initially highlights the preoccupation of Chinese intellectuals with the ideas of Schmitt. It proceeds to mention the use of Schmitt’s ideas in supporting the particular ideological positions of Chinese liberals, the New Leftists, those who articulate the China Path and even the Chinese state. Through a comparative analysis I both compare how Schmittian ideas have been used by Chinese intellectuals to critique the economic inequality in Chinese society and alternatively the relevance of such critiques to the issues of social inequality in PNG. The discussion subsequently focuses on PNG’s international relations and China’s increasing economic and political influence. While the United States and its regional partner Australia appear to be alarmed by an expanding Chinese presence, others do not necessarily believe that Beijing has overreaching ambitions of global dominance. The article considers the suggestion that Chinese thinking on international relations has been influenced by Schmitt’s concept of the Großraum, an alternative to the Westphalian system, in which international relations are marked by a dominant hegemon and self-contained regional blocks consisting of constellated nations. As PNG finds itself in a critical position and subject to pressures from both the West and China, the text considers PNG sovereignty within a possible regional system in which China serves as the dominant hegemon.

Trading with a Friend's Enemy

AbstractEconomic sanctions have been the West's response of choice to Russia's full-scale aggression in Ukraine. Predictably, speculation abounds as to what these sanctions portend for future responses to acts of interstate aggression. The principles underpinning the “trading with the enemy” laws of a seemingly bygone era have resurfaced but applied not to the sanctioning powers’ own enemies but in solidarity with another state, at least insofar as the breaches of erga omnes obligations through armed aggression are concerned. The contemporary expansion in sanctions practice may have far-reaching repercussions.

Rethinking Proxy War Theory in IR: A Critical Analysis of Principal–Agent Theory

AbstractThis paper explores the question of what drives proxy alignment in war and argues that current proxy war scholarship needs further thinking to go beyond focusing on the principal–agent theory and individual actors’ motivation analysis. Rather, there is a need to look at the generative mechanisms of proxy alignment as a process that constitutes patterns of friend–enemy relations. The paper argues securitization patterns from domestic to regional and international levels drive actors to re-evaluate their positions and define their enemies and friends. This is a process of securitization alignment and confluence, which serves as a generative mechanism for proxy alignment in a conflict. Securitization alignment is based on a convergence of securitizations by different actors that create a friend–enemy dynamic and convergence of security interests between actors. The confluence of securitizations from the domestic level to regional and beyond also connects actors across different levels to be in alignment and impact the conflict.

Lauren K. Thompson, Friendly Enemies: Soldier Fraternization throughout the American Civil War

Review of: Friendly Enemies: Soldier Fraternization throughout the American Civil War, by Lauren K. Thompson.

Multiagent Hierarchical Cognition Difference Policy for Multiagent Cooperation

Multiagent cooperation is one of the most attractive research fields in multiagent systems. There are many attempts made by researchers in this field to promote cooperation behavior. However, several issues still exist, such as complex interactions among different groups of agents, redundant communication contents of irrelevant agents, which prevents the learning and convergence of agent cooperation behaviors. To address the limitations above, a novel method called multiagent hierarchical cognition difference policy (MA-HCDP) is proposed in this paper. It includes a hierarchical group network (HGN), a cognition difference network (CDN), and a soft communication network (SCN). HGN is designed to distinguish different underlying information of diverse groups’ observations (including friendly group, enemy group, and object group) and extract different high-dimensional state representations of different groups. CDN is designed based on a variational auto-encoder to allow each agent to choose its neighbors (communication targets) adaptively with its environment cognition difference. SCN is designed to handle the complex interactions among the agents with a soft attention mechanism. The results of simulations demonstrate the superior effectiveness of our method compared with existing methods.

Frenemies: Marine Turtle Conservation and Economic Development in the Rushikulya Coast, Eastern India

The discourse on biodiversity conservation often presents this domain as an antithesis to economic development. However, in practice, the relation between conservation and development is far more complex because conservationists possess limited powers and must give serious consideration to the economic aspirations of others in any given region, such as local communities and industries. Moreover, conservationists are themselves a heterogeneous group with diverse ways of working. Therefore, although the relation between conservation and development is often described in binary terms such as conflict—co-operation, this does not adequately capture the nuances and dilemmas of actual conservation practice. In this article, I present an ethnographic study of marine turtle conservation in Rushikulya (eastern India), to argue that the relation between the two domains is essentially ambivalent and uncertain and hence, best understood as one of being ‘frenemies’ i.e. friendly enemies, rather than as allies or antagonists. From fieldwork conducted over three years (2012–2015), I describe how actors in both domains opportunistically borrow tools and concepts from each other, which blurs the boundaries between them and results in both connections and contestations. To conclude, I suggest we need more ethnographic studies to understand the realities of practice and provoke reflection on current approaches to both conservation and development.

Agonism, Democracy, and the Moral Equality of Voice

Agonism emerged three decades ago as an assault on the overemphasis in political theory on justice and consensus. It has now become the norm. But its character and relation to core values of democracy are not as unproblematic today as is often thought, an issue that becomes more pressing as contemporary politics increasingly seem locked into notions of unrelenting conflict between “friends” and “enemies.” This essay traces alternative ontological roots and ethical implications of agonism, distinguishing between “imperializing” and “tempered” modes. The former, exemplified in the popular Schmitt-Mouffe formulation, is shown to be fundamentally flawed in its failure to conceive politics in a fashion that does not allow the dynamic of friend–enemy to imperially trump appeals to democratic norms. In a world of insurgent white nationalism in democratic polities, this is no small fault. “Tempered” agonists, such as William Connolly and Bonnie Honig, offer ontologies where democratic norms can gain traction. Despite the admirable qualities of these alternatives, their formulations are nevertheless not fully persuasive. The difficulty lies in their underarticulated accounts of equality. I suggest an alternative formulation of agonism that embraces a central role for the idea of the moral equality of voice, a value that resides in the seam between notions of difference, resistance, and conflict emphasized by agonists, on the one hand, and the idea of fairness emphasized by notions of democratic justice, on the other.

My Questionable Status as a Friendly Enemy Alien: British Responses to Jewish Refugee Nurses 1933 to 1948.

My Questionable Status as a Friendly Enemy Alien: British Responses to Jewish Refugee Nurses 1933 to 1948.

Conventional and Postqualitative Research: An Invitation to Dialogue

This article explores a question that was left mostly unanswered in a recent special issue of Qualitative Inquiry surveying the field of postqualitative research: How can conventional and post qualitative research coexist within the qualitative community? The importance of addressing this key question is first highlighted. Then, a possible answer is offered, which is: By promoting a new paradigm dialogue grounded in the principles of agonistic pluralism. Challenging the idea of consensus and harmonious coexistence, agonistic pluralism allows casting researchers with competing paradigmatic positions as adversaries or “friendly enemies,” which exist together in the same space without each sacrificing its beliefs about knowledge production. We invite members of the global qualitative community to explore this possibility.

Hermann Heller on politics: discipline, sphere and activity

ABSTRACTMost students of politics are familiar with Carl Schmitt’s definition of politics as a friend–enemy distinction. Yet, only few know of alternative conceptions of politics in interwar Germany that emphasize cooperation and legality over confrontation and decisionism. To unlock such views, this article examines the work of Hermann Heller, a social-democratic constitutional theorist, and takes a close look at his conceptualization of politics as a sphere, activity and discipline. For Heller, ‘the political’ consists in turning human conflict into social cooperation. For him, the political may be conflictual, but is also conditioned by shared norms and agreed rules. By consequence, to act politically means to order the antagonistic social relations that are typical of every human society. In this sense, politics is a purposeful activity, but one which leaves the content of every decision unconfined and the potentialities that follow endless. Like politicians, politics scholars must reflect on ethical and legal principles, while remaining focused on context-specific political problems. The study of politics cannot be disconnected from the study of law, ethics and social reality. Heller’s work showed that the way we conceive of politics is directly related to the way we study politics and vice-versa.

Regionalism as an Instrument for Global Power Contestation: The Case of China

ABSTRACTClaims about the decline of regionalism in world politics have overlooked the continuing development and expansion of Chinese initiatives. This article critically examines the conventional conception of regionalism and develops a new flexible conceptual approach to the form of Chinese led-regionalism, and in particular its state-centric variant. The article examines the roles of China-led regionalism in the context of US–China rivalry through the case studies of ASEAN plus 1 (China) regarding the South China Sea, and the Shanghai Cooperation Organisation. The article also brings two separate sets of literatures on the politics of alliances and regionalism together by examining the role of regionalism in modifying the logic of alliances. It finds that China-led regionalism has modified the logic of alliance politics by developing a hybrid and overlapping membership arrangement that blurs friend–enemy assumptions. China-led regionalism in the area of security, however, has not provided a mechanism that can manage the rivalry between the US and China due to its exclusive nature.

Rearticulating the Friend–Enemy Distinction within States: The HCNM’s ‘New Diplomacy’ of Desecuritization

Summary This article’s premise is that the practice of representatives of international organizations has something important to tell us about what it means to ‘do desecuritization’. The analysis provides a qualitative process-tracing of diplomacy by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe’s (OSCE’s) High Commissioner on National Minorities (HCNM). It finds that ‘new diplomats’ can ‘do desecuritization’ differently. By rearticulating norms, as well as negotiating interests, the HCNM is able to escape the constraints imposed by security grammar and begin to transform the friend–enemy distinction within states. ‘New diplomats’ like the HCNM are capable of initiating such fundamental changes within states because their non-state platforms and institutional cultures transcend traditional international dichotomies of ‘us’ and ‘them’. These findings add nuance to our understanding of desecuritization as practice and suggest a novel methodological approach for studying desecuritization empirically.

The constitutional crisis in Poland, Schmittian questions and Kaczyński’s political and legal philosophy

ABSTRACT Between 2007 and 2015, the ruling party of Poland was the pro-European, liberal-conservative and strict fiscal policy-oriented Civic Platform. In 2015, Civic Platform lost in both the presidential elections (10 May) and the parliamentary elections (25 October). The winner was the conservative-nationalistic and EU-sceptical ‘Law and Justice’ party (PiS) led by Jarosław Kaczyński. A constitutional crisis began when the newly elected parliament changed the five members of the constitutional court, and the crisis deepened as a result of many new reforms, dividing the nation. This paper argues that this division of the citizens has a Schmittian nature. The aim of the article is to analyse the recent constitutional crisis in Poland, focusing on the Schmittian debate that has appeared in the academic, intellectual and judicial discussions and seeking to understand the political and legal philosophy behind the actions of Kaczyński. The paper considers three main questions: (1) What happened between 2015 and 2017? (2) What are the Schmittian questions in the debate about the rule of law? (3) How is Kaczyński’s political philosophy formulated? The language of the debates is at times brutal. This, but not only this, reminds the reader of Schmitt’s friend–enemy division. Moreover, Kaczyński’s political power reminds us of the power of Schmitt’s sovereign.

The enemy within: The dangers of Chantal Mouffe’s figure of the adversary to the democratic task of agonistic planning

Chantal Mouffe’s agonistic pluralism calls for the mediation of antagonism. In planning theory, increasingly influential agonistic planning theory has taken inspiration from Mouffe’s neo-Schmittian radical democratic theory and promoted as its democratic task the transformation of antagonistic relation between friends and enemies into agonistic ones between adversaries. To accomplish this democratic task, however, I argue that it is not enough to transform antagonism into agonism and that agonism must also be prevented from transforming into antagonism. To this end, I first consider how Carl Schmitt’s formulation of the political as the friend–enemy concept is presupposed in his understanding of the state and is linked directly to his decisionist theory of sovereignty. Transforming antagonism into agonism could thus potentially compromise the effectiveness of sovereign decisions and the unity of social order, and I argue that the mediation of antagonism should be considered to involve the mediation between friends and enemies as well as the mediation between chaos and order. Yet the Mouffean figure of the adversary cannot adequately address the latter. With Bauman and Norval, I draw attention to Zygmunt Bauman’s figure of the stranger in the mediation between chaos and order and, with Sandercock, to a possible complementarity between Mouffe-inspired agonistic planning theory and Sandercock’s postmodern therapeutic planning theory. This complementarity is then examined through a number of empirical planning literature on agonistic and therapeutic planning practices, and I conclude by calling for the recognition of both the Mouffean figure of the adversary and Bauman’s figure of the stranger in implementing the democratic task of agonistic planning theory.

The dilemmas of ontological insecurity in a postcolonising Northern Ireland

ABSTRACTSince the signing of the Belfast Good Friday Agreement of 1998, Northern Ireland has made significant progress towards a postcolonising transformation of its political culture and its major political and social institutions, as it has shifted away from violence and the dominance of political ideologies structured by the friend–enemy distinction. These ideological formations and the practices of social and political antagonism that they prescribed have been challenged by adversary–neighbour ideological formations that construct identities and relations through more inclusive norms of recognition and that support a more complex emotional constellation. However, as this cultural transformation has been neither thoroughgoing nor universal, Northern Ireland finds itself in the somewhat counter-intuitive situation in which the shift away from the violence of the past has increased, rather than reduced, the ontological insecurity of its citizens. Moreover, as ontological security may be supported by either friend–enemy or adversary–neighbour ideological formations, two distinct ways in which ontological security may collapse or re-configure have emerged in Northern Ireland.

Gambling with the public sphere: Accounting’s contribution to debate on social issues

This paper explores the contribution of accounts, especially counter-accounts, to the debate on social issues in the public sphere. We examine a social activist organisation's challenge to a major corporation to acknowledge the issue of problem gambling and change its poker machine operations. While the professionally sanctioned corporate financial statements and corporate responsibility reports failed to contribute relevant information for an informed public debate, the activist organisation sponsored and produced both narrative and calculative counter-accounts which contributed to public debate. We initially anchor our approach in Habermas' to explore dialogic accounts and democratic accountability at the deliberative-agonistic divide. Our contextualised, theorised narrative identifies the accounts and counter-accounts provided by the protagonists. Practically, the paper demonstrates the power of counter-accounts to reinvigorate debate in the public sphere, irrespective of whether it stimulates a change in corporate behaviour. We therefore contend that social accounting should be empirically examined and contextually interpreted. The case brings into focus the deliberative-agonistic divide inherent in democratic systems and recognised in the social accounting literature, and suggests that ideological differences make it difficult for corporate and activist protagonists to co-exist as friendly enemies. This challenges Habermas' conception of a public sphere as naively idealistic, since it neglects contemporary ideological, political and power differentials, but proposes a space in which debate about accounting's role in social issues can be agonistically debated. It leads us to call for more theoretically informed, contextualised case studies to examine the potential of accounting to enable public debate on social issues.