International Public Sphere Research Articles

Derrida and Parle-Ment (Parliament)

Recent scholarship on Jacques Derrida’s work has turned toward his political and institutional engagements. I further this body of research by outlining a twofold problematic regarding the issue of “parliament.” Its first dimension concerns what I call a poli-technic of lying, which denotes that politically impactful techniques of lying demand we follow the lacunae of the polis, the phenomenality of an international public sphere and technologies of public circulation, and the relationship between the construction of categories of “peoples,” “nations,” “borders,” and their “authorities” with practices of force or violence. In the following, I consider Derrida’s relation to the International Parliament of Writers (IPW) as a supplementary institution from which examination of this problematic might be situated in light of alternative traditions predicated on hospitality, and on sheltering the other as a practice inextricable from a “frank concept of truth.” I also consider the emergent possibilities this approach opens for responding to immediate conditions – attacks on the lives of writers around the world, accelerating global displacement, intensifying border closures, and unchecked police enforcement. I look toward the political unit Derrida identifies as crucial for these actions: the city as a space for frank and open speech – the ville franche.

INTERNATIONAL LEGAL ANALYSIS OF THE BOYCOTT PRODUCTS SUSPECTED OF SUPPORTING GENOCIDE

This jurnal explores the significance of boycotting products suspected of supporting genocide within the framework of international law. The complex relationship between human rights, state responsibility to prevent genocide, and the international community's response to violations of international norms is at the heart of this investigation. The study defines boycott as a form of isolation undertaken by individuals or groups against an entity, encompassing actions like blacklisting, embargoes, and blockades, targeting various products from consumer goods to academic and sports products. Governments, either individually or collectively, issue boycott resolutions, as exemplified by Arab countries' historic boycott against Israel. The paper also introduces other forms of boycotts, such as investment withdrawal, divestment, and sanctions, citing examples like Sudan. Framing the discussion within the context of the United Nations Genocide Convention, the jurnal argues that product boycotts can serve as tools for enforcing compliance with the convention, holding states accountable for preventing genocide. Moreover, product boycotts play a vital role in the international public sphere, mobilizing global public opinion and exerting social, economic, and political pressure on perpetrators of genocide. The study addresses critical questions, focusing on the role of product boycotts as sanctions in international law and their impact on garnering global support and pressuring perpetrators, while providing a voice to victims. The research methodology employed is normative legal research, relying on literature review and secondary legal sources, including journals, articles, and news related to the international legal analysis of the boycott of products suspected of supporting genocide. The jurnal concludes by emphasizing the importance of boycotting products suspected of supporting genocide within the international legal framework, not only as a form of protest but as a

Inculcating a Gendered Christian Internationalism: The Chinese Student YWCA

Taking the little-studied Student Young Women’s Christian Associations of China as a case study, this article dissects how gendered Christian international identities were inculcated in Chinese girls at a variety of scales—local, national, and international—in the interwar years. This article highlights how Christianity, for Chinese Student YWCA members in the 1920s, provided a key tool for constructing internationalism. The Christian, patriotic, and gendered rhetoric of “duty,” “service,” and “sacrifice” enabled Chinese girls to salve tensions between their national and international identities in an era of mounting antiforeign hostility. YWCA members also drew on women’s peacemaking roles to step into the international public sphere. The YWCA provided students with training in leadership, organizational skills, and, in some cases, international diplomacy. While they drew on the rhetorical devices, skills, tactics, and training provided by entry into international women’s networks, YWCA members adapted the message to suit their own needs and objectives.

The Age of Questions: Or, a First Attempt at an Aggregate History of the Eastern, Social, Woman, American, Jewish, Polish, Bullion, Tuberculosis, and Many Other Questions Over the Nineteenth Century, and Beyond, by Holly Case, 2018.

Holly Case’s most adventurous work as of yet seeks to juxtapose patterns common to nineteenth century publicists’ questions in order to reveal the contradictions of the age. Case devotes each chapter to a particular theme or ideological quality of the querists, which are in dispute with one another, and yet feature common idioms of progress and geopolitical reconfiguration. Internal to each chapter are the oxymoronic imbrications between conceptual polarities such as nationalism and the international public sphere, war through peace, gravitas with farce, and more. Case explains the prevalence of high-stakes public policy, prospects of war and the convulsive realignment of empires and nations through the persistent bundling of many of these questions. She addresses the ebb and flow of popularity of many era-spanning questions, which strengthens her attempt to provide a genealogy for the crises and ‘questions’ of our current era, and her accounting for how queristic contradictions were perceived to be transcended. It is reasonable to suggest that Case has provided a foundational step for an emergent niche of epistemological inquiry in the historical discipline, not unlike Benedict Anderson’s contribution to the study of nationalism through his magnum opus Imagined Communities.

Misinformation and Technology: Rights and Regulation Across Borders

The “virtual” public sphere has taken on unprecedented importance, exposing a variety of legal questions regarding the governance of the internet and its relationship to democracy and freedom of speech. This Chapter begins with reflections on the traditional public sphere and its evolution into a virtual phenomenon. Virality, interactivity, and zero marginal information costs have exacerbated traditional issues with fake news. The algorithmic distribution of information has distorted public deliberation. The interaction between national and international public spheres has never been so seamless, leading to unprecedented issues in the governance of national communication environments. The Chapter examines legislative and judicial responses to these new challenges.

How Influential Are International NGO s in the Public Arena?

Summary International non-governmental organisations have, for some time, been operating as diplomacy actors in the national and international public spheres. There has been an increase in their influence in the local areas of intervention of their programmes and in broader spaces where polices about the environment, inequality and other issues are decided. However, their influence has been threatened by the emergence of social movements and a flexible style of individualised activism that promotes their demands, as well as by questions around their independence and legitimacy that some of their actions generate cyclically. COVID-19 has brought into the public sphere some old challenges that international non-governmental organisations (INGO s) have been working on for years: health vulnerability, economic precarity and social emergency. This essay analyses this context, in which new challenges are appearing for INGO s concerning how they can influence the public sphere and policy-making, with the collaboration of new allies and partners.

The Roman Question in Latin America: Italian unification and the development of a transatlantic Ultramontane movement

ABSTRACT The unification of Italy is one the events of the nineteenth century which resonated within the international public sphere of the time. The religious dimension of these events contributed decisively to their internationalization. In this context, this essay will analyze the impact of the Roman Question in Latin America. I will examine how the Latin American faithful were informed of what was occurring in Italy, both from the pulpit and through the press. I will also show how descriptions of the situation of the pope sought to create empathy among the faithful, and to develop emotional bonds with the Holy See. Finally, this article studies the role of papal diplomacy, the prelates, and other local actors in the promotion of displays of solidarity with Pope Pius IX. The Roman Question contributed decisively to the diffusion of Ultramontanism in Latin America.

Discussion and mediation of social outrage on Twitter: The reaction to the judicial sentence of "La Manada"

In recent years, digital feminism has been prominent in the international public sphere and the massive release of individual testimonies of violence against women has had an important presence on social media. In Spain, the reaction to the judicial sentence of the La Manada case, which only convicted the five men accused of abuse, rather than rape, provoked a public outrage that was negotiated on social networks and was later displayed in mass demonstrations across the country. The aim of this study is to analyze the reaction that took place on Twitter on the day of the ruling of the sentence (26 April 2018) and how the dominant frames were initiated and stabilized on Twitter. With a sample of almost 500.000 tweets, the posts achieving most retweets per hour and the most salient media objects (including hashtags, visual content and links) have been analyzed based on the framing theory. Media objects have been explored through flowcharts allowing the visualization of the evolution of the dominant messages. The results show a hegemonic conversation on Twitter against the ruling of the court with a high presence of feminist demands. Furthermore, the analysis of the evolution of the main frames shows that the different Twitter affordances allow rapidity in the negotiation of the dominant messages. This paper contributes to the understanding of the articulation of framing from a complex perspective including media objects such as images and URLs that broaden the layers of meaning of the Twitter discourse on collective actions.

Discussion and mediation of social outrage on Twitter: The reaction to the judicial sentence of "La Manada"

In recent years, digital feminism has been prominent in the international public sphere and the massive release of individual testimonies of violence against women has had an important presence on social media. In Spain, the reaction to the judicial sentence of the La Manada case, which only convicted the five men accused of abuse, rather than rape, provoked a public outrage that was negotiated on social networks and was later displayed in mass demonstrations across the country. The aim of this study is to analyze the reaction that took place on Twitter on the day of the ruling of the sentence (26 April 2018) and how the dominant frames were initiated and stabilized on Twitter. With a sample of almost 500.000 tweets, the posts achieving most retweets per hour and the most salient media objects (including hashtags, visual content and links) have been analyzed based on the framing theory. Media objects have been explored through flowcharts allowing the visualization of the evolution of the dominant messages. The results show a hegemonic conversation on Twitter against the ruling of the court with a high presence of feminist demands. Furthermore, the analysis of the evolution of the main frames shows that the different Twitter affordances allow rapidity in the negotiation of the dominant messages. This paper contributes to the understanding of the articulation of framing from a complex perspective including media objects such as images and URLs that broaden the layers of meaning of the Twitter discourse on collective actions.

Liberal and Illiberal Internationalism in the Making of the League of Nations Convention on Broadcasting in the Cause of Peace

The 1936 League of Nations Convention on the Use of Broadcasting in the Cause of Peace sought to shape a liberal international public sphere, through encouragement of empathetic and neighborly broadcasts to other nations and prohibitions on international broadcast of hostile speech and false claims. It expressed 1920s liberal hopes that adding protocols and rules to international communications would foster peace. How was it then that by the late 1930s these same hopes for an international public sphere of civil and peace-fostering international discourse appeared to many liberals in national contexts as not only fantastical, but illiberal, a clear threat to the emerging core liberal value of free speech? Analysis of the making and early implementation of the Convention facilitates understanding of the rapid change in the valency of these ideas and illuminates the historical contours of the always-contested line between liberal and illiberal policies in communications history. That line is difficult to discern clearly in this case for two main reasons: removing offensive criticism of other nations from international broadcasting was perceived as illiberal censorship by some and as laudable self-restraint and international good manners by others; positive liberal internationalist content was perceived as educational by liberal internationalists and as potentially illiberal propaganda by nationalists. Viewing the making of the Convention through the lens of the contest about what constituted liberal and illiberal internationalism helps us better understand both its high ambition and some of the reasons why it was so quickly labelled a failure. [End Page 165]

The Alevi question and the limits of citizenship in Turkey

ABSTRACTThe Alevi question in Turkey is not only about a manifestation of the demands for religious freedoms and pluralism but also an issue of citizenship at least for the last three decades. This article argues that as a result of the rise of the Alevi identity and collective capacity of the Alevis to formulate demands in the national and international public spheres, the issue has increasingly turned to a matter of struggle for the long-denied equal citizenship rights of the Alevis in Turkey. Expected failure of workshops process, namely Alevi Opening, during the second term of the Adalet ve Kalkınma Partisi (AKP) period increasingly brought a sense of the disappointment among the Alevi organizations due to the fact that the issue was not managed with a perspective based on equal citizenship rights but with a discussion on the authenticity and originality of the Alevi demands. Enduring silence for the solution of the Alevi question in the last decade would lead Alevi organizations to the search for the extension of the self-creation of the survival mechanisms without the state support. This paper, within these considerations, is based on the demands of the Alevi society in Turkey and their struggle for the legal recognition, which increasingly challenged the Turkish form of secularism and citizenship regimes today.

Mexicanos en exilio y su performance político

A reading of the role collectivity can play when promoting interaction between people who have moved through experiences of terror. The material here presented is the outcome of two extended research residencies in El Paso (Texas, US): a four-month investigation from 2012 and a year-long study in 2014. Over the course of both, I conducted nineteen in-depth interviews, completed participatory observations and collaborated with the organization known as Mexicanos en Exilio (“Mexicans in Exile”). With a focus on performance, I analyze denunciation efforts that have come from the organization, to propose its members have developed a political performance that—sustained through three reconnection processes (subjective, communitarian and political) and promoted by constant encounter and exchange—has afforded their narratives visibility and entrance onto the international public sphere.

Responsibility of a Host State in Transnational Investment Disputes

The article seeks to define the legal nature of the responsibility of a host state in transnational investment disputes. It considers numerous rules (treaties, national law, customs, soft law, etc.) and their application within a domestic legal system to ensure the proper implementation of civil and other legal rights and obligations of host states and foreign investors. It is argued that the involvement of foreign investors and host states in international commercial arbitration, including the ICSID, and the application of international law (along with national law) as a legal ground for the payment of compensation, do not change the nature of the existing legal relationship between the parties of the investment dispute. The responsibility of the host state to the foreign investor expressed in the state’s obligation to pay damages (compensation) remains in the private, rather than international public law sphere. In conditions of lack of proper rules of investment law states should not stand aside from the present process of making such rules by non-state actors. This situation detracts from the treaty as a major source of international law, sometimes does not correspond to the interests of host states and moreover may threaten their sovereignty.

Visit Transylvania! Transylvania Representations of Tourists Coming from Abroad

The subject of the present study is Transylvania as a tourist destination, more precisely the analysis of what Transylvania means for the foreign tourists visiting here, and what meaning they attach to it. The timeliness of the issue is given by two factors. On the one hand the number of events with a touristic appeal has grown in the past years in Transylvania, and similarly the number of tourists has risen. On the other hand, writings that recommend Transylvania as an outstanding destination are more and more frequent in the international public sphere, in other words, it increasingly appears on the map of international tourism.

Peripheral Players? German Colonial Interests, The Press, and the Spirit of Locarno

ABSTRACTThe Locarno Conference, held on 5–16 October 1925, represented the culmination of nearly two years of diplomatic communication between the foreign offices of Germany, Britain, and France. The conference was an attempt to normalize relations between the former Allied powers and Germany's new Weimar Republic and more tightly bind Germany's politics and economy to Western Europe. Colonial German lobbies hoped that the Locarno talks heralded the return of empire and an end to Germany's banishment from the work of the ‘civilizing mission’ and the humiliating experience of being a ‘postcolonial state in a still colonial world’. Public scrutiny from false press reports about the restoration of the German colonies emanating from Germany, France, Britain and its colonies and dominions, and even the United States complicated matters for Locarno delegates by forcing discussion of off-agenda topics. This article interrogates how the Colonial German lobby influenced the Locarno Conference through activity in the international public sphere, how they managed a partial victory in the wake of Locarno, and more importantly, the Colonial German lobby learned new and better strategies for playing properly to public opinion and international bureaucracies.

17 National and International Public Spheres and the Protection of Human Rights

Abstract Since the founding of the UN, the protection of human rights has been a national and international challenge. In international human rights covenants, State Parties firstly commit themselves to respecting human rights in their respective constitutional area and to protecting and possibly incorporating them into the relevant constitution, but, secondly, they also submit to an international control. National protection is usually organized by different institutions (Constitutional Court, “Human Rights Commissioner of the Government”, etc.), but also accompanied by critical NGOs and the national civil public. International protection is on the one hand implemented by a number of international organizations and institutions (Human Rights Council in Geneva, UN Human Rights Commissioner, monitoring bodies to individual contracts, regional and international human rights courts), but on the other hand is accompanied by a critical, now regionally and internationally operating public. This includes a number of permanent NGOs, but also ad hoc groups, tribunals and the various media (print, TV, internet) and anonymous campaigns on the Internet and the social networks. This paper examines the functions and tasks of such concomitant national and international public spheres and tries to assess their importance for the protection of human rights.

Public Sphere and Collective Action. the Portuguese Movement of the “15th September”

Considering the social events and collective protests that have emerged in the international and national public sphere and more specifically the movement “To hell with the Troika! We want our lives!” – a social movement that started in June, 2012, against the Troika and the measures of the Portuguese Government, and which was responsible for the organization of the demonstration of the 15th September 2012, in Portugal, as well as in other cities in the country and in Europe, spreading in social digital networks and leading to subsequent public demonstrations, we propose a study concerning the current protest movements and the new forms of public mobilization, once activism has increased in electronic links (net activism) and on the street. Revisiting the conceptions of public sphere as a common space related to the notion of living-together, as publicity and visibility (Arendt), as a form and an event (Quere) and as a space of meeting, accessibility and movement (Joseph), we, thus, intend to discuss the following issues: the public space as a place of collective action (Cefai) and civic mobilization (Rouet); the importance of digital social networks in the new forms of communication – in relation with the modern public space (Habermas) - and the analysis of the movement of the 15th September in the light of Tillly’s perspective on social movements. It is also our aim to understand whether these new forms of organization, mobilization and acting in public are distant, or not, from traditional social movements and if we are facing the emergence of new public spaces. DOI: 10.5901/mjss.2015.v6n6s5p425

PHOTOGRAPHIC DIPLOMACY IN THE POSTWAR WORLD: UNESCO AND THE CONCEPTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY AS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE, 1946–1956

In the postwar decade, UNESCO aimed to create an international public sphere to secure peace. The organization made extensive use of photographs to do so, including the photographic archive of works of art and photojournalism from the ruined cities of Europe. However, photography was not simply a transparent medium for communicating internationalist ideals; it was a formative influence in shaping UNESCO's effort to build “peace in the minds of men”. This essay analyses the conception of photography as a universal language articulated in UNESCO-sponsored forums, the use of photography in UNESCO publications concerning human rights and educational reconstruction, and the internationalist ideals of world culture and world citizenship relevant to UNESCO's early work. Analysis reveals that UNESCO's use of photography was less the valuable deployment of a universal language suited to an internationalist agenda than it was the universalizing of certain cultural values in pursuit of the organization's utopian vision.

Traumatic Encounters: Negotiating Humanitarian Testimony in Post-earthquake Haiti

IntroductionImages of destruction and suffering relayed by survivors, journalists, and aid workers were essential to connecting the world to the January 12, 2010, earthquake in Haiti and to generating the global expressions of solidarity that followed. Yet these attempts to bear witness to the catastrophe in Haiti for viewers at home often reinforced the distance between Haiti and the West. Despite their authors' stated compassion for and solidarity with the Haitian people, such accounts detached the crisis from its historical and political contexts to insert Haiti into what Michel-Rolph Trouillot calls the savage slot, a temporary stand-in for the global South, until the international media moved its catastrophe caravan on to the next disaster.1 Buried under this deluge of reports and survival accounts trying to make sense of the disaster, Haiti seemed beset once again by a shroud of otherness as the island quickly disappeared behind a mirage of images.2 As the immediate response to the earthquake reveals, testimony is a fundamental cog of the humanitarian machine that is important for publicizing causes, shaping perceptions, and mobilizing solidarities; as a result, it is also a fragile terrain of cross-cultural encounters fraught with the politics of writing or speaking for others.Five years after the 2010 earthquake, my objective in this article is to return to a number of long-form testimonies published in the immediate wake of the catastrophe to examine how these narratives grapple with the ethical, political, and ideological implications of representing the pain of others for audiences in Europe and North America. In their accounts of the disaster, US humanitarian filmmaker Gerard Straub, Haitian Canadian author and newly elected member of the French Academy Dany Laferriere, and Haitian writer Yanick Lahens all marshal a journalistic realism in their efforts to document and bear witness to this traumatic upheaval. These three authors also share a sustained concern for the production, circulation, and consumption of images of the disaster in the international public sphere. Though they are not humanitarian aid workers, Laferriere and Lahens relay representations of Haitian trauma into the same international public sphere wherein foreign humanitarians and journalists projected their own. Like Straub, Laferriere and Lahens also position their narratives as necessary rejoinders to deformations of Haitian history and culture that permeated many popular mainstream accounts of the disaster including, but not limited to, CNN's voyeuristic coverage as well as the heavily condemned remarks by Pat Robertson about Haiti's pact with the devil or David Brooks about its progress-resistant culture.3 The portraits of postquake Haiti that emerge from such testimonies bear witness to the reactions of the individuals and communities enmeshed in the catastrophe and the international humanitarian response to it.Humanitarianism, whether as disaster response or in the form of development, remains an important economic, political, and social interface that mediates power relations between the global North and South. In recent decades critics have denounced Western humanitarianism as a tool for the spread of neoliberal globalization, the opening of new markets, and the privatization of even greater swaths of Southern economies.4 However, in mainstream views of humanitarianism, Mark Schuller argues, the 2010 Haiti earthquake is particularly significant because it sparked the emergence of a short-lived discourse critical of humanitarian organizations in light of the grossly mismanaged recovery.5 The accounts by Straub, Laferriere, and Lahens that are at the center of my analysis actively participate in the emergent, yet fleeting, discourse that Schuller highlights. Combining foreign, diasporic, and national viewpoints with regard to Haiti, their narratives think critically about global NorthSouth relations in the humanitarian context. …

Information Technologies in the Postindustrial Society

New IT technologies, and in particular the Internet have become at present an alternative media channel. The emergence of new technologies changes the forms of communication. Computer networks exert impact on the development of the public domain in which the debate between citizens and authorities. A new international public sphere arises, and thanks to the Internet, the discussion concerning various problems takes place independently of time and space, but above all it crosses national borders. Computer data basis provide better access to reliable information. Yet unequal access to information triggers new factors dividing societies into those which are better or worse informed or those who can take advantage of information thanks to education or technology skills. Hence the following question arises: how to meet the requirements of the development of the global IT society?New solutions concerning hardware, software and telecommunications combining a great number of subjects ranging individual users, through local communities, universities, enterprises, governmental agencies to international corporations into one global network.