Kinds Of Actors Research Articles

Of Rebels and Disobedients: Reflections on Arendt, Race, Lawbreaking

Hannah Arendt valued the unprecedented, the unexpected, and the new, yet in essays crafted at the end of the rebellious 1960s, struggled to square this valuation with a palpable desire for law and order. She lamented that criminality had overtaken American life, accused the police of not arresting enough criminals, and charged ‘the Negro community’ with standing behind what she named black violence. At once, she praised ‘the white rebels’ of the student movement in the United States for their courageous acts of disobedience. This essay explores how differential Arendt’s treatment of lawbreaking action was in an effort to understand how ‘certain sections of the population’ in the United States could appear to stand for criminality rather than civil disobedience to her mind. It examines how Arendt’s reflections on the ostensibly non-racial subjects of civil disobedience and lawbreaking were underwritten by racial, when not racist, ways of thinking. The essay also raises a larger question: to the extent that the concept of civil disobedience involves limits, how are those limits drawn to the exclusion of certain kinds of actors and their particular claims in the public realm? Pondering this question through Arendt, it concludes that in her theorization of civil disobedience, Arendt was profoundly limited by the fabulous tale that the United States is an exceptional land of freedom and democracy in the world.

Falk, Svenja, Glaab, Manuela, Römmele, Andrea, Schober, Henrik & Thunert, Martin (Hrsg.) (2019). Handbuch Politikberatung. Wiesbaden: VS Verlag. 623 Seiten. ISBN: 978-3-658-03482-5.

After 13 years, this is the second edition of the Handbuch der Politikberatung – and the first problem is the translation of the title. The typical English translation would be Handbook of Policy Advice, but the term in Germany is used much more loosely, covering also all kinds political advice, i. e. public affairs, public relations, polls and survey research etc., and even what is called “participative advice” of and by citizens, nongovernmental organizations etc. In 39 contributions by more than 50 authors, disciplinary and theoretical aspects are covered, but especially all kinds of actors, both looking for and supplying this kind of advice are presented or present themselves. The handbook offers a good overview about the German scene, but it does not quite succeed in its aim to clarify and enhance the academic debate. Many contributions are by actors directly involved in this field, which offers interesting insights, but is something different than critical and detached analysis.

Food Systems and Food Security: The Role of Small Farms and Small Food Businesses in Santiago Island, Cabo Verde

This study aims to analyse the role and contribution of small farms and small food businesses on the food system and food security. Drawing on a conceptual framework, methodology, and data from the EU H2020 ‘SALSA-Small farms, small food businesses and sustainable food and nutrition security’ project hereafter referred as SALSA project, this issue has been analysed in relation to four staple products (tomato, chicken, maize, and banana) in Santiago Island (Cabo Verde). The study follows a regional approach based on a detailed analysis of the territorial food systems and of the production/consumption balance of those staple products. The results show that the subsystems of production, processing, distribution, and consumption are different in the different food systems map for the four staple products, with complex and diversified interrelationships between small farms and related small businesses linking with various markets and all kinds of actors. Moreover, the evidence shows that small farms, in conjunction with small food businesses, are crucial to national food security in Santiago Island. The small farm is fundamental for greater food availability produced in the region, and the small food business is a key component playing a very important role by ensuring the stability of supply, being primarily responsible for establishing relationships to population centres.

Questioning the Wilsonian moment: the role of ethnicity and nationalism in the dissolution of European empires from the Belle Époque through the First World War

ABSTRACTThis dossier aims to problematize the widespread understanding of ethnic cleavages as the hard core undergirding national conflict. As such it questions the rise of ethnic nationalism during the late nineteenth century as the direct cause of the dawn of Europe’s ‘oppressed peoples’ after 1918. The different contributions evaluate the status of the First World War as the breakthrough moment of Wilsonian self-determination within the multi-ethnic states and empires in Europe. In this respect they investigate the recent powerful thesis propounded by scholars of national indifference in Central Europe that it was the unprecedented disruption of the Great War that politicized ethnicity as never before and made it into a marker of groupness rather than a mere social category, to use Rogers Brubaker’s terms. The articles in this dossier also contribute to recent investigations that focus on how European empires tried to accommodate nationalism and how nationalist movements in and outside of Europe used the disruption of the war and Wilson’s plea for self-determination to ask for independence. These articles demonstrate how the specific developments of war and revolution produced particular understandings of the general idea of self-determination. The Wilsonian discourse as such had a breakthrough in 1918 when the destruction of Austria-Hungary generally became accepted as an Allied post-war goal. Movements world-wide adopted self-determination as a goal and standard, but as this dossier demonstrates, all kinds of actors used Wilson’s words for their many purposes, such that one cannot speak of a coherent and meaningful Wilsonian moment.

The Quality of Representative Claims: Uncovering a Weakness in the Defense of the Liberal World Order

All kinds of actors, elected and unelected, make claims to represent certain constituencies. This article sheds new light on what this practice of representative claims-making might imply for the legitimacy of the liberal world order. It develops a quality of representation index at the level of representative claims and introduces a novel dataset. First, the article introduces the information criterion as key benchmark against which to evaluate representative claims. Second, it constructs a quality of representation index based on this criterion and uses it to assess representative claims. Third, multivariate analysis corroborates differences between various makers while controlling for context. Bridging the divide between political theory and empirical political sociology, this article reveals that the supporters of the current liberal democratic world order make significantly lower quality representative claims than various challengers. A range of new avenues for both theoretical and empirical research ensues.

The linkage between the education and employment systems: ideal types of vocational education and training programs

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the literature by proposing a methodological approach that scholars in all research fields can use to develop high-quality explanatory typologies. We argue that every typology should be constructed using a systematic, transparent process and must have a strong theoretical foundation to validate its explanatory value. Drawing on Max Weber’s typology theory, we apply our approach to construct three ideal types of vocational education and training (VET) programs. By bypassing heterogeneous context conditions, our typological approach enables us to compare VET programs based on the criteria that are relevant to an explanation of youth labor market outcomes. We build on Niklas Luhmann’s theory of social systems, which helps elucidate the significance of the linkage between actors from the education and employment systems in VET. The first ideal type, with maximal linkage, entails equal power-sharing between both kinds of actors. We expect such a VET program to have the most favorable outcome. The other two ideal types, in which one system has all the power, result in either undesirable youth labor market outcomes, such as unemployment or skills mismatch, or lack of access to further education.

A trilevel model for best response in energy demand-side management

Demand-side management (DSM) is a powerful tool to efficiently manage the consumption of energy. DSM relies on various techniques and means. In this work, we propose a trilevel energy market model for load shifting induced by time-of-use pricing. Four kinds of actors are involved: electricity suppliers (sell energy), local agents (buy, sell and consume), aggregators (buy and sell) and end users (consume). The interactions among these actors lead to a trilevel multi-leader–multi-follower game. Solving such games is known to be hard, thus we assume that the decision variables of all electricity suppliers but one are known and optimize the decisions of the remaining supplier. This leads to a single-leader–multi-follower game, which aims to compute the leader’s best response to the decisions of his competitors.The trilevel model is first formulated as a bilevel problem using an explicit formula for the lowest optimization level. Solution algorithms are developed in the optimistic case and in a variant named “semi-optimistic” approach leading to more robust solutions. Finally, numerical results highlight the efficiency of the methods and the sensitivity of the solutions with respect to the model parameters.

HeritaMus: A Tool for Collaborative Curation of Tangible and Intangible Heritage

HeritaMus is a digital tool for gathering, retrieving and visualizing complex data on heritage (tangible and intangible), thereby promoting participatory curatorship by mobilizing communities of practice. Developed over a three-year period by a European consortium, the project was based on a cooperative ethnography study on the uses and re-uses of historical sound recordings of two cultural manifestations inscribed on the UNESCO ICH list: fado and flamenco. Taking historical sound recordings as a fundamental actor that informs current musical practice, the project focused on overcoming the artificial divide between tangible heritage (historical phonograms) and intangible heritage (musical practice and community of practice knowledge). HeritaMus was designed to display the networks established by all kinds of actors (human and non-human), deepening the understanding of their intricate relationships.This paper introduces the theoretical background of the HeritaMus project and the conceptual challenges that the consortium faced while developing the tool, describes the tool’s main characteristics and processes, and projects future developments. Some research results are also presented concerning politics of representation, the uneven representation of communities of practice and communities of research, the impact of “heritage excess” and the erasure of controversy among heritage practices—topics that are known to practitioners but often overlooked by academia.

Társadalmi mozgalmak a visegrádi országokban: konfliktus vagy együttműködés? Empirikus elemzés

Globalization and Europeanization have significantly contributed to a change in the role of the nation states. Considering the specifics of Central and Eastern European political culture, major societal changes are most likely to be triggered by social movements. Despite numerous researches, it is still debated whether the most significant social movements of the V4 countries tend to choose the cooperative or the conflictual way as their dominant action strategy. The purpose of this paper is to examine the general tendencies of the social movements using empirical data. The study seeks answers to the following questions: a) Which norms best characterize the “stable” social order of the V4 countries? b) What kind of actors would like to bring change?c) Is there a significant difference between the actors of the national, respectively, the EU action spheres and their dominant modes of action? The research uses data provided by the European Social Survey, GDELT (Global Data on Events, Location and Tone), and the Transparency Register of the European Union.

Multi-actor networks and innovation niches: university training for local Agroecological Dynamization

The global environmental and social-economic crises of industrialized agriculture have led to the emergence of agroecology as an alternative approach aiming to increase the ecological, social and economic sustainability of agri–food systems. The ‘multi-level perspective’ is now a widely used framework to understand and promote the upscaling of local innovation niches, such as agroecology, to broader scales (e.g., regional, national, international), thus reconfiguring the dominant socio-technical regimes. Additionally, emergent ‘hybrid forums’ can provide a space between niche and regime where niche innovators can become important actors in scaling up and out emergent innovations. In this paper, we examine a university training program (Postgraduate Diploma in Local Agroecological Dynamization at the Universitat Autonoma de Barcelona), to better understand its role as a ‘hybrid forum’. Our analysis focuses especially on how the program, as an example of a hybrid forum, worked to reconfigure practices, concepts, and tools of local development practitioners. We also assess to what extent the program contributed to transitioning local development institutions toward agroecology. An online survey (n = 46) and in-depth interviews (n = 16) were carried out to determine how the training program has impacted the student’s opinions and their respective institutions. The results show that most of the students consider that they have acquired new theoretical frameworks and useful methods to re-framing their local development projects, that new alliances with multi-actor networks have been perceived, and that some internal changes of the local development practices have taken place. We conclude that the training program, as a hybrid forum, is capable of outscaling niche innovations through linkages with different kind of actors both from the niche and the regime. Political changes in the socio-technical landscape level offer an opportunity to amplify the impact of the innovations which are being generated by those multi-actor networks, but with a limited multi-level impact as far as institutional regime-actors not aligned with agroecological transition keep the most of the competencies on agri–food systems.

Governing large-scale farmland acquisitions in Québec: the conventional family farm model questioned

This article argues that the definition of land grabs in public debate is a politically contested process with profound normative consequences for policy recommendations regarding the future of the family farm model. To substantiate this argument, I first explore how different definitions of land grabbing bring into focus different kinds of actors and briefly survey the history of land grabbing in Canada. I then introduce the public debate about land grabbing in Quebec and discuss its evolution from its beginning in 2009 up until the provincial public inquiry on land grabs in March 2015. Here, I make critical observations regarding each participant’s position, showing how different definitions of land grabbing has significant implications for policy recommendation and the promotion of different agricultural business models. More specifically, I emphasize how these discussions crucially fail to consider indigenous people’s land rights and ignore the constraints imposed by the corporate food regime on family farms. I conclude by suggesting that the adoption of a food sovereignty approach to land governance helps redirect attention to these important issues and provide insight into imagining more sustainable alternative models of agriculture.

A Post-Western Europe: Strange Identities in a Less Liberal World Order

AbstractDebates on “rising powers” and a possible end to the liberal international order mostly focus on two kinds of actors: the hegemon (the United States), privileged by the power distribution of yesteryear, and rising powers (notably China). Europe's curious position brings to light some intriguing dynamics of the emerging world order—nuances needed to capture a more differentiated future. This essay traces the threats and opportunities to Europe presented by the emerging order in four domains. In terms of overall power (polarity) and economics, far-reaching change registers but is rarely designated as threatening. In contrast, change regarding values (human rights and democracy especially) triggers more alarm. Finally, in the domain of institutions, change elicited a relative lack of concern prior to 2016, but worries have grown since then. For Europe, peaceful change primarily demands that rising powers rearticulate rather than confront classical Western values because, in contrast to the United States, there is little sense of loss in Europe in relation to the global structures of power and economics.

Does Who Matter? The Various Forms of Authority to Use Military Force

In this article, I will ask what authority means under international law. I will find that there are various actors with different forms of authority, but no overarching concept of what characteristic it is that may endow an actor with authority, and even less of a coherent conception of legitimacy as a requirement for such authority. In fact, international law recognizes different authorities for different causes and different contexts, allocated to different actors, who base their authority on different characteristics (state legitimacy, representativity, military power, control). There is a range of possible consequences that may follow from having authority (i.e. the concept of authority in the sense of “power” can be disaggregated) and there are a range of different kinds of actors might be differently able to trigger these various consequences (i.e. authority as an attribute of an actor can be also disaggregated). For instance, under the jus in bello, non-state actors can create a state of armed conflict, in which they can often – but not always -- continue to use military means without legal sanction. Hence, by resorting to arms, a non-state actor can arrogate for itself the right to further use military means. While the jus ad bellum may still, in principle require legitimacy (in the quite formal sense of being a state), current jus in bello covers also non-state actors, and from a practical point of view, the jus in bello regulation undermines any jus ad bellum requirement of legitimate authority.

Editor's Foreword: Long Day's Journeys and Deposed Emperors

Might it be a register of our current cultural moment that several productions of Long Day's Journey Into Night—arguably O'Neill's darkest play—were performed this past year, four of which are reviewed in this edition of the EOR? Or that O'Neill's expressionistic portrait of a despotic ruler meeting his demise (The Emperor Jones) in the Irish Repertory Theatre's revival felt all the more poignant as our first black president left the White House after divisive elections? Or, when transferred across the Atlantic to the cavernous Armory, that Richard Jones's neon production of The Hairy Ape felt less like a period piece and more of a current snapshot of how the average Yank clashes with a culture obsessed with Fifth Avenue capital?It is precisely during times of tumult that we turn to great thinkers. With a country deeply divided since the election, works like 1984, The Handmaid's Tale, and It Can't Happen Here have risen to the top of best-seller lists. While O'Neill's dramas might not be among the must-read lists, they are certainly on the “must stage” list. For it is in the living room of Monte Cristo Cottage that we find insights into how families are torn apart; it is on the giant red throne that we find the possibilities—and limits—of tyrannical rule; and it is within the stokehole of a ship where we can see the sweltering labor for a chance to belong.Whether staged on Broadway, in Los Angeles, or within O'Neill's summer home in New London, Long Day's Journey Into Night was among O'Neill's most prominently performed plays this past year. Robert McLean recounts how the fine acting in the Palm Beach Dramaworks production resulted in one of the best Long Day's Journeys he has witnessed. The much-anticipated Broadway production of Long Day's Journey starring Gabriel Byrne and Jessica Lange delivered a raw and aching interpretation, with Lange giving a heart-wrenching portrayal of Mary Tyrone—and justly winning a Tony Award for Best Actress. On the West Coast, the LA production of Long Day's Journey featured a different—but no less stunning—pair of actors in the title roles: Alfred Molina and Jane Kaczmarek. With dramaturgical work by former EOR editor William Davies King, this production included projections of O'Neill's family and recordings of O'Neill reading poetry to bring the autobiographical elements of the play to life, as Jaime Leigh Gray's review reveals. But what could be more autobiographical than staging Long Day's Journey within the home in which Eugene grew up? Robert Dowling's review shows how the Flock Theatre for the first time brought the play to Monte Cristo Cottage, where the house itself became a character. Sitting just feet away from the actors, the audience felt the intimacy not only of the actors' work but also of references to New London life.New York's 55,000-square-foot Park Avenue Armory drill hall functioned as another kind of actor in Richard Jones's transfer of his London production of The Hairy Ape. With the “gritty and charismatic” Bobby Cannavale leading the ensemble as Yank, Ryder Thornton tells us, the production was significantly restaged to take advantage of the site-specific space. In contrast to the expansive Armory, the Irish Rep's tiny theater—not unlike the original Provincetown Playhouse on Macdougal Street—gave their revival of The Emperor Jones intimacy, demonstrating “that O'Neill is once again the playwright for another new American century, unmasking the appetites and transgressions that lie beneath the dream of empire,” as Kurt Eisen writes.Two deconstructed productions of O'Neill's dramas showed the desire to make new art and innovate, much as O'Neill turned away from the theater of his father. In an evening of one-acts (Recklessness and Now I Ask You) entitled O'Neill (Unexpected), the Metropolitan Theater Company subverted genre conventions, Zander Brietzke observes, playing the tragic Recklessness as comedy and Now I Ask You—O'Neill's only comedy other than Ah, Wilderness!—as tragedy. And Kurt Eisen describes the experimental nature of the Brooklyn-based Target Margin Theater in its fracturing of The Iceman Cometh under the title The Iceman Lab, in which different directors each took on one of the play's four acts.Whether deconstructing O'Neill's dramas with postmodern adaptations, enmeshing O'Neill's biography into the production, or casting Broadway stars in award-winning revivals, the slate of productions reviewed here reveals a need to wrestle with the challenges in front of us. We cannot afford to be crushed like Yank in a gorilla's cage, or be caged by the claustrophobic trauma of dysfunctional families. And we cannot afford to be complicit with despotic rulers. In this way, for our current moment, O'Neill is indeed unexpectedly relevant.

The two faces of personhood: Hobbes, corporate agency and the personality of the state

There is an important but underappreciated ambiguity in Hobbes’ concept of personhood. In one sense, persons are representatives or actors. In the other sense, persons are representees or characters. An estate agent is a person in the first sense; her client is a person in the second. This ambiguity is crucial for understanding Hobbes’ claim that the state is a person. Most scholars follow the first sense of ‘person’, which suggests that the state is a kind of actor – in modern terms, a ‘corporate agent’. I argue that Hobbes’ state is a person only in the second sense: a character rather than an actor. If there are any primitive corporate agents in Hobbes’ political thought, they are representative assemblies, not states or corporations. Contemporary political theorists and philosophers tend to miss what is unique and valuable about Hobbes’ idea of state personality because they project the idea of corporate agency onto it.

Through the looking glass of Bhils - How Markets win what the State has lost in the desert jungles of Western Rajasthan

Based on the author’s field work in western Rajasthan, this paper forwards the argument that the growing chasm between its promises and delivery has made the state lose its credibility among the Bhils of western Rajasthan in India. The interviews and observations are based on twelve weeks of participation in the daily life of multiple actors in desert jungles of Jodhpur and Bikaner western Rajasthan. The main motive was to understand various postures on hunting- as a community activity as well as a legal input behind certain modern state laws. Still waiting for basic amenities such as reliable supply of water and electricity, forest communities as Bhils also remain unhappy with the way the power politics amongst caste plays out to suppress their ascent into public offices. Many practices of the state remain out of bounds for them. In as far as evoking from the state a moral-functional response over its failings is concerned, Bhils see no light at the end of the day either. They substantiate this by pointing out that, perhaps, their demands, requirements and expectations from the state still remain pretty much the same as the promises in the inaugural election manifestos of parties post-independence. However, although they find it hard to reach the state, its reciprocal reach towards intervening in day to day lives of the communities remains much more than its own ability to deliver for them. This is evidenced by the helicopter visions emanating from changed hunting laws which in turn change the way Bhils view the state and society around them. While Bhils come to terms with or question these laws in India, the irony is that the hunting of the very species which stands declared as under threat stands hunted clandestinely on ground by all kinds of actors, despite a ‘jail without bail’ provision that presumably should up the ante for criminal activities such as poaching. In this context this paper talks of the world view of the Bhils over the issue in general, their dilemmas and emic perspectives in particular. It also brings to light the implications of conservation politics by other communities in the vicinity such as the Bishnois who wage collective struggles to ensure protection of endangered species, while the state remains distant and lags behind in its approach to answer the issues raised by the Bhils, newer market strategies and products gain a quick entry as well as growing relevance in the Bhil lifestyles.

Understanding marginal changes in ecosystem services from biodiesel feedstock production: A study of Hassan Bio-Fuel Park, India

Small-scale biodiesel production with a high level of community involvement has been associated with a number of benefits. These include relatively low environmental impacts, lack of competition with food production, strong poverty alleviation effects and enhanced access to energy. This Short Communication provides a qualitative analysis of the effects of the cultivation of biodiesel oilseed tree crops (mostly Millettia pinnata, along with Simarouba glauca, Azadirachta indica, Madhuca lungifolia and Jatropha curcas) in such a small-scale project, the Hassan Bio-Fuel Park in Karnataka, India. This extensive ethnographic research and using the ecosystem services approach to synthesize the findings suggests that the changes in both the flows of ecosystem services and different constituents of human wellbeing are marginal. While the ecosystem services approach can be useful to synthesize various forms of knowledge on biofuels to inform policy, this particular case study highlights the importance of being open about the different, often implicit, priorities and values of research projects and the various kinds of actors involved in biofuel production. Finally, it is crucial to understand not just which impacts are generated but especially how those impacts are generated.

Death of the secret recipe: “Open source cooking” and field organization in the culinary arts

Knowledge sharing is an important but understudied aspect of the formation and organization of creative fields. To better understand the relationship between knowledge sharing and field organization, I examine a small but influential movement within the culinary arts known as “modernist cuisine.” This movement eschews many of the protective practices that have traditionally guarded culinary innovations in favor of an open sharing model similar to how knowledge is shared in the sciences or open source software development. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, participant observation, and other primary resources, I find that this open mode of knowledge sharing precipitates a system of peer-based citation, whereby producers receive direct recognition for their discoveries without the endorsement of traditional tastemakers such as restaurant critics. This citation-based prestige system opens the culinary field to participation from new kinds of actors, generates new roles that are better insulated from the economic demands of traditional restaurant work, and may even influence the field’s traditional status hierarchy. These findings suggest that the way knowledge is shared plays a considerable role in the organization of fields where expertise and innovation are highly valued, and that changes in these practices can have other consequences in the field at large.

THE CASE OF THE CITY OF SEVAS TOPOL: DOMESTIC AND INTERNATIONAL LAW

This article deals with an issue which went largely unremarked at the time – the role of the city of Sevastopol in Crimea’s declaration of independence. The Declaration of Independence of the Republic of Crimea was a joint resolution adopted by the Supreme Council of Crimea and the City Council of Sevastopol. One may state that the city of Sevastopol declared its independence as an entity possessing an international identity. Initially, only States were treated as recognized subjects of international law. But now other kinds of actors also share this recognition. However, from the point of view of classical international law, cities have no legal identity in international law and they are not granted the status of subjects of international law. The legal activities of cities on the international stage results in the need for a new approach to the treatment of cities under international law. The author has examined the legality of Sevastopol’s action in the light of both domestic and international laws. An analysis of the status of Sevastopol in Ukrainian law, as well in Soviet law is also included in this article. The author presents examples of actions of cities on the international scene which might prove that cities could be treated as non-state actors. However, the conclusion states that it remains questionable whether the city has truly acquired the status of being a subject of public international law. It is doubtful that the case of Sevastopol will contribute to the development of doctrine of non-state actors.

Betriebliche Selbstverwaltung zwischen den Blöcken – und danach? Das jugoslawische Modell in Rückschau und Perspektive

AbstractThe article reconsiders the series of revolts that broke out in the Albanian provinces in 1910, 1911 and 1912 in paying attention to their nature, the place and position of the various actors involved as well as to the processes of repression and negotiation. Because of the changing context, of the harsh repression of summer 1910 and of the violent control of the electoral campaign of spring 1912, the uprisings, which were reactive, turned against the military and fiscal reforms, became active and multifaceted and led by different kinds of actors (local chiefs, former deputies opposed to the CUP, militaries, etc.). Their Albanian or pan-Albanian dimension was part of the contemporary debate and was a stake for their treatment.