Internal Contestation Research Articles

The Myth of Determining Mate and Wedding Day in The Tradition of The Kejawen Community, Central Java, Indonesia

This article proves that the dialogue between Islamic teachings and the local culture of the Kejawen community creates a syncretic blending culture. The influence of culture is more dominant than the values ​​of Islamic teachings The transmission of teachings from ancestors is delivered orally and is believed to be the truth. The marriage tradition of the kejawen community is a fusion of local Javanese culture with Islamic religious values. Creative dialogue between local Javanese culture and Islamic religious traditions gave birth to a syncretic pattern of religious traditions. In the tradition of the kejawen community, the determination of a life partner and the day of the wedding uses a calculation based on the birthday of the prospective bride and groom. The way of counting uses a formula that has been passed down by their ancestors orally from generation to generatio Internal contestation between cultural and religious values shows the superiority of local Javanese culture over Islamic teachings.

Contestations and Transformations: The Shared Religious Space of Jhule Lal in Sindh, Pakistan

Syncretic and shared religious spaces have long been perceived as reflections of tolerance. This does not imply that tolerance is completely liberated from multiple clashing components and the coexistence of interfaith practices do not suggest that hostility is entirely missing. In recent times, a transformation is taking place at the shared space of the Jhule Lal by the dominant religious group. However, there remains an appearance of tolerance at the shared space of the Jhule Lal among believers of both Islam and Hinduism, which blinds the observer of the deep internal contestation and process of transformation between both Sindhi Hindus and Sindhi Muslims who revere the same saint of the Jhule Lal. A syncretic space does not simply absorb different religious groups, and by studying the practices, rituals and interactions of the custodians, visitors and devotees at the shrine, this paper aims to unearth the processes through which shrine is contested in multiple identities, discourse (written, textual, verbal) authority, and belief systems.

EU foreign policy and hybrid actors in the Middle East: ready for geopolitical contestation?

ABSTRACT The 2019 European Commission recognizes a need to learn the language of power and geopolitics for the EU to become a stronger player in a contested world. Yet the EU experiences difficulties in navigating the geopolitical scene in its immediate neighbourhood, the Middle East and North Africa, characterized by fast-changing alliances among international and regional powers but also a wide array of non-state and hybrid actors. Policy recommendations urge the EU to include the latter in its foreign policy calculus. This article investigates how the EU accounts for a specific set of actors by exploring its foreign policy discourse. Specifically, it analyses how two hybrid actors, Hamas and Hezbollah, are discussed within the European Parliament, Commission and Council. It is argued that internal contestation over the terrorist nature of these actors poses challenges for the EU to join the geopolitical game in its Southern neighbourhood.

Competitive Balance: Information Disclosure and Discrimination in an Asymmetric Contest

We study a design problem for an effort-maximizing principal in a two-player contest with two dimensions of asymmetry. Players have different skill levels and an information gap exists, as only one player knows the skill difference. The principal has two policy instruments to redress the lack of competitive balance due to asymmetry; she can commit to an information-revealing mechanism, and she can discriminate one of the players by biasing his effort. We characterize the optimal level of discrimination to maximize aggregate effort, showing how this is in turn inextricably linked to the choice of information revelation. Applications are found in newcomer-incumbent situations in an internal labor market, sales-force management, and research contests.

Child marriage, human rights and international norms: the case of legislative reform in Trinidad and Tobago

The United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child entered into force in 1990. It condemns child marriage, violence and discrimination against children and enjoins tutelage for their education and health. Implementing such principles in national legislation sometimes conflicts with local norms relating to respect for cultural and religious traditions. This was the case of Trinidad and Tobago, a multicultural and multi-religious society that legally sanctioned child marriage until 2017. The paper makes two unique contributions to the literature. First, using the literature on child marriage and the obligations under international conventions, the paper creates a child marriage conceptual framework with the main normative positions on child marriage. Second, using the framework, it explores the normative motivations underlying the domestic legal reform debates held in parliament between 2015–2017. The paper uses the conceptual framework to explain the transformations in the traditional positions of local religious and ethnic groups, provides evidence of norm penetration from the international to a local multicultural setting and furthers the literature on international human rights norm penetration and contestation.

From rules to standards: Civil society contestations, EITI and the missing link to accountability in Nigeria: Interview with Faith Nwadishi

Since her early role as a member and coordinator of the Publish What You Pay (PWYP) coalition in Nigeria, Faith Nwadishi has participated at the highest levels of EITI leadership at the national, continental and global levels as a representative of civil society organizations. In this discussion with Isaac 'Asume' Osuoka in February 2020, Nwadishi reflects on the factors and forces that continue to shape NEITI and how the role of Nigerian civil society organizations has contributed to its framing and implementation. Describing ongoing North-South tensions and compromises, Nwadishi recounts how the NEITI has utilized, contested and helped further the EITI's global agenda. Here, the EITI is shown to be evolving in response to internal contestations and external criticism, reflected in the expansion of the EITI agenda from a core concern on financial payments between companies and governments to the accommodation of environmental reporting in the 2019 EITI Standard. However, other concerns such as human rights practices of companies and government in sites of extraction remain disputed in a global EITI regime where Northern political and corporate forces remain dominant.

In Search of Order: Portrayal of Communists in Cold War Italy

This article analyzes the battle between Italian Communists and anti-Communists during the early Cold War. Without denying the critical role of high politics or the rivalry between Washington and Moscow, the article places the home front at the center of its analysis, using a bottom-up perspective. Drawing on the rhetoric, remembrances, and visual propaganda produced by Communists and anti-Communists alike, the article shifts the focus of attention away from governments and diplomacy and toward imagination and culture as agents of historical change. Looking beyond the institutional-administrative sphere of politics, the article explores the aspirations, emotions, expectations, and hopes formulated by Italians under conditions of existential uncertainty. The article concludes that the Cold War in Italy was, above all else, an internal contest between two parties over what the recent past meant and what would ensure a just and stable order for society.

Competitive Balance: Information Disclosure and Discrimination in an Asymmetric Contest

We study a design problem for an effort-maximizing principal in a two-player contest with two dimensions of asymmetry. Players have different skill levels and an information gap exists, as only one player knows the skill difference. The principal has two policy instruments to redress the lack of competitive balance due to asymmetry; she can commit to an information-disclosing mechanism, and she can discriminate one of the players by biasing his effort. We characterize the optimal level of discrimination to maximize aggregate effort, showing how this inextricably determines the choice of information disclosure. Applications are found in newcomer-incumbent situations in an internal labor market, sales-force management, and research contests.

Contestation in Multi-Stakeholder Initiatives: Enhancing the Democratic Quality of Transnational Governance

ABSTRACTThis article studies multi-stakeholder initiatives (MSIs) as spaces for both deliberation and contestation between constituencies with competing discourses and disputed values, beliefs, and preferences. We review different theoretical perspectives on MSIs, which see them mainly as spaces to find solutions to market problems (economic approach), as spaces of conflict and bargaining (political approach), or as spaces of consensus (deliberative approach). In contrast, we build on a contestatory deliberative perspective, which gives equal value to both contestation and consensus. We identify four types of internal contestation which can be present in MSIs—procedural, inclusiveness, epistemic, and ultimate-goal—and argue that embracing contestation and engaging in ongoing revision of provisional agreements, criteria, and goals can enhance the democratic quality of MSIs. Finally, we explore the implications of this perspective for theorizing about the democratic quality in MSIs and about the role of corporations in transnational governance.

The Grandmontine “Good Man (Vir Bonus)”—Clerc or Conversus?: Ideals and Identity among the Successors of Stephen of Muret (†1124)

The Grandmontine communities of the twelfth century developed a unique social vision of community organization based on the received spiritual teachings of the Auvergne hermit, Stephen of Muret. Central to their order was the subordination of clerics to lay brother governors. From this position, the Grandmontine clerics recorded their ideal of the “Good Man,” and this vision of virtue became significant in later internal contests and conflicts over community leadership. This article examines the evolution and ruin of Grandmontine confraternity, with reference to other marginalized religious groups of the twelfth century with whom their struggles can be compared.

Contesting liberal internationalism: China’s renegotiation of world order

As the introduction to the special issue on 'Contesting liberal internationalism: China's renegotiation of world order', this paper outlines the theoretical framework of the special issue, namely international order and order contestation, and the main arguments of the four papers included in this special issue. Recently, a, albeit not the, key challenge to the liberal international order stems from the leadership aspirations of non-Western, non-liberal states, and their increasing demand for a greater voice, most notably China under the leadership of Xi Jinping. This special issue is constructed as a debate concerning the alleged challenges posed by China to both the political and economic spheres of the liberal international order. The four case studies and papers are grouped into two core themes: the impact of China's state-capitalist development model and practices on the liberal economic order, and China's attempts to transform norms and rules in security-related matters. The four papers aim to appraise Chinese discursive narratives and practices that would collectively challenge American liberal hegemony. Altogether they argue that a hybrid of order-building norms and practices is likely to co-exist alongside the prevailing liberal international order.

Negotiating Contestations for Community-Oriented Heritage Management: A Case Study of Loushang in China

Rural heritage is a living heritage of significant importance; it requires community-oriented management for cultural continuity and local development. Different social relations exist at rural heritage sites, which lead to external contestation among stakeholders and internal contestation within the community. It is essential to identify the impact caused by such contestations and determine an appropriate way to negotiate solutions. This paper examines the case of Loushang in Guizhou Province, identifying the contestations by examining the social relations through questionnaires and semi-structured interviews. Negotiation requires an appropriate person or social group to act as intermediary: they engage the stakeholders and induce them to collaborate; they also empower the community in heritage management. The case of Loushang indicates the tools that are necessary to facilitate community-oriented management for rural heritage; it bridges theoretical research and heritage practice.

Silencing the contestant. Legitimizing Crimea’s annexation by mimicking the West

ABSTRACTThis article analyses Russia’s endeavours in legitimising the annexation of Crimea in the eyes of the Western community. The paper argues that Russia’s strategy of “silencing” the international contestation has been focused on the use of the West’s “language” for the justification of contested actions. Starting from the assertion that the formulation of Russia’s foreign policy is determined by Western normative frameworks and by the West’s international behaviour, the article scrutinised Moscow’s official narrative after March 2014 by comparing it with the West’s arguments used in particular in the cases of NATO’s intervention in Yugoslavia and the recognition of Kosovo’s independence.

Boundary work and normativity in research communication across time

ABSTRACT This paper looks at how research communication in Norwegian migration and diversity research has changed over time. The main themes in the analysis are researchers’ motivations to enter the field and their experiences of, and reactions to, critique from colleagues and other audiences. Theory about credibility contests and boundary work on the interface of the academia and media, along with ideas about explicit and implicit normativity, inform the analysis. A main conclusion is that, as the field has matured, contests over normativity have changed from internal contests over implicit normativity to external charges of explicit normativity. The empirical analysis builds on 31 interviews with Norwegian researchers about their experiences of, and views on, public research communication in newspapers, social media, radio, TV and face-to-face panel debates. The interviewed researchers are of different age, gender, and ethnicity and they work in 10 different universities and research institutes across Norway.

The Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank – New Multilateralism: Early Development, Innovation, and Future Agendas

Analysts across the disciplines have started to address the development and agenda of the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank (AIIB), however the collective understanding of major aspects of the AIIB's institutional evolution, and related multilateral cooperation and international contestation, remain fuzzy and fragmented. This Introductory article discusses how the AIIB has progressed so rapidly in three years, and provides an overview of the unique contributions of the 13 essays in this collection, and of the ways the essays complement one another. Focusing on the main trends and patterns in the AIIB's early development, four essays address major overarching themes that reflect the multilateral character of the Bank, and nine essays provide member‐country or regional perspectives on the new Bank, highlighting variations and complementarities in interests, ideas, and priorities among the broader membership of the Bank. The Introduction concludes with some implications for future research, and for AIIB policy and programming that can be drawn from the essays.

Power Sharing, Mobilization, and Party Organization

We study the internal organization of political parties as the solution of a moral hazard problem between a party principal (or selectorate) and two factions. Factional mobilization effort bolsters a party’s electoral chances but can only be imperfectly monitored—via an internal contest. We model a party’s internal organization as a system of “prizes,” an al- location of resources between winner and loser of the internal contest. We show that when (i) a party’s baseline electoral strength is low and (ii) electoral outcomes are not too responsive to mobilization efforts, there is an inverse relationship between inter-party power sharing and intra-party power sharing: institutional settings that award more resources and policy influence to election winners should produce party structures that promote a more egalitarian allocation of power across factions. Our results help organize the empirically documented dispersion in party organizational structures.

China’s Foreign Ministry: Fit for Purpose in the Era of Xi Jinping, BRI and ‘Major Country Diplomacy with Chinese Characteristics’?

President Xi Jinping has raised the bar in China’s engagement with the world: first, in launching in 2012 the ‘Belt and Road Initiative’ (BRI) as the idiom for intensive eco-political engagement with a wide swathe of states in Asia, Europe and Africa, plus Latin America; and second, in framing heightened global expectations for this self-avowed ‘major country’ that has moved out of the shadow of Deng Xiaoping’s 1989 hide our capacities and bide our time dictum. This places unprecedented demands on the foreign ministry, its diplomatic mission and personnel, and on all the other agencies that make up what we may call the foreign affairs network. The year 2018 has seen several new developments in the institutional structures and the work methods that connect with this enhanced priority to foreign policy implementation. This essay examines the challenges that China currently faces in pursuing its ambitious external objectives, in a fraught international environment and contestation among the world’s leading and emerging powers. Domestic challenges in coordinating actions are visible in BRI projects, which are a high national priority. The Chinese foreign ministry now receives better political support, but it remains unclear if this will suffice in meeting the major challenges they face, both abroad and at home—in working with domestic stakeholders.

Language Intermediaries and Local Agency: Peacebuilding, Translation/Interpreting and Political Disempowerment in ‘Mature’ Post-Dayton Bosnia–Herzegovina

The peace negotiations ending the 1992–95 Bosnian war established a constitutional system of ethnic power-sharing giving international peacebuilding a significant role in post-conflict Bosnia’s governance and economy. This indefinite mission depended – like any other intervention where foreigners work across linguistic boundaries – on interlinguistic mediation by locally-recruited translators/interpreters, an aspect of knowledge production that even current research into peacebuilding’s micropolitics often neglects. On an individual level, their frequently-overlooked agency was integral to peacebuilding practice. Yet theorizing their agency must also acknowledge the macrosocial level, where critics argue the post-war constitution has stripped Bosnians of political agency, foreclosing political participation as anything but ethnic subjects corresponding to three institutionalized ethnic identities. The entrenched, growing disconnect between political elites and the public, expressed through social protest in 2014, foregrounds agency and dis/empowerment in Bosnian society more sharply than pre-2014 research accounted for, revealing further interlinkages between international peacebuilding and domestic political contestation.

Economic Opportunity and Strategic Dilemma in Colonial Development: Britain, Japan and Malaya’s Iron Ore, 1920s to 1950s

The importance of Malaya’s iron ore has been downgraded from both an economic and geo-strategic perspective. Under colonial administration, iron-ore mines owned and operated by Japanese enterprises and individuals, and the resultant exports to Japan, were central to economic development in the east-coast states of the peninsula. But this also made British Malaya a site of international contestation as Anglo–Japanese relations became estranged in the run up to World War Two in Asia and the Pacific. British administrators had to balance economic opportunity with strategic cost, and securing iron ore was a key factor in Japan’s occupation of Malaya after December 1941. Pre-war dilemmas resurfaced after the Pacific War. Nevertheless, exports to Japan both resumed and expanded. The combination of Japanese regeneration and Southeast Asian development in the context of the Cold War once again placed Malaya’s iron ore at the centre of geo-strategic and economic priorities for what was fast becoming the terminal colonial regime. This analysis is supported by the wide range of primary sources consulted from the records of the Malayan state administrations to British intelligence assessments, as well as the evaluation of quantitative data.

Institutional Cultures and Legal Education at Select Canadian Law Faculties (DCL Thesis, McGill University)

This dissertation is an exploration of the uniqueness of Canadian law Faculties as sites of meanings about legal education. Through an empirical study, it aims to tease out the institutional cultures of three law teaching institutions: the Legal Sciences Department at the University of Quebec in Montreal, the Faculty of Law at the University of Alberta and the Faculty of Law at the University of Moncton. The thesis notably focuses on the goals they each attribute to legal education, the structures surrounding it and its academic modalities. The findings show that each Faculty associates to such elements a set of meanings experienced as core to their self-conception, enduring through time and distinguishing them from others. Each Faculty thus constitutes a unique community of significations in resonance with its history, social environment and changing membership, even when accounting for the internal contestation and evolution of such meanings about legal education. This thesis builds on the insights of previous works showing that law professors experience their Faculty’s institutional cultures as endowed with normative force and sketch out the content of such cultural norms at the three case studies. It then examines how these same Faculties are engaging with the prominent challenge posed by the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s Call to Action 28 to further tease out their culture as well as demonstrate their relevance to improve our understanding of law Faculties’ responses to common contemporary challenges. The substantive and detailed engagement with the plural realities of legal education in Canada in this thesis aims to awaken the assumptions legal educators entertain about the goals and modalities of legal education and broaden their horizons of possibilities.