Political Functions Research Articles

Connecting the Nation and individuals: Scout uniforms in Republican China

ABSTRACT This study examines the functions and ideology of the Chinese Scout uniform during the Republican period (1912–1949). It begins by identifying four issues related to the British influence on Chinese Scout uniforms in early Republican China, which demonstrate efforts to integrate foreign and local cultures. By analysing the regulations and standards governing Chinese Scout uniforms, this research sheds light on the topics of children, childhood, education, and national identity during the Republican era. The Scout uniform was designed to establish a distinct identity among Chinese Scouts, fostering a sense of pride and integrity. Additionally, the Scout uniform’s unification and standardisation aimed to promote teamwork, with accessories like ribbons, badges, stars, and neckers effectively managing and categorizing Scouts. Equally significant was its political function. Regardless of the organisation responsible for Scouting in China at a given time, whether local Scout associations or the Kuomintang, patriotic commitment and national respect were equally emphasised. However, the Kuomintang placed greater emphasis on shaping Scouts’ minds and bodies for political purposes. This study enhances the understanding of how the Scout uniform connected the nation and individuals, influenced the development and organisation of the Scouts, and contributed to youth discipline in Republican China.

Racist and antiracist conspiracy theories

ABSTRACT In conspiracy theory philosophy the primary debate has been epistemic, but the concern is now also shifting to the ethical and political implications of taking conspiracy theories seriously. This shift is epitomized in the work of Quassim Cassam, whose focus has moved away from the epistemic faults of the theories and theorists to the political function of conspiracy theories. This function, he argues, is to ‘express and promote an ideology’, specifically, racist, antisemitic, and extremist ideology. In this essay, I will challenge two of Cassam’s assumptions. First, I will disagree with his claim that racist conspiracy theories ought to be treated dismissively as a class. This is due in part to the difficulties in defining racist conspiracy theories and due in part to what I call the Conspiracy Theory Location Problem, which is the challenge of identifying what constitutes ‘the theory’. In response, I suggest we need to be even more particularistic about ‘instances’ of a theory. Second, I disagree that the only function of conspiracy theories is to promote racist ideology. Instead, I argue that there exists a class of antiracist conspiracy theories that resist white supremacy by uncovering racist conspiracies and challenging racist institutions, systems, and ideologies.

Apocalypses

This entry analyzes the notion of apocalypses in various socio-cultural contexts, highlighting the evolution of research and its diversification, from the field of religious science to that of socio-anthropology. It highlights the symbolic, social and political functions of social movements based on such perspectives, and the place they occupy in representations of contemporary popular culture. The latter uses them to give meaning to current events, pandemics and climate change, interpreted from hybrid apocalyptic matrices borrowing elements from religious, scientific and secular images and discourses.

THE POLITICAL FUNCTION OF PUBLIC FINANCE. THE POLAND EXAMPLE

The article concerns the function of public finance. The authors attempt to provide an answer as to whether, in addition to the classic functions of public finance – the allocative, redistributive and stabilizing functions – one can arrive at a claim that public finance also plays a political function. These reflections are based on the course of 2023 parliamentary elections in Poland and the analysis of election programs presented by the individual political parties. Extracted from the programs were all the promises which could impact the redistribution of public goods and services and would involve their public funding, as well as those which could impact the tax revenues of the state. The analysis leads to the conclusions that the scope of public spending and the degree of fiscalism were one of the main factors encouraging the voters to vote for a particular political party. Since election promises have a major impact on the election results and they can be turned into legal regulations impacting public budgets, the claim concerning the political function of public finance is justified.

Political Education Initiatives by the Mizoram Presbyterian Church

Political education aims to guarantee that individuals possess political literacy and are well-informed. Nevertheless, there is considerable controversy regarding the primary emphasis of political education. There is a debate regarding whether education should prioritize teaching individuals about the functioning of government and politics or whether its main objective should be imparting ideals and principles. The Mizoram Presbyterian Church has undertaken numerous initiatives to educate persons through the Church, highlighting the involvement of God in politics since its inception. Providing knowledge and instruction to individuals on the true nature of politics, the biblical principles that guide political actions, how the political landscape of Mizoram has been shaped, and the specific flaws within Mizoram's political system.

Assembling the multitude: the transversal potential of categories for social work practice

This article elaborates on a theoretically informed model of action rooted in the concept of professional resistance, which approaches groups of people and social problems in an alternative way to the dominant modes of managerial practice. The aim is to create conditions for approaching groups with social needs differently and to be able to act politically for social change within contemporary society. We will do this by exploring the potential of the assembly in line with Hardt, Negri and Butler, as well as the notion of transversal politics as developed by Yuval-Davis, for creating political subjectivities and alliances across differences. The reason for this theoretical approach is based on how the effects of categorisation and its political function can sometimes be challenging to identify. This is argued to especially be the case within a neoliberal capitalist society where categories induce competition between precarious groups to maintain the political status quo.

The Kingdom of Loloda: The Dynamics of Economic, Political, and Military in North Maluku During the Dutch Collonial Power (1817-1942)

This research was conducted based on the fact that the Loloda Kingdom had been lost in history since 1322. The remark that in that year, Loloda did not attend the meeting of the Maluku kings who succeeded in forming the Moti Alliance (<i>Motir Verbond</i> [1322-1343]) which was initiated by the King of Ternate VII, Sida Arif Malamo (1322-1331). Since that year also Loloda, considered not part of the "world of Maluku". Furthermore, <i>de jure</i>, during the VOC period (1627-1800), all Loloda was declared to have disappeared, because Ternate was annexed during the reign of Sultan Amir Hamzah (1627-1648). But <i>de facto</i>, the political structure of the Loloda kingdom actually still existed during that period in the Northwest Coast of Halmahera. The results showed that the cooperation between Ternate and the Dutch colonial government since 1817 through political contracts on the grounds of mutually beneficial cooperation and friendship, actually caused all of Loloda's economic, political and military power to be weakened and taken over by Ternate to Dutch interests. Although Loloda was in the shadow of the power of Ternate and the Netherlands, the kingdom was still able to carry out its economic, political and military functions during the period 1817-1942, even though it was under the control of Ternate with the consent of the Dutch. This study aims to explain the existence of the presence of the Loloda Kingdom in the economic, political, and military dynamics that occurred in North Maluku until the collapse of the power of the Dutch Colonial Government in Indonesia in 1942. This study uses historical research methods, with the following stages: 1) tracing and collecting sources historical sources from literature, archives, field, and documentation (heuristics); 2) analysis and synthesis (criticism, verification, and validation of data; 3) interpretation of the results of analysis and data synthesis; and 4) writing history (historiography).

Refining Academic Conversations through Discourse with the Imperative Politeness Function

This study aims to describe the function of using politeness as an imperative in academic interaction. The deep data collection study was done through three techniques: recording, observation, and interviews. The in-depth data study analyzed in this research is in the form of recorded data from lecturers' and students' speeches. The selected data is the result of lecturers' speeches to students and students' speeches to lecturers in lectures which contain the imperative function of politeness. Note data fields in the form of recorded data fields descriptive and reflective. In addition, research data can be obtained from generation in a way creative intuition language researcher. The results of the research show that the use of imperative politeness functions by lecturers towards students includes: (1) commanding function, (2) requesting function, (3) prohibiting function, (4) inviting function, (5) suggesting function, (6) expecting function, (7) encouraging function, and (8) urging function. Use function politeness, which is imperative from student to lecturer in academic interaction, includes (1) function application and (2) function request. Politeness markers used to represent the function of imperative politeness in academic interaction include (1) linguistic politeness markers, (2) persona markers, and (3) informal diction markers. The study reveals that lecturers with power in the classroom often consider linguistic politeness in speaking, allowing students to express their speech the way the lecturer speaks. However, this can lead to a lack of harmony between lecturers and students, and may not set an example for students in speaking.

Literature and art as political discourse: adapting The White-Haired Girl in the communist context of China

ABSTRACT It is not only political actors but also the contexts, which make a text political discourse. This nuanced understanding turns political functions and implications into defining features of political discourse. Using the Chinese revolutionary work The White-Haired Girl as a case study, this paper argues that the constant adaptations of the work, in its various literary and artistic forms, are intrinsically political. Born out of a folktale, the work first assumed the form of literary non-fiction in 1940. Aligning with Chinese Communist Party’s evolving political agendas in the next few decades, The White-Haired Girl migrated across medial borders to take the form of a movie in the 1950s and a ballet in the 1960s. The highly ideological adaptations transformed the work into political discourse, with its life sustained not primarily by artistic merits but by political functions. The adaptation history of The White-Haired Girl reveals that intersemiotic translations of a work tend to complement their source text(s), and they also bear (intertextual) traces of their sociohistorical contexts.

Sanat Bağlamında Berlin Duvarı’nın İzleri

Germany was the place where the cold war between the United States and the Soviet Union took place, planning to establish an ideological domination over the world. After the end of the Second World War, although the city of Berlin remained within the borders of East Germany, as per an agreement between the Soviets and the Western bloc countries. divided. In order to prevent their escape to East and West Germany, the German administration began to build a wall around East Berlin on August 13, 1961, closing all passages to the western part, telling its citizens that they had a freer and more prosperous life. Hundreds of people lost their lives trying to escape to West Berlin by crossing the Berlin Wall until it collapsed on November 9, 1989. The walls of the public space create a political language and a space used against the system. The aim of this study was investigated in the context of the division of Germany, represented by the wreckage of the Berlin Wall, on a social and political plane. The resistance and political discourse function of graffiti in public spaces is examined through the example of the Berlin Wall. Artistic traces with a predominant protest aspect were investigated through literature review and visual concepts. Keywords: Public art, Berlin Wall, War, Graffiti, Politics, Street Art

Climate refugeehood: A counterargument

This paper argues against the idea of climate change refugeehood. Drawing on political realism, it reconstructs the idea and function of refugeehood in international politics. Refugees are not the agencyless victims merely in search of rescue by states of the Global North, as the idea of climate refugeehood as a form of humanitarian refugeehood would have it. Nor are they simply a function of reparative justice, or of defending international state legitimacy. To liberal democracies, refugees are those fleeing political oppression. They hold an important political function in inter-state relations in undermining rival political systems and strengthening liberal democratic regimes, both ideally and materially. The idea of climate refugeehood collides with the role refugeehood plays in international politics, the reasons for their admission, and the conceptualization of their plight and function. It ought, hence, to be rejected.

Morality in the Refugee Regime? Arguing for More (Political) Realism in Admitting Refugees

Refugees drown, are beaten, and are pushed back at the borders of the states of the Global North. Moral outrage is understandable in the face of such treatment. But does it constitute a good political theory? Can morality supply us with good normative arguments for a political world? In this article, I argue that they cannot. Drawing on political realism, I show why moral arguments for admitting refugees fail. What we require is not the extrapolation of moral arguments onto a political world, but a new form of political normativity that is derived from how politics works. I show that refugeehood possesses a specific political function in international politics. States do not admit refugees based on humanitarian reasons. This is what moral arguments get wrong. Rather, they fulfill the political function of condemning and embarrassing other states, of building oppositional and military forces to undermine rival political systems both ideologically and materially. In other words, they play an important political role—a role that allows us to build normative arguments from within a political and not a moral understanding of the world.

“How Do We Put the Country Back Together?” Mitigating Affective Polarization Through Mediated Intergroup Contact

ABSTRACT Affective polarization presents an ongoing threat to the political and social functioning of democracies as partisans increasingly dislike and distrust opposing partisans. Because engagement with political media is one way by which citizens understand partisan dynamics, we hypothesize that exposure to positive mediated intergroup contact via an entertainment narrative may be able to attenuate feelings of affective polarization—especially through identification with a character that expresses differing political views—but also that negative intergroup contact via a political debate could exacerbate partisan tensions. This premise is tested in an experiment (N = 544) that juxtaposed real-world examples of political media using excerpts from the U.S. television comedy The Conners and the 2020 U.S. presidential debates. Two common indicators of affective polarization, a feeling thermometer and social distance, were used to measure the affective gap between Democrats and Republicans. For the purposes of our analyses, a brief implicit association test (BIAT) was also conducted to measure participants’ implicit bias toward members of the political outgroup. We find evidence that exposure to positive intergroup contact can attenuate partisan tensions, especially through identification with the character belonging to the opposing political party, but that identification with the co-partisan character can further exacerbate negative affect.

Comic innocence

In recent years, humour has re-entered the public sphere as a serious and potentially explosive topic of debate, giving rise to social conflicts and controversies. Paradoxically, however, humour has at the same time been passionately (and often aggressively) defended as innocent and harmless. I propose the notion of ‘comic innocence’ to make sense of this paradox. I take Dutch and American studies of racism, white innocence and racial ignorance as a starting point to construct a theory of comic innocence, which is tested through the analysis of responses in both legacy and social media to a serious opinion article on humour (written by the author of this paper), which sparked a scandal in the summer of 2021. I analyse 265 tweets and a small number of related newspaper articles and blog posts to demonstrate the respondents’ “humour ideologies”. I argue that, in the context of the “re-politicisation of humour”, those who defend humour as innocent mobilise and re-articulate three older ideas on humour. First, they emphasise the overall positive psychological, social and political functions and effects of humour. Second, they believe that humour should be protected against a ‘woke’ culture of high sensitivity and censorship. Third, they argue that humour research is a joke, and humour scholars lack a sense of humour. The humour scholar appears in this debate as the most important source of danger: a humourless, left-wing scientist keen on curtailing and censoring humorous expression.

Geographies of super-philanthropy: Disaggregating the global philanthropic complex

In recent decades the world has witnessed an unparalleled growth of philanthropic initiatives and institutions that has proven inextricable from the vast accumulation and concentration of wealth on a global scale. Echoing recent calls for geographers to study philanthropy, this paper seeks to advance a critical geographical understanding of globalising philanthropy. Inspired by geographical scholarship on relational thinking, the paper frames the varied manifestations of contemporary philanthropy as a ‘philanthropic complex’ in order to understand philanthropy through central themes of relationality, intermediation and stabilisation. Advancing theories of philanthropy by characterising the complex's geographical unevenness and political functions of depoliticisation, the paper closes by outlining avenues in which relational thinking about philanthropy can advance geographical theories of elites and global development.

‘Intelligible government’: rethinking the meaning of monarchy in the age of King Charles III

ABSTRACT At the beginning of a new reign it seems appropriate to re-assess the meaning of monarchy in modern Britain. The new King heads a fractured royal family, a divided nation, and a disaffected Commonwealth. How can we as scholars make sense of where the monarchy has been, and where it might be going? This article suggests a new scholarly approach is required. Through a critical analysis of three classic studies of monarchy: Walter Bagehot’s The English constitution (1867), Kingsley Martin’s The magic of monarchy (1937) and Tom Nairn’s The enchanted glass (1988), the lecture traces the lineage of modern interpretations of the British monarchy and points up their limitations. Preoccupied with the symbolism of monarchy, conventional scholarship neglects its important political functions. As the lecture argues, in the era of Brexit at home and populist regimes around the world, modern democracies may actually need monarchy more than ever before.

On the nature of tradition: The Japanese notion of furusato and a historical quest for place

ABSTRACT The notion of ‘tradition' still haunts anthropological discourse as something to be addressed with great scepticism and suspicion. Anthropologists are usually among the first to highlight the supposed impetus for reification that inhabits the idea of tradition, as well as its nationalistic, ideological, or political functions. Taking as a point of departure the Japanese notion of furusato (‘hometown', ‘native place') and its interpretation as an ‘invented tradition’, this paper attempts to look beyond the surface of these kind of functionalist evaluations and invites anthropologists to consider instead the mode of being and coming to be of tradition in human worlds; in other words, not the truth about tradition but the truth of tradition. Our understanding of tradition will be enhanced – this paper proposes – if we see it not as the 'thing' transmitted, but as the horizon of intelligibility disclosed and set in motion by that which is transmitted.

The Terminator in the goldfields: speculative affects in an extractive frontier in Colombia

AbstractThis article analyses the relationships among speculative rumour, everyday storytelling, and financial speculation that impact small‐scale gold mining towns in Colombia. By following the stories surrounding the visit of Arnold Schwarzenegger to Marmato, a mining town in central Colombia, and its consequences, I explore how people speculate about such ‘speculative’ visits so as to reframe the events as part of wider colonial histories. I aim to comprehend the affective constellation of lives criss‐crossed by financial speculation and the political openings created by rumour, storytelling, and fabulation. I argue that people locate the Schwarzenegger visit as part of a crisis‐ridden history that counters the narratives of modern and responsible mining. The argument contributes to the conceptualization of speculation in anthropology, as well as to questions of history, temporality, and politics of extractive frontiers. The article is based on ethnographic fieldwork carried out between 2016 and 2019 in the central Andes of Colombia and with governmental and corporate representatives.

Can failure be useful in policymaking? The case of EU equal pay policy

Although equal pay for equal work between women and men is a founding principle of the European Union, enshrined in the Treaties since 1957, the gender pay gap stands at 12.7 per cent in 2021 and has only changed minimally for two decades. This article explores a policymaking paradox: the EU equal pay policy seems unaffected by failure, on the contrary, failure seems to contribute to the legitimisation of the policy. The article asks how and why a policy implementation failure framing has been developed in the field of EU equal pay promotion? What is the political function of this framing and what is its impact on the EU policymaking process? Over the years, the EU equal pay policy has been associated with a repeated experience of implementation failure. This failure framing has been particularly present in the debates over the implementation of the 2006 Recast Directive, especially since this frame has been impelled by the quantitative and symbolic strength of the gender pay gap’s percentage. The article shows that this framing performed important functions. From a policymaking perspective, the implementation failure framing allowed the gender equality policy community to keep the issue firmly on the EU agenda and to ride out the dismantling storm. The article also shows that the analytical definition of what constitutes a policy failure should be more nuanced. To conclude, the article asks if this type of failure framing can continue to produce results in an increasingly polarised context such as that of gender equality.

Neocolonialism and Imperial Dominance of the Post-Colonial African States

The study examines the impact of imperial dominance on the socio-economic development of the Post-colonial African States. There is a core search to the argument that globalizing the world with developing countries, has grossly embedded a horizontal gap among the nation states. The consequences of these interactions and impacts, have incredibly premised such dominant structures on the continent as they are examined to be colonial legacies. These apparently, control a state of international dependency and a culture of corruption within the new states. Imperialism and neocolonialism, created a structurally weak nations in Africa and beyond. Having incessantly exploited the indigenous populations. The political aspects of the menace, have deeply asphyxiating as these weak political structures which were created by the western imperialist nations, received political and socio-economic functions at Independence, which they are not developed enough to handle. Subsequently, after Europe was through by under-developing the continent of Africa, it simply left. No measures were taken to help Africans migrated to self-governance or to be better organized. This of course, was argued that Africa was not prepared for a modern economy that would benefit from industrialization and it consequently plunged the Post-colonial African States into a primarily subsistence farming economy. Hence, the state of economy and socio-cultural values of African States as at the time were not properly structured to govern as this resulted the continent into poverty and civil war. At the end of the Second World War, Europe’s two major and remaining colonial powers (French and British) found that they could no longer rule their African colonies as before. For reasons mostly economic but also geopolitical and nationalistic, they were not willing to give them up entirely. Thus, sought mechanisms to maintain control of Africa as the second wave of colonial rule. Therefore, came in form of ‘’neocolonialism and imperialism” as these imply the external control and dominance of economic, political, technological, educational and military strength of the continent with respect to a globalizing paradigm. Keywords: Globalization, Imperialism. Neocolonialism, Post-colonial African States, International Dependency