Ideological Affinity Research Articles

Mexico’s foreign policy under new leadership

Despite the inauguration of a new president in October 2024, Mexico’s foreign policy is likely to show some continuity with past practices – it will remain non-aligned, demonstrating ideological affinity with some left-leaning governments in the Global South, while the United States will remain the primary external reference point on security and economic issues. In the near term, Mexico–US relations will be put to the test during Trump’s forthcoming presidency, as his hostility towards Mexico has been evident since the start of his first presidential campaign in 2015.

Tribal Politics or Discerning Voters? Party and Policy in Local Elections

How do voters react to local candidates who share their policy views but not their party identification, and vice versa? This paper presents findings from a survey experiment that cross-pressured respondents to choose between a co-partisan candidate who does not share their policy views (on housing and homelessness) and an opposing party candidate with some ideological affinity. The majority of respondents chose party over policy, indicating they would vote for co-partisans even if the candidate from the opposing party is closer to their policy positions. However, significant minorities defected and in some circumstances most did. Weak partisans, those with stronger policy views, and those who viewed the issues as highly salient were more likely to defect from their party when cross-pressured. Our findings support revising the expectation that partisanship always takes precedence over policy views and reinforces the view that partisanship may operate differently at the local level.

BRICS as a Catalyst for Global Governance Transformation: Beyond Western Perceptions

Scholarship on global political economy and global peace and security governance often depicts BRICS members as emerging powers with relatively limited experience in international leadership. These depictions underscore their contested regional leadership and ambiguous institutional, political, ideological, and socio-economic capacities to influence and reshape the global governance system. However, this article challenges some of these characterizations of BRICS members as inaccurate and rooted in Western exceptionalism. Employing a qualitative secondary research approach, it aims to analyze the role of BRICS as a new model for global governance by examining key institutional and political initiatives undertaken by the bloc, as well as by each of its member states.The analysis reveals that institutional initiatives such as the New Development Bank (NDB) demonstrate the BRICS’ capacity to deploy a combination of hard and soft power tools, thereby contributing to the emergence of multipolarity in the global governance architecture. These initiatives have exposed the world's developing regions to new experiences, resources, and understandings of the priorities of emerging powers. Furthermore, political responses to crises, such as turmoil in Zimbabwe, Libya, and Mali, as well as nuclear issues in Iran, where BRICS members have assumed mediatory, supportive, or leading roles, have sparked renewed interest in understanding BRICS as an alternative to traditional conceptions of global peace and security governance. Significantly, BRICS’ soft power diplomacy plays a pivotal role in projecting the bloc as an advocate of alternative global governance architecture and in dispelling negative perceptions. This objective is achieved through the BRICS’ transformative agenda, which offers alternative pathways for attaining international public goods in developing regions with shared historical and ideological affinities.

The Moderating Effect of Ideological Identification on How Economic News and Economic Growth Impact Individual Economic Perceptions: Evidence From Chile

Previous literature argues that macroeconomic conditions and economic news impact socio-tropic assessments. Others find that ideological identification or ideological affinity with the government impact socio-tropic economic views. Here, we test the moderating effect of ideological identification on how economic growth and economic news shape economic perceptions. We test this hypothesis using a dataset that combines monthly polls in Chile (2014–2018), economic news, and economic growth indicators. We find that ideological affinity with the government intensifies the positive impact of good macroeconomic indicators on current and prospective perceptions and, surprisingly, induces more positive current perceptions when negative economic news increases. In turn, ideological affinity with the government is associated with a slightly negative impact of good macroeconomic indicators on current (but not prospective) economic perceptions and a negative impact of negative economic news on current and prospective perceptions. Ideology moderates the effect of macroeconomic indicators and economic news on economic perceptions.

Was Gogol a Slavophile writer? A view from Serbia

The article is concerned with the Slavic question in Gogol’s journalism and that of the Russian Slavophiles as it was perceived in Serbia. The study was prompted by the author’s discovery of an article printed in the Serbian journal Ljetopis (1860) where Gogol is referred to as a Slavophile. This somewhat biased inclusion of Gogol into the circle of Khomyakov and the brothers Aksakov stemmed from the fact that his view of Slavic issues resembled that of the authors of Russkaya Beseda. Sartakov argues that Gogol decidedly avoided taking sides in the central dispute of the period — the rift between the Slavophiles and the Westernizers — and criticized extreme opinions expressed by both parties. According to Sartakov, Gogol’s ideological affinity with Khomyakov, the brothers Aksakov, and others proves that, rather than being influenced by their ideas, Gogol’s view on Slavic history had the same origins. To support his point, the scholar cites Gogol’s little-known sketch about the Slavs, in which the writer posits that they stood in profound civilizational contrast to their European counterparts, especially Germanic tribes.

Exclusionary Cosmopolitanism in Buenos Aires

ABSTRACT In this article I explore the organisation of practices of vernacular cosmopolitanism in the city of Buenos Aires. The starting point is a series of festivals and activities organised by the city government to promote and celebrate its cosmopolitanism. I then explore the spaces where they take place, and the monuments built by immigrant communities that populate the urban landscape. I read these in relationship to the ideological making of the Argentine nation and state, showing that the vernacular cosmopolitanism being promoted is exclusionary in character, and Eurocentric in orientation. Furthermore, I suggest that this form of exclusionary cosmopolitanism has an ideological affinity and shared genealogy with the settler colonialism that underpins Argentine nation building and its territorial state consolidation. I also show that in these celebrations of diversity, the government of the city of Buenos Aires strategically uses immigrant institutions and their networks, subsuming their particularity and multiplicity to that of the city and the nation.

Eterno femenino» en Cristóbal de Castro y en su traducción de Eva moderna (1921), de Scipio Sighele

Cristóbal de Castro (1874-1953) has been considered a feminist author by some scholars and editors of his work. This consideration is insufficient if the emphasis is only made on the author as someone who wrote to describe women, not paying attention to the typology of his female characters. Since what type of woman does Castro present in his work? Furthermore, it is also insufficient if translation is not considered part of his writing and the treatment of women in his translated works is ignorEd. In the following essay, Castro’s thinking on women as reflected in his literary and journalistic work is studied, as well as in the translation of Eva moderna (1921), which was made by the Italian Scipio Sighele. Attention is paid to the ideological affinity between the author and the translator to reflect on whether the texts of both authors are committed to a new model of woman that goes beyond the nineteenth-century codes, which situated women in the sphere of the private and feelings, or, on the contrary, whether they reproduce an «eternal feminine», that is, an image of women dominated by men as an eternal truth, which, according to the theory of immanence, makes the emancipation of women and their conquest of the public sphere impossible.

Digital Truth-making Among the New Chinese Online Fandom Nationalists: Between Online Popular Culture and Political Participation

In recent years, the rise of digital populist and/or nationalist movement and the post-truth phenomenon have affected the political landscapes of many countries, including China. This article focuses on how pop-cultural practices and practices of political participation intertwine in the digital truth-making process of Chinese online “fandom nationalists”. Using over one year of ethnographic mixed-methods data analysis following relevant hashtags and chat groups, I illustrate the truth-making practices of these online users and their clear preference for information with ideological affinities. I argue that the social media affordances allow Chinese online fandom nationalists to create various forms of strong synergies between pop-/fandom-cultural and political practices that provide an ideal ground for the propagation of certain political truths while simultaneously suppressing/hiding the truths of others.

Vietnam’s Current Perceptions and Policies Regarding Its Relations with China

Despite having same political ideologies, Vietnam and China share mutual suspicion and contradictions in their bilateral interactions. Since the normalization of Sino-Vietnamese relations in 1991, In the post-Cold War era, Vietnam-China relations could be called as a mature asymmetry. These have affected strategic considerations in Vietnam’s policy towards China. I argue that Vietnam’s cooperation strategy with China encompasses ‘both cooperation and struggle’. In other words, unlike conditions of mature asymmetry, where both countries attempt to maintain peaceful relations, in the case of Vietnam and China, the responsibility has been placed more in the former rather than the latter. In addition, I argue that though the relations are perceived to be driven by ideological affinity and growing economic interdependence, the ‘trust deficit’ is a determining factor that obstructs the development of the two countries’ relations.

Why Fight? The Combatant Careers of the Anti‐Kyiv Fighters in the Donbas War1

Based on original qualitative data on the mobilization of anti‐Kyiv combatants during the war in eastern Ukraine (started in 2014), this article suggests an approach for understanding the spontaneous mobilization of nonstate armed groups during contemporary military conflicts. This approach is based on the notion of career as a collective path of mobilization unfolding over time. It explains how different mobilization factors usually proposed in the literature on contemporary civil wars acquire their mobilization power. The article identifies five combatant careers leading to joining the anti‐Kyiv armed groups: evolving localists, disrupted outcasts, nationalist warriors, adventurous ideologues, and inspired sympathizers. It demonstrates that (1) mobilization requires the combination of factors such as economic incentives, ideological affinity, social connections, and conflict dynamics in a particularly sequenced way, (2) this combination is different for each career path, and (3) these factors acquire their mobilizing capacity only in the context of particular social trajectories.

The Relationship Between Serbia and Russia in the Post-Yugoslav Era: Political, Economic and Security Dimensions

This article analyzes the post-Yugoslav Serbian-Russian political, economic and security connection. The research examines bilateral cooperation and its effects on regional and global security using history, political science and international relations. Ideological affinities, political maneuverings, economic dependency and mutual security interests define the relationship, which has major ramifications for Balkan stability and European security. The essay continues by examining the policy implications of the Serbian-Russian alliance for regional and global players and suggesting future research options in light of the changing geopolitical landscape

Political existentiality in Carl Schmitt; reenchanting the political

Carl Schmitt described the political in existential terms. The political consists in the distinction between friend and enemy, a distinction between collectivities that are existentially different. This led Richard Wolin to label Schmitt a “political existentialist” whose work relies on a specific cultural and philosophical climate of “vitalism.” Consequently, Schmitt’s thought is treated as ideology by Wolin. Instead of focusing on Schmitt’s underlying ideological affinity with a particular cultural climate, this paper attempts to conceptualize the notion of “political existentiality” as a crucial element in Schmitt’s understanding of the political and defend it as a notion that reveals something about the political condition itself. In order to understand the meaning of existentiality, we will conceptualize it against the background of Max Weber’s disenchantment thesis and conclude that through the notion of political existentiality Schmitt conceptualizes the political sphere as a locus of meaning and values and thus reenchants the political.

Mnemonic diplomacy in Russian-Serbian relations: The limits of the possible

The Balkan region has traditionally been of particular importance for Russia, and currently Serbia remains one of the few European countries potentially exposed, due to ideological affinity, to the influence of Russia’s soft power. Memory policy is an important tool in creating and maintaining this affinity because it enables formulation of unifying historical narratives and shared vision of the key events in the common history, thereby providing underpinning for assessments of current developments and for creating an image of the desired future. However, it has its limits and boundaries, and this paper aims at assessing the strength of the Russian-Serbian mnemonic union. The research builds on the concept of ‘mnemonic diplomacy’, which refers to a set of techniques and methods for the affirmation, coordination and dissemination of certain historical narratives designed to support the state’s foreign policy activities. The author argues that the Russian-Serbian memory alliance is based primarily on common assessments of the events of World War II. The paper examines the key stages, internal and external drivers of this mnemonic union development, as well as identifies contradictions and conflicts inherent to this process. The author emphasizes that within the framework of the Russian-Serbian memory alliance both parties have always pursued their own goals. For instance, Serbia sought to use it to increase its weight in the Balkan and, more broadly, European politics, as well as to strengthen relations with its traditional geopolitical ally. For Russia, this mnemonic alliance acquired particular significance when the country’s leaders set a course for transforming the post-Cold War world order. However, it was exactly this new turn of Russia’s foreign policy whose most visible manifestation was the launch of the special military operation in Ukraine that dramatically complicated Serbia’s position, including that in the field of memory politics. At the same time it has revealed the limits of the Russian-Serbian mnemonic union. The author concludes that the effectiveness of mnemonic diplomacy and, more broadly, the very possibility of forming and maintaining mnemonic alliances, ultimately depend on a combination of objective factors, including close economic ties and mutual geopolitical interest. Pushed outside this comfort zone, complementary historical narratives built solely on the appeal to the common heritage quickly lose their power of attraction.

When Beijing Chose Seoul over Pyongyang: China–South Korea Diplomatic Normalization Revisited

AbstractOn 24 August 1992, China finally normalized its diplomatic relations with South Korea, notwithstanding North Korea's protestations. What made Beijing jettison its traditional friendship with Pyongyang and recognize Seoul? What did China want from Sino-South Korea normalization? By extensively unearthing hitherto unknown archival evidence, this paper argues that it was China's security concern about being besieged by pro-Soviet powers, rather than an ideological affinity with North Korea, that delayed Sino-South Korea rapprochement. In the same vein, the study posits that it was the gradual Sino-Soviet reconciliation from 1985 onwards that enabled Beijing to reconcile with Seoul. Furthermore, it argues that in the face of the sudden dissolution of the Eastern bloc and the collapse of the Soviet Union, Beijing hastily sought to secure a cordon sanitaire and foreclose the possibility of the formation of a US–Japan–South Korea anti-China united front by normalizing relations with Seoul.

Waves, Floods, Currents: The Politics and Poetics of Water in Social Movement Analysis

AbstractThe task of conceptualising social movements draws on a wealth of watery images, from protest waves and political currents, to imagining mobilisations as tides, ripples, cascades or high‐pressure hydraulics. Called upon to analyse complex processes, these waters have a life of their own, carrying analytical implications while extending a relationship to water that is never only symbolic and is material, embodied and historical. This article explores the ways water is “enrolled” to understand movements, to advance three arguments: first, these use familiar water morphologies to naturalise particular, located understandings of political change and social form; second, they imply normative claims and ideological affinities regarding political struggle; third, this has implications for our relationship to water, echoing the abstract and alienating “modern water” of capitalist world‐ecology. The article considers how critical water knowledges and subjectivities, often sustained by social movement spaces, indicate possibilities of a being‐otherwise with water and its meanings.

Dance as Yoga: Ritual Offering and Imitation Dei in the Physical Practices of Classical Indian Theatre

In the Nāṭyaśāstra, two main types of physical practices are described in some detail: the so-called “bodily acting” (āṅgikābhinaya) and dance (nṛtta). Although their building blocks are to a large extent common, their purpose appears to be different: while bodily acting is used for dramatic mimesis, dance is said to produce beauty and to be auspicious. Peculiar to the technique of dance are the one hundred and eight karaṇas, complex dance movements that require great coordination, balance and flexibility. Sculptural representations of the karaṇas in the mediaeval temples of South India and in Central Java, as well as some interpretations by contemporary dancers, have elicited comparisons with yogic āsanas, notwithstanding the fact that the karaṇas were first and foremost codified in the context of Sanskrit theatre. More generally, the overlap between dance and yoga-related concepts and practices in antiquity has not been studied in depth. In this chapter, I investigate the connection of dance with the pūrvaraṅga, the preliminary rite that precedes the performance of a play, in order to highlight the connection of some of the physical practices described in the Nāṭyaśāstra’s chapter on dance with ideas of mental cultivation, ritual, and devotion. This connection is particularly evident in the case of the piṇḍībandhas, a set of movements of difficult interpretation that present ideological affinities with practices described in early religious sources, especially, but not exclusively, those of Śaiva affiliation. Finally, I argue that this interface between drama and ritual points to a shared ground for practices and beliefs connected with the body in ancient India.

Intertextual Moments, Contested Meanings: Kitula King’ei’s Adaptation and Rewriting of Utendi wa Mwana Kupona

This paper examines Kitula Kinge'i's reworking of a controversial nineteenth-century Swahili classic, Utendi wa Mwana Kupona by Mwana Kupona, into "biographical" children's books. It revisits some of the critical controversies surrounding her poem in order to underscore how King'ei's adaptations participate directly in the debates about the status and importance of Mwana Kupona's text within Swahili popular culture and imagination. The paper also highlights the ways in which, at the formal level, King'ei radically transforms Mwana Kupona's text, as well as the effects such transformations have on the way she is read in a new, global context. Ultimately, I demonstrate that although King'ei's transcreative adaptations of the formal elements of the poem are so extensive as to result in new texts, he is unable to decisively untether himself from its conservative, feudal class values. What would have been a radical project is, in the end, hampered by its didactic impulses and its ideological affinities to Mwana Kupona's poem.

Iran and Regional Convergence in Eurasia

AbstractRegional convergence in Eurasia has been evolving since the collapse of the Soviet Union. The Commonwealth of Independent States was Russia's initial attempt to forge a comprehensive regional integration. However, Russia gradually shifted its focus to economics, and this produced the Eurasian Economic Union (EEU). This organization has concluded numerous cooperation agreements, even with countries outside the borders of Eurasia, raising questions about regional convergence. In addition, with the expansion of China's influence in Central Asia, there has been a shift in the role and scope of the EEU. Iran has concluded a preferential trade agreement with the EEU, including non‐tariff measures and a list of commodities for which barriers have been reduced or cut to zero. The main question of this study is how Iran's presence in this organization will influence Eurasian convergence. We examine the opportunities for, and obstacles to, convergence through an analysis of the forces that can bind an institution like the EEU: cultural and ideological affinities; the hegemony of the most powerful actors; and the potential for solving common problems.

My enemy’s enemies are my friends: Alternative sources of support in multi-party races

The research on redistributive strategies to secure support has been dominated by a core and swing voter model, which pits two parties against each other in a costly race for support. What are other options beyond targeting either swing or one’s own core voters? This paper identifies a political scenario where core supporters from other parties are viable targets and sets out to test three dimensions that indicate when actors can effectively target them. This paper’s main expectation is that by accounting for voters’ ideological affinity, levels of fragmentation, and the potential to deliver their votes, parties can effectively target other parties’ core supporters. The case of Brazil’s Bolsa Família delivers evidence for the hypotheses.

Why Jihadis Switch: Social Ties, Ideological Affinity and Opportunity

What prompts individuals to leave an established extremist group to join a breakaway faction or splinter group? This phenomenon of inter-terrorist or inter-extremist group migration is under-studied. However, terrorists and extremists can and do migrate between groups, especially in those instances when the costs of exit are low. Using a systematic, iterative, inductive theoretical approach merging existing theory on fragmentation and defection with insights from deep fieldwork with 11 Islamist extremist groups in Indonesia between 2010 and 2019, this article identifies three mechanisms via which individuals migrate between extremist groups: social ties, ideological affinity, and opportunity. In doing so, it finds that Indonesian Islamist extremists rarely switch for the same reason each time; instead, their decisions are shaped by relationships, needs, and beliefs that evolve and shift over their lifecycle in that particular jihadi ecosystem.