Liberalism Research Articles

Communities of exposure, community as exposure: Thinking collective life in the police abolitionist movement

The growing police abolitionist movement in the United States invokes the figure of community to bind various political claims, from shifting the arena of justice to fiscal restructuring. Geographic scholarship on community has yet to conceptualize its usage in this movement, and existing literature tends to critique conceptualizations of community-as-political-resistance by demonstrating a given community’s exclusionary practices and reasserting a liberal politics of inclusion. This article combines analysis of activist literatures from the liberatory harm reduction and transformative justice movements with elements of Jean-Luc Nancy’s philosophy to offer an understanding of community as a shifting and provisional spectrum of relations at once structural and intimate, thus challenging its prevailing figuration as a form of enclosure mediated by the terms of inclusion and exclusion. Drawing on archival work into informally circulated, praxis-based ephemera from movements under the umbrella of police abolition, I conceptualize an abolitionist understanding of community at the juncture of ‘communities of exposure,’ formed along a structurally-produced spectrum of exposure to the harms of white supremacy, settler colonialism, and cis-heteropatriarchy, and ‘community as exposure,’ the condition of relationality that resists enclosure and, in understanding our essential vulnerability to one another as a resource for care, refuses the notion that police could sanitize community of its risks.

The new legalities of Islamic contractual interpretation: institutional frameworks and the displacement of intention

Purpose This study aims to examine the extent to which traditional juristic approaches to determining intention in Islamic law are altered in the institutional framework and standard-setting project of the Malaysian state. Design/methodology/approach The study used the transnational law theory, which views normativity as culturally, socially and religiously embedded. The development of norms, customs and laws is also contingent on self-maximizing behavior. The Sharīʿa Advisory Council’s interpretation of the bayʿ al-ʿīnah standard is a case study of this approach to the development of law. Findings This study shows that traditional approaches to determining the validity of an Islamic contract have been displaced by the institutional logic of the state, which prioritizes uniformity and certainty in law and reflects liberal, Western and capitalistic values. Islamic standard setting is part of the state’s objective to uniformize law due to the globalization of financial markets. The normative collisions in the standard-setting project produce a new jurisprudence based on the state’s uniform and purposive determination of a contract’s validity. Research limitations/implications Further research on institutional frameworks is needed to conceptualize how Islamic commercial principles and ethics can be incentivized in the state’s legal systems. Originality/value Few works, if any, have examined the interaction of the state’s institutional environment with jurists’ traditional approaches to determining contractual intention. Most scholarship assumes the decisive role of market forces, but the role of law and institutions in this context is under-researched.

China’s Promoting of Authoritarian–Westphalian Democracy and Its Implications for the Liberal International Order

China is seen as undemocratic, illiberal, and autocratic by many who live outside it, and the terms “democracy” and “China” are often difficult to reconcile. Nonetheless, Beijing has been actively employing the concept of democracy both domestically and on the international stage in recent years. This paper aims to critically examine how Beijing conceptualizes and advocates for democracy at home and abroad. It also endeavors to explore the implications for the country’s domestic and global governance, particularly in relation to the US-centered liberal international order in the context of critical international relations studies. In so doing, this paper will focus methodologically on Beijing’s official documents and state media outlets, presenting an argument that is twofold. First, by promoting its unique form of democracy known as “whole-process people’s democracy,” Beijing domestically intertwines democracy with authoritarianism, hierarchy, and dictatorship. This whole-process people’s democracy appears to function at home as a tool of regime security that is characterized by a rule that is of and for the people but not by the people. Second, China on the international stage has adopted Western-style liberal values to advocate for enhanced democracy in international relations. Through its strategic adoption of these liberal values, Beijing accuses the United States of a hegemonic liberal hypocrisy in international relations while appearing to aspire to a world that is fragmented into essentially different entities.

“Instagram is like a karela”: transnational digital queer politics and online censorship and surveillance in India

Abstract This article explores transnational queer political flows and negotiations in Indian queer/trans communities on Instagram, situating this in its limits and restrictions as a public sphere that is corporate- and state-governed and subject to conditions of profitability, censorship, regulation, and algorithmic disciplining. Using insights from 23 in-depth interviews with queer/trans women and non-binary Instagram users and community organizers across India, I argue that binaries of Western/Indigenous, global/local, authentic/inauthentic are insufficient to understand Indian queer digital politics. I instead explore the political utility of agentic reclamations and negotiations of queer/trans identity by marginal queer/trans users. At the same time, drawing on participant experiences of content moderation, censorship, and corporate and state surveillance, I examine how the potentials of Instagram as a site to mediate articulations of a radical politics of queer liberation are restricted, thwarted, and reconfigured by platform design and policing.

Federal fractals: review of Stephen Tierney, The Federal Contract

Stephen Tierney’s new book presents an exciting new theory of federal constitutionalism. His core argument is that each federal constitution is founded on a ‘federal contract’, which is an agreement among a plurality of territorial communities to form a federal political community while retaining their distinct constitutional identity as constituent states. This offers an alternative to the ‘social contact’ of liberal political theory in which the isolated individual is the sole basic unit of the constitutional order. The explanatory power of Tierney’s thesis is impressive. He shows how the idea of the federal contract can be manifested in many varied forms but in a manner that recognises the constitutional status and autonomy of the constituent states, formed into an association under which they agree to act cooperatively with each other and with the federation as a whole, under a mutual commitment of reciprocity that underwrites inter-governmental cooperation and solidarity, while also maintaining inter-governmental distinctiveness and autonomy. Under the auspices of this simple and elegant idea, Tierney offers an account of federal constitutionalism that resembles the fractal patterns of mathematical geometry insofar as each federal system reflects a particular federating logic that drives its initial creation and ongoing evolution. This opens up a promising area of further research involving an ever-closer examination of federal systems to see whether the fractal-like patterns he has identified continue to be apparent at progressively higher levels of resolution.

Translation and gender in contemporary Mapuche dramaturgy

ABSTRACT The theater company Kimvn Teatro, under the leadership of Mapuche playwright and director Paula González Seguel, produces and features documentary dramaturgies performed and written by a collaborative group of mostly female Mapuche artists and non-professional actors. The present study seeks to critically examine multilingualism in the written text of Kimvn Teatro's debut work, Ñi pu tremen - Mis antepasados, from a transnational feminist translation studies approach. This analysis focuses on the intersections of drama translation, female solidarity, feminist politics of authorship, and cultural representation of Mapuche women in the diaspora. The research explores how collaborative authorship and translinguistic strategies disrupt intersecting regimes of patriarchal and colonial power. Furthermore, the significance of translation is examined in terms of addressing the limitations imposed by monolingualism in contemporary Latin American drama. This entails the deterritorialization of Spanish and the affirmation of Mapuche culture and language within the framework of a “minor documentary dramaturgy”.

How conservative groups fight liberal values and try to ‘moralize’ the European Court of Human Rights

AbstractThis paper analyses the growing litigation before the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR) by conservative European Non-governmental Organizations (NGOs) who exploit legal opportunities and other advocacy tactics. These actors oppose the liberal insistence on permissive individual freedom, minority rights and mandatory vaccination. Instead, they promote the sanctity of life, traditional values and harsh terrorism penalties. In this study we show that conservative legal mobilisation is not only related to litigation but also covers the execution of certain ECtHR judgments and the nomination of some European judges. We analyse their tactics using legal and sociolegal methodology (interviews, analysis of legal documents and jurisprudence and network analysis) to characterise their influence on the European human rights system and the reactions of the Council of Europe. We reflect on the moral values claimed by conservative NGOs and their liberal counterparts by analysing how powerful private actors, driven by material and moral interests, take creative initiatives that shape or reshape case law and its politicisation through alliances with so-called ‘illiberal’ and ‘populist’ states.

Imagining a Post-High-Economic-Growth Society: The Crisis of the Liberal Political Economy and the “Japanese Model of Mature Society”

Imagining a Post-High-Economic-Growth Society: The Crisis of the Liberal Political Economy and the “Japanese Model of Mature Society”

Feminist flashpoints and the burning question of accountability

The media coverage of the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss reveals the ongoing difficulties of holding powerful men accountable, despite decades of feminist mobilisation around sexual violence. This essay builds on Sarah Banet-Weiser’s concept of the ‘feminist flashpoint’ as spectacular media events which can help problematise cultural understandings of ‘accountability’ beyond ‘cancel culture’ and carceral feminist politics. Analysing the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss in relation to another feminist flashpoint, the contested interpretation of the photograph V-J Day in Times Square, initiates an epistemological shift that focuses on the spectators of the kiss instead of its protagonists. This critical shift locates a feminist practice of accountability in processes of historicization and thinks of responsibility in collective rather than invidividual terms. This piece is part of a special themed issue on the Rubiales/Hermoso non-consensual kiss.

Subsidiarity, sphere sovereignty, and state sovereignty

An important question for liberal political theory is whether its account of political morality is compatible with religious political thought. This paper examines one aspect of that broad question, namely the compatibility of the Christian pluralist tradition with liberalism's account of state sovereignty. According to Cécile Laborde, a central commitment of liberalism—and perhaps its most radical—is the claim that the state possesses a form of sovereignty that she dubs ‘competence-competence’. This refers to the state's meta-jurisdictional authority to decide the areas of competence of associations within it. The Christian pluralist tradition, in contrast, emphasises the independent authority of various kinds of social groups and the external limits this places on the state. The paper argues that, despite appearances to the contrary and the claims of many pluralist thinkers, these two views are compatible. It does so through a detailed examination of the two main strands of Christian pluralism, namely subsidiarity and sphere sovereignty, and by comparing pluralists’ and liberals’ approaches to the regulation of religious groups.

Thinking Like a Feminist: What Feminist Theory Has to Offer Sociology

What does feminist theory have to offer sociology? Defining feminist theory as work that problematizes the gender binary and the relations of domination that constitute and emerge from it, we explore four key aspects of feminist scholarship. We begin with work that explores gender as a structuring trope. We then turn to how gender is coconstituted with other structures of power and domination. Next, we survey how feminists have theorized the relationship between nature and the social through the body. Finally, we examine feminist epistemological claims. We conclude by demonstrating the inextricability of feminist conceptual work and feminist politics. As we move across these bodies of work, we show how they are linked with one another and suggest some of the ways in which thinking like a feminist would help sociologists better grasp the dynamics of the social worlds we study.

Sexual assault victims face a penalty for adjacent consent

Across 11 experimental studies ( n = 12,257), we show that female victims of sexual assault are blamed more and seen as less morally virtuous if their assault follows voluntary sexual intimacy, a factor we term “adjacent consent”. Moreover, we illuminate a psychological mechanism contributing to this penalty: When a woman who provided no consent whatsoever is assaulted, people tend to see her as more moral than if she were not victimized (the “Virtuous Victim Effect”)—yet people do not extend the same moral elevation to victims who consented to sex-adjacent activity before they were assaulted. Adjacent consent plays a unique role in undermining the moral elevation of rape victims; respondents continue to elevate victims when, in the absence of adjacent consent, we introduce other information that makes the perpetrator seem less abhorrent or that makes the victim seem promiscuous, reckless, or sexually interested in her perpetrator. Furthermore, adjacent consent disqualifies rape victims from moral elevation in the eyes of a wide swath of respondents—including political liberals and undergraduates who, when no assault occurs, have no moral objection to (or even applaud) the victim’s voluntary sexual intimacy. Our results thus illuminate how sexual assault victims may be penalized for adjacent consent by even progressive or “sex-positive” communities. Finally, we identify a potential real-world consequence of adjacent consent: using field data from over 180,000 students across 33 U.S. universities, we find evidence that victims are less likely to report their sexual assaults in cases involving adjacent consent.

Women's political participation in the United States after women's suffrage: women's representation in the legislature of the house of representatives and the senate

Historically, women have confronted formidable barriers to political participation, entrenched by patriarchal norms. Despite the ratification of the Nineteenth Amendment in the United States, which granted women voting rights, substantive representation remains elusive. This study investigates the persistent gender gap in political representation, focusing on the 113th congressional elections. Employing liberal feminist theory and democratic principles, it aims to elucidate the urgency of addressing women's underrepresentation in legislative bodies. Through literature review and quantitative analysis of electoral data, this research seeks to uncover the impact of electoral systems on women's political engagement. Results reveal stark contrasts between countries like the US and Rwanda, emphasizing the critical role of electoral mechanisms in fostering gender parity. By illuminating these disparities, this study underscores the imperative for policy interventions to ensure equitable political participation for women, thereby advancing democratic ideals and societal progress.

Constitutional liberalism through thick and thin: Reflections on Frank Michelman’s Constitutional Essentials

In his new book, Constitutional Essentials, Frank Michelman provides a splendid elaboration and defense of ‘the constitutional theory of political liberalism’ implicit in John Rawls’s classic work, Political Liberalism. In this essay, we make some observations about what a difference 30 years makes, comparing the political and constitutional climate in which Rawls wrote and published Political Liberalism in 1993 with the climate in which Michelman wrote and published this exegesis of it. We focus on (1) changes in our circumstances of pluralism, including the accentuation of polarization and unreasonable views, and (2) the simultaneous breakdown of trust in the Supreme Court authoritatively to resolve disputes concerning constitutional essentials. Throughout, we acknowledge and seek to reckon with the possibility that Michelman may have given Rawls’s liberal principle of legitimacy its fullest, most coherent account just at the moment when the possibility of realizing it seems to be passing.

Dr Catherine Chisholm, 'children's physician': Her work for child welfare and feminist networking in Manchester.

Catherine Chisholm BA MB ChB MD FRCP CBE (1879-1952) is celebrated as the first woman to qualify in medicine from Manchester University in 1904 and is remembered for founding the Manchester Babies Hospital in 1914 (later renamed in 1935 as the Duchess of York Hospital for Babies). She was indefatigable in her pursuit to improve the education and status of women doctors; the first woman member and president of the British Paediatric Society; first woman president of the Manchester Medical Society and was mainly responsible for establishing the Medical Women's Federation in 1917. Her career was a complex mixture of medical and social networks that linked her work as a children's physician to the Manchester Public Health Committee, Liberal politics and feminist groups. These networks played an important role in Dr Chisholm's successful career and are at the centre of this paper.

Undermining liberal international organizations from within: Evidence from the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe

AbstractInternational organizations promoting democratic governance and human rights are increasingly challenged by some of their own member states. To better understand this dynamic, we propose a distinction between the illiberal ideology of political parties and their regime environment, aiming to examine the international behavior of actors extending beyond autocratic governments. We argue that the domestic regime environment plays a pivotal role in influencing the extent to which illiberal parties engage in contestation to undermine liberal norms on the international stage. We expect contestation behavior to be primarily driven by illiberal parties seeking to diminish the influence of liberal international politics on domestic power structures. Moreover, we contend that government participation moderates illiberal parties’ contestation behavior. To test our expectations empirically, we study roll call votes in the Parliamentary Assembly of the Council of Europe (PACE), one of the most powerful international parliaments promoting liberal values. Drawing on an original dataset that records approximately 500,000 individual votes cast in PACE decisions, we find evidence for substantive contestation by illiberal parties, especially those representing illiberal regimes. Only illiberal governments in liberal systems moderate themselves at the amendment stage. Our study has implications for the potential threat that emerging illiberal actors pose to international liberal institutions.

‘Does this hurt?’: feminism, pain and the problem of reification

Feminist debates around sex have often revolved around the vexed question of whether women can achieve genuine pleasure under patriarchy. Some ‘sex-negative’ feminists have claimed that the entire debate around ‘pleasure under patriarchy’ rests on an ontological mistake: when women say that they experience sexual pleasure with men, what they mean by ‘pleasure’ is actually pain. On this view, pain is assumed to have an objective existence regardless of whatever the subject is experiencing. Positing such a gap between ‘feeling pain’ as a subjective state of affairs and ‘being in pain’ as an objective fact presupposes a ‘detectivist’ theory of subjectivity, whereby the subject is taken to relate to her pain as a reified object. Examining how detectivism has haunted different feminist traditions – from 1970s feminist consciousness-raising and MacKinnon's anti-sex feminism, to contemporary feminist critiques of liberal consent – I argue that a detectivist theory of subjectivity limits the critical horizon of a feminist politics of pain: it ends up politicising marginalised pain only at the cost of falsifying the subjective nature of pain itself.

Introduction to the Special Issue “Canonizing and Contesting Communist-Era Dissent in Eastern Europe: Actors, Representations, and Impacts since 1989”

This special issue in historical and memory studies analyzes two interrelated processes. It explores how the dissident past has been negotiated, contested, or reclaimed since 1989 and how key post-dissident actors have employed their own pasts as a moral and political resource after 1989, with what consequences. The issue approaches post-dissident history and the memory of dissent after 1989 in a regional-comparative frame while paying ample attention to transnational dynamics, such as interactions between Western recognition and national contestation. The issue thus analyzes the varied meanings east Europeans have assigned to dissident pasts and post-dissident presents and how the contests over such meanings have come to shape their politics and culture. Individual contributions focus on post-dissident actors, their representations, or their impact. A focus on actors enables in-depth exploration of post-dissident politics across the Visegrád countries and how the dissident experience was translated, via a politics of consensus, into liberal politics during the early years of “transition.” This focus also yields studies that analyze how post-dissidents have drawn on the intellectual authority and moral credibility they derived from their dissident pasts. Other studies in the collection trace transformation in the representation of forms of dissent in the decades since 1989 and the changing political and cultural values such representations have conveyed. Still other studies explore and reflect on the reasons behind the backlash against the post-dissident canon and its leading representatives while also considering ways in which “dissident heroes” have been posthumously reclaimed.

Soft power in complicated and complex education systems: Gender, education and global governance in organisational responses to SDG 4

This article examines how the distinction between complicated and complex education systems contributes to our understanding of global governance and how “soft power” concerned with gender is used in international development organisations’ responses to Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, the global goal for education. Four global governance approaches which shape these organisations are distinguished: partnership building, gender mainstreaming, gender activism and contestation by global feminist movements. These strands of soft power have implications for how meanings of gender, education, power and accountability are interpreted. The work of three organisations – the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), the Gender at the Centre Initiative (GCI) and the Malala Fund – are reviewed to exemplify these global governance approaches. The analysis draws on a close reading of the organisations’ published documents to build a history of how the gender concerns of SDG 4 came to be interpreted, negotiated, contested or ignored. The activities of the three organisations show considerable interplay between concepts of complicated and complex education systems. The discussion raises questions regarding what kind of work soft power in gender and education does in a context of huge and growing global inequalities and insecurities. In addition, the question is posed why there is still no institutional base to articulate a global feminist politics which confronts and seeks to dismantle unjust structures of power.

Post-Dissident Politics and the “Liberal Consensus” in East-Central Europe after 1989

This article’s central question is how former dissidents and their engagement in post-1989 nascent democratic politics contributed to the emergence of what was later retrospectively labelled the “liberal consensus.” I look at the earliest stages of this consensus before it started to lock in the conditionality of the EU accession process. To this end, I first discuss the “liberal consensus” from a retrospective and past prospective perspective. I define the notions of “post-dissent” and liberal politics emerging after 1989 on the dissident platform. I discuss the theoretical background and historical contours of the notion of dissident “politics of consensus.” The empirical core of the study is an analysis of the birth of post-dissident liberal parties in the process of the disintegration of broad consensual democratization movements of the 1989 revolutions. The study offers a comparison of the Czech, Slovak, Hungarian, and Polish cases, analyzing their similarities and less obvious but significant differences.