Hegemonic Policy Research Articles

Language, Resistance and Multilingualism in Post-Colonial Zimbabwe: The Kalanga and their Struggle for Recognition

The article focuses on language policy in Zimbabwe and argues that both the colonial and post-colonial governments advocated a unitary language policy in which English and the two major indigenous languages – ChiShona and IsiNdebele – were adopted as national languages. For the post-colonial government, this language policy was influenced by prevailing ideas about linguistic unity as a prerequisite for economic development and the construction of a cohesive national identity. This approach led to the marginalisation of minor languages and their associated cultures in education and the wider public sphere. The article shows how one marginalised linguistic community, the Kalanga of south-western Zimbabwe, responded to the government’s exclusionary policies. It traces the resistance to such government policies and the promotion of the TjiKalanga language and culture by two organisations – the Kalanga Cultural Promotion Society, relaunched in 1980, and the Kalanga and Language and Cultural Development Association, founded in 2005. It also engages with the various activities and interventions carried out by the two groups, leading to the introduction of TjiKalanga in schools, among other achievements. Furthermore, the article argues that the rise and development of the two TjiKalanga language and cultural promotion organisations illustrate the pitfalls of centralising and unifying tendencies in both the colonial and post-colonial governments in Zimbabwe. It also demonstrates the agency and resistance of minority groups in relation to these flawed policies. By assessing the performance of the two organisations, the article views their activities as a form of cultural resistance to the hegemonic and exclusionist policies of post-independence Zimbabwean government. Cultural resistance is used as a conceptual approach through which the limits of the impact of hegemonic monolithic language policies on minority groups, such as the Kalanga in the post-colonial Zimbabwean context, are illustrated and illuminated.

The Privatisation of a National Project : The settlements along the trans-Israel Highway since 1977

The settlements along the Trans-Israel Highway illustrate the privatisation of the national settlement enterprise. To understand this process, this dissertation focuses on the settlement production mechanism, which consists of the reciprocal interests of the government and various private groups to develop and domesticate the border area between the State of Israel and the occupied West-Bank - the Green-Line. Centring on the spatial privileges the state granted to diverse spatial agents, this dissertation examines the manner in which different favoured groups were given the power to colonise, plan, develop and market space as a means to enhance the state’s power over it. Investigating the gradual transformation of this production mechanism, this dissertation explores the increasing privatisation of the local economy and culture, as well as how this was manifested in the built environment. Examining the modifications in the architectural and urban products this mechanism produced, this dissertation analyses the materialisation of the privatised national settlement project and how it transformed together with the changing political and economic interests.

Aversion and Desire: The Disruption of Monolithic Ambivalence in Octavia Butler’s Kindred

This article is an attempt to explore colonial ambivalence in Octavia Butler’s Kindred (1979). The significance of study brings to light a major issue which has been hardly emphasized in the existing academic scholarship on the novel. The study will reveal an ambivalent identity in an individual colonial locales and societies. It will analyze and show the many complex ways in which Butler uses her fictional savvy as a medium to broker, affiliate, and project the places, peoples, cultures, and ethnicity to work through the ethical, political, and affective conceptualization of ambivalent identities. Butler’s ambivalent writing, correspondingly, asserts a sense of belonging to the locality in which post-colonial subjects have evolved, and, at the same time, expresses the specificity of the actual racial experience of being ethnic, or alienated in homeland. The study will add to the remapping of contemporary postcolonial fiction and the reevaluation traditional ambivalent identities. It will testify to the increasingly progressive and long-awaited destruction of cultural national containment. The study addresses a vastly under-examined area, namely the impact of colonialism on the native identities of the blacks. Ambivalent subjectivities have always coexisted within and outside the long inherited history of the blacks’ nation, but their text has long been disregarded. As a mode of demonstration, the problem with politically correct perspectives on ambivalent relations and those with the neat postcolonial and colonial oppositions are manifold, including the effects of hegemonic policies. Such hegemonies will be scrutinized by applying Homi Bhabha’s concept of ambivalence as a conceptual framework for the study’s textual analysis.

REGIONAL AND HEGEMONIC IMAGE OF THE UNITED STATES: ANALYSIS OF TURKISH AND FOREIGN STUDENTS’ US PERCEPTION THROUGH TWO MOVIES

The aim of this study is to understand and explain how the US instrumentalizes and perceives cinema for its own hegemonic policies. The scope of our study is limited to dichotomical comparisons which have an important place in the hegemonic policies of USA. Our work is a qualitative one and is based around two Hollywood films. In this context, interviews and focus group interviews were conducted with Turkish and foreign, Muslim and Christian students and their opinions about two Hollywood productions were analyzed and the data obtained were analyzed within the framework of descriptive analysis and thematic analysis methods. The data obtained from the students participating in the study give an idea of ​​how educated young people evaluate, perceive and use the relationship between cinema films and the global hegemony of the USA. In this sense, the results of our study, the use of cinemanion in the presentation of the United States and how the situation is perceived and understood by young people from different regions, countries, religions and ethnicities is trying to make a valuable contribution to the global and hegemonic policies that have been rarely seen in Turkish literature.

Fear, Humanity and Managing the Heritage of War

Using the concepts of affective community (Ahmed 2015; Hutchison 2016) and affective management of “war heritage” (Logan and Reeves 2009; Gegner and Ziino 2012; Lončar 2014; Stublić 2019), the article examines how social subjects in Western Slavonia – a microlocation with many places of memory and a dense accumulation of historical traumas within them – are constructed as resisting and/or conforming to the dominant hegemonic policy of remembering the Homeland War as the “cornerstone of reasoning” in Croatia (Blanuša 2017). The examples analysed range from the activities of a local “memory agent” and the founder of a digital archive of local history to the reception of a book of testimonies and a documentary on the humanity of Pakrac’s medics in the war (Lessons on Humanity, 2017 and 2019). Based on these examples, I identified different strategies of cultural, pedagogical and ideological re-presentation and re-animation of local war heritage in the social and digital environment. These strategies are different responses to the fear that the feeling of social connection to war events and veterans as symbols of national unity and pride has been ebbing away. However, there has also been a noticeable shift on the Croatian (semi-)periphery from a ceremonial commemorative culture to a digital culture of memory of war, fostered by affective communities which transcend local, ethnic and generational boundaries. The second shift is semantic – the tendency to replace victimological and triumphalist war narratives with those of “humanitarian heroism” and positive war stories about humanity, about helping and rescuing people from the “enemy side”. In conclusion, even though the Croatian “social framework of memory” (Halbwachs 2013) offers different models for transforming fear, pain, violence and the trauma of war into “cultural heritage”, only individuals remember and feel, and very few among them become memory agents and activists of “mnemonic resistance” (Molden 2016) with a significant role in the struggles over the meaning of the past.

The security strategy of the People’s Republic of China in light of the 2019 Defence White Paper

This article aims to outline main directions of the security strategy of the People’s Republic of China basing on the analysis of the Defence White Paper of July 2019, the political practice of the Beijing authorities as well as internal and international situation. Having analysed the above mentioned areas, the author concludes that the contemporary strategy of the PRC is internally subordinated to maintaining territorial, political and social integrity, including primarily legitimization of the power of the Communist Party of China. Externally, the strategy is oriented at reversing the unfavourable balance of forces in the Asia-Pacific region and weakening of the US military advantage. Those two directions determine the activities of the Chinese state in such specific areas as: modernization of the People’s Liberation Army (PLA), the relations with Taiwan and claims concerning South China Sea. The Defence White Paper is aimed at contrasting the unilateral and hegemonic policy of the United States (as the authors of the document see it) with the defensive and moderate activities of China. The narration serves to convince international players to remain neutral or engage in collaboration with China in the face of intensifying military, economic and political pressure on the part of the USA. China has entered a “critical moment” of its development and the response of the Beijing authorities to the challenges of internal development and external pressures will determine whether in the 21st century it will become a superpower.

Entering “neomahanean” world: Contemporary maritime rivalry of China and the United States

The author uses Mahan?s sea power concept in order to determine its contemporary geopolitical significance compared to land power. The main thesis of the paper is that international relations - after a century long dominance of land power - are entering a new era of primary significance of sea power, due a rivalry of China and the United States, which is predestined to be mostly maritime. This is the consequence of contemporary globalization, which made biggest world economies dependent on uninterrupted sea commerce, as well as of the unique geopolitical position of China, which neither faces important land challenges, nor can pose them. Arms race and changes in maritime strategies show that the competition at sea between the U.S. and China has already started. Which direction and tempo it shall take depends on whether the U.S. abandons its hegemonic policy in favour of a defensive one, and adequately uses sea power in service of the latter.

Ciencia y políticas de drogas : contexto sociocultural, neuropolítica y control social.

El objetivo del presente trabajo es mostrar las distancias entre perspectivas científicas complejas y políticas de drogas prohibicionistas, aunque estas se justifiquen a partir de planteamientos supuestamente científicos. La metodología consiste en analizar el tema desde dos aspectos estratégicos: por un lado, revisando la hipótesis de la adicción como enfermedad cerebral, y por el otro, contrastando los principales informes institucionales sobre el cannabis con las políticas hegemónicas en el siglo XX. Los resultados ponen en evidencia las limitaciones de la hipótesis de la adicción como enfermedad cerebral, así como diferencias entre lo señalado por los informes y políticas prohibicionistas sobre el cannabis. En las conclusiones se subraya que las incongruencias entre ciencia y políticas de drogas hay que entenderlas en el contexto de sus usos en relación con el control social y sus transformaciones, desde uno de tipo coercitivo e institucional, a la neuropolítica, basada en la performance individual.

Anthropological practices, inter-group conflicts and shared colonial experiences in a regional context of the Lower Amazon

Abstract The purpose of this paper is to present new reflections on ethnographic research conducted in the Lower Amazon, in social situations investigated under fieldwork conditions over two and a half decades. During this period, nation-building developmental projects promoted by capitalist enterprises and the modernising state, regarded as the two most important powers that organise space today, have been implemented. In this context of hegemonic developmental policies, narratives related to territorial and cultural rights are produced, which equally count on the contribution of anthropologists through academic research and the elaboration of legal and administrative reports in Brazil as new narrative genres.

On «particularity» and «exceptionalism» of the United States of America

The article analyzes the hegemonic policy of the largest and most influential state in the world – the United States, supported under the justified concept of “peculiarity” and exclusivity of America. Using this term, Washington imposes its only “correct” and necessary policy for the development of countries and peoples. Showing numerous examples, the author exposes the deceit and duplicity of such a policy, its rejection by most countries of the world. The article is intended for specialists in foreign affairs and those who study the place and role of the United States in the contemporary world.

Pakistan's State Sovereignty in the Light of Saudi Arab's Overt Dictation

Historically Pakistan's relations with Saudi Arab have been concerted and coordinated on the basis of calculated strategy, except for the few exceptions. Pakistan had maintained friendly ties with Saudi Arab but with time Saudi Arab started playing more assertive role in relation to Pakistan. Since inception Pakistan tends to look towards the Saudi Arab due to cultural orientation of its public. The unprecedented transition in paradigm of Pak-Saudi relations came when Saudi Arab assumed the role of major economic aid donor. Today, the role of Pakistan can be described as 'shatter belt' vis-à-vis major powers. Pakistani an attempt to pull itself out of Western influence relied on Saudi Aid which resulted in explicit dictation of Saudi Arab.The internal weakness of Pakistan extended the opportunity for accepting external pressure which compromised the sovereignty of state directly and placed Pakistan in compliant position in relation to Saudi Arab. This paper will divulge the unique relations of Saudi Arab and Pakistan by dissecting the dimensions of Saudi Arab's political, economic and cultural influence on Pakistan. It will also illume the Saudi hegemonic policies in which Pakistan adjusts and influenced to revise its own policy choices. This paper will dwell on the way forward in Pak-Saudi relations in order to restore balance and maintain sovereignty of the state.

Conjuring the past: Slow violence and the temporalities of environmental rights tribunals

In his 2011 Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor, Rob Nixon argues that the ‘slow violence’ of environmental collapse - the too often ‘invisible’ violence that unfolds over decades or even centuries, from the acidification of the oceans to the radioactivity of depleted uranium – represents a formidable representational challenge for contemporary environmental activists. In an era in which ‘the media venerate the spectacular and when public policy is shaped primarily around perceived immediate need’, the challenges of making visible the ‘staggeringly discounted casualties’ associated with environmental destruction are both substantial and urgent (2011: 3). Based on ethnographic research with rights of nature activists in Peru and Australia, this paper analyses the narrative and performative strategies that are increasingly being experimented with at Rights of Nature Tribunals to subvert, extend, and otherwise complexify the spatio-temporalities of mainstream environmental policy making. Drawing on recent work in feminist posthumanism and post-colonial eco-criticism, I argue that these temporal tactics, while still largely marginal to hegemonic policy blocs, are raising important questions about the scalar habits and assumptions that continue to anchor much environmental policy-making.

The Sino-Russian strategic understanding on the Arab uprisings: Motivations and implications

This article seeks to analyse the emerging Sino-Russian strategic understanding on the Arab uprisings of late 2010 and beyond by investigating its underlying motivations and its implications for Middle East and international politics. Building on the assumptions of ‘power transition theory’ in explaining great power interactions, it is argued that the Sino-Russian strategic understanding on the Arab uprisings dovetails with their pre-existing strategic posture in relation to global politics, and was motivated by their joint rising dissatisfaction with US unilateralist and hegemonic policies in the region. Such policies, from a Sino-Russian perspective, tended to exclude, rather than accommodate, the interests of both powers in this pivotal part of the globe. This prompted Russia and China to capitalize on their growing military and economic power and join efforts in the form of a strategic understanding in an attempt to effectively challenge an intrusive and overreaching hegemon and secure their interests in the region. This strategic understanding has had significant implications for the configuration of great power relationships in the direction of challenging US regional hegemony and facilitating a shift in the regional and global balance of power.

Disabling discourses and ableist assumptions: Reimagining social justice through education for disabled people through a critical discourse analysis approach

Responding to the special issue call Capital and Capability, this paper undertakes a critical policy analysis of a recently published Irish labour market activation strategy for people with disabilities through a discourse analytical framework. Drawing on a disability studies lens informed by Foucault’s theory of discourse, the study reveals a hegemonic policy rhetoric within the pages of this policy document that is deeply embedded in neoliberal assumptions about the role and value of education. Through a critical disability studies lens, this study draws attention to the concepts of disablism and neoliberal ableism, whilst highlighting in particular how rhetoric is a means by which ableist culture perpetuates itself. In response to the disparities surrounding the employment of disabled people, the Comprehensive Employment Strategy for People with Disabilities 2015–2024was launched into policy in October 2015. This strategy represents a significant policy event in the Irish disability policy landscape, warranting further questioning, interrogation and analysis. This paper aims to reveal the framework of thinking that lies within the discursive contours of this strategy and to assess the implications therein for inclusive education policy and practice. In keeping with the aim of the special issue, the study explores the potential of a capabilities approach in creating a discursive policy space where social justice througheducation for disabled people can be imagined.

Från litteraturförståelse till literacy

From Literary Comprehension to Literacy: The Expansion of a Concept and its Consequences for the Teaching of Literature
 During the last few decades, the concept of ”literacy” has had a growing impact on the vast fields of education. Although the uses of the concept are multifaceted and diverse, the hegemonic policy discourse as supported by the OECD treats literacy as an individual competence closely tied to the development of explicit reading strategies. This article examines what the concept of literacy means for literary studies in general and literature education in particular. We argue that there are reasons to critically reflect upon the effects of invoking the concept of literacy in the field of literature education. With the aid of theorists like Rita Felski and Toril Moi, our main focus is to examine the risks of centering attention on the ”subject” (the student and his/her abilities) instead of the ”object” (in our case, the works of fiction). By turning to Gert Biesta and Emmanuel Lévinas, we argue that there is an educational value in acknowledging and appreciating what lies beyond the scope of the student’s immediate understanding.

Experiencias de aprendizaje desde los márgenes institucionales. Caso de estudio: La Escuela de Arte y Oficios, UAM Cuajimalpa

En este texto se abordará los casos de estudio de dos prácticas de aprendizaje: el primero de la Escuela de Artes y Oficios (UAM Cuajimalpa, Ciudad de México) y el segundo del taller Las narraciones familiares como relato de la Historia (itinerante). Con el estudio de estos dos proyectos, que operan en los márgenes de las instituciones, se pretende, por un lado, presentar el cruce de sus marcos de producción y desarrollo para así exponer su relación con prácticas críticas a las políticas hegemónicas en el contexto específico de esta universidad pública. Por otro lado, mostrar la relación de las prácticas artísticas con el impulso para crear experiencias de ruptura en los alumnos.

30 years of SUS: the beginning, the pathway and the target.

In this text, we refer to the solid and historical civilizational roots of the Brazilian Unified Health System, SUS (Sistema Único de Saúde) that give it a perennial status. Data and analyses are systematized, pointing out, in parallel to the construction of SUS, the construction of another public health policy that has subverted the principles and guidelines of the Federal Constitution of 1988: a real, implicit and hegemonic policy. As for SUS, we identify and reinforce explicit advances and resistances with its principles and guidelines, over this 30 year period, but with invaluable accumulation in management, evaluation, knowledge construction, appropriate technologies, resistance strategies and politicization in defense of the constitutional directives. The knowledge that has been acquired over this time is understood to form part of a drive towards a civilizing pathway that was proposed by the 1988 Constitution. Although SUS is considered to be an unfinished work with deviations, and the need, on one hand, to be consolidated in better achievements, and on the other, to be permanently reinvented in order to accomplish its mission.

La narrativa colonial española sobre Marruecos como fuente para el estudio de la mora-bestia: deshumanización y monstruosidad

The objective of these pages is to study the representation of a secondary character, but one that appears frequently in the Spanish colonial narrative published during the 20th century and which has been decided to name moor-woman-beast . This moor-woman-beast is a type of «other» Moroccan who has always lived in the countryside, which is often described as a beast of burden and suffers different dehumanizing processes such as animalization, naturalization, reification and monstruosification. A islamophobic representation that, under civilizing pretexts that serve as an alibi for applying colonial and/or hegemonic policies, encourages the otherisation and dehumanization of the true Moroccan women, those women plural and diverse that live in the factual Morocco.

Um entre a ética e o reconhecimento

As análises acadêmicas e não acadêmicas dos produtos audiovisuais buscam tensionar relações postas pelos objetos de formas diversas, e muitas delas se ocupam de uma crítica aos lugares estáveis construídos por percepções condicionadas pelas políticas estabelecidas e pelo que se faz como hegemonia na cena social. Entretanto, ao aproximar certas balizas teóricas na presença da mediação como um dispositivo ético, nota-se a necessidade e, não obstante, o apagamento de uma mesma questão: a noção de reconhecimento. O artigo tem como proposta aproximar os conceitos de ética, moral e reconhecimento como plataforma crítica para as análises dos objetos do campo do audiovisual por meio de contribuições trazidas por Serelle, Fraser e Safatle.

Registro, incorporação tecnológica e produção pública de medicamento: estudo sobre o atazanavir

Brazil was one of the first countries in the Global South to include in its public health policies robust control measures against HIV/Aids. Thus, in 2015, approximately 450,000 patients were under treatment by the Unified Health System. The sanitary registration is a crucial step for the drug entry into the domestic market, what configures a very favorable element for the drug access. Several sectors of society, even if based on different reasons, act in favor of the incorporation of new technologies; this fact, ultimately, favorably weighs in controlling the epidemic. In this work the atazanavir antiretroviral cycle is discussed through a descriptive documental study; that cycle involves: the selection of the drug by therapeutic consensus; the sanitary registration; and the definition of technological incorporation strategies for a national drug production. In 2003, the registration of atazanavir was granted in Brazil: only three months after being granted by the FDA in America and only five and a half months before being granted in Europe. This resulted in the rapid inclusion in the recommendations and in a therapeutic consensus being adopted in Brazil as the preferred drug (1st choice) in 2004. Moreover, atazanavir’s development became the object of a public-private partnership –known as Productive Development Partnership (PDP)-, inside the hegemonic policy of adopting new health technologies, defined by the Ministry of Health.