Liberal Practices Research Articles

Hybrid and ‘Everyday’ Political Ordering: Constructing and Contesting Legitimacy in Somaliland

A number of recent post-colonial liberal peace critiques have moved beyond the counter-positioning of ‘liberal/Western’ versus ‘communal/non-Western’ peace and political order. Instead, they draw attention to the interstices – the processes of contestation, repulsion and accommodation – between these approaches. Some argue that the most promising, if contentious, forms of political ordering and peace building take place exactly in a hybrid of state-based and liberal practices, and local customs and ‘everyday’ life in post-conflict settings.Through a case-study of Somaliland, this article examines the potentials and limits of such a hybrid approach to advancing peace and political order. The analysis in particular engages with the largely uncharted issue of how political legitimacy is constructed or undermined, in the context of post-conflict hybrid political orders. Somaliland’s reconstruction process was characterised by very low international intervention when compared to other so-called ‘fragile states’ and post-conflict settings. The article looks at how political institutions and structures of governance were constituted from within Somaliland through local agencies and formation of alliances, which cut across the dichotomies of ‘state/non-state’ and ‘liberal/traditional’ forms of governance and legitimacy. It illustrates the advantages, as well as some of the challenges, of this process of political ordering and hybridization, where the domestic sphere was allowed to be constitutive for the creation of legitimacy.Examining a small-scale international-local initiative of peace dialogues and community policing in Somaliland, the article also discusses how international support may engage with ‘everyday’ strategies of self-securing, and deliberately ‘facilitate’ hybridity in the context of conflict management and justice.The analysis offers an empirical anchoring of the concepts of ‘hybridity’ and the ‘everyday’, but also demonstrates how the case of Somaliland speaks more broadly to post-colonial liberal peace critiques and the call for new approaches to peace and political order.

“Culture Fatigue”: The State and Minority Rights in Botswana

The circulation and intersection of supranational rights, discourses, and practices with local struggles have contributed to victories, disappointments, and in many instances, new articulations and understandings of rights for local people. In Botswana, the ever-increasing interaction of minority groups with international institutions, laws and conventions, nongovernmental groups (NGOs), and the Botswana courts has created a dialectic that continues to reshape vernacular rights discourses. The state has also been a party in this evolving dialectic and has found new means of intervening in the process. The Botswana state prides itself on its liberal practices and has received international acclaim as a result. The state’s success in promoting individual-based human rights provides a context for minorities to self-identify, recognize their oppression, and safely challenge the state. Initially disarmed by minority demands and legal action, the state has now attempted to redefine the goals of minorities and to reduce the substance and redress of justice claims to support for and celebration of minority groups' dance, food, and costume. This has produced, in the words of minority activists, “culture fatigue.” This paper will examine these processes; consider the conflicting and converging discourses and practices resulting from the mutual absorption of rights dialogue on the part of local groups, international bodies, and the state; and discuss the ways in which these have supported, clashed with, strengthened, or distorted the positions and outcomes of the various actors and their projects.

Sexual Politics and Ascriptive Autonomy

I explore the notion of ascriptive autonomy as a conceptual and political tool that can be used to understand and enact potentially liberatory practices that enable marginalized people to have greater individual autonomy. “Ascriptive autonomy” refers to the sense in which autonomy is partly constituted by the conferral of the status of “autonomous individual.” Autonomy is both a capacity to determine one's own ends and a status conferred by virtue of being recognized by others. I focus on the link between these two facets of autonomy insofar as recognition may enable the development of capacity. In certain situations, autonomy may be ascribed even if one lacks some requirements associated with the capacity for autonomy because of either institutional or psychic constraints that follow from oppression. In such instances of “selective, purposeful misrecognition,” ascription may lead to the cultivatation of the capacity for autonomy while opening up a space for politics. To demonstrate this, I recast the feminist debate over sexuality using the terms of ascriptive autonomy. When viewed through the lens of misrecognition, we can better respond to critiques that charge proponents of the “pro-sex”position with focusing on sexual pleasure at the expense of sufficient attention paid to the constraints faced by women.

The cost of multiple sclerosis in Norway

Health economic aspects have been increasingly important during introduction of new treatments for multiple sclerosis. As a partial response for Norway, a cost-of-illness study was carried out to estimate the yearly cost of the illness to society and relate costs and patients’ quality of life to illness severity. Estimated cost to society was Euro 439 million in 2002 exclusive of the cost of reduced quality of life. The cost per patient was close to Euro 65,000. Account taken of methodological differences, the results compare to results for Sweden, Norway’s closest neighboring country. The illness reduced patients’ quality of life with 0.26. More patients were early retired because of their MS in Norway than in any of nine other European countries comprised by a recent European study, illustrating a liberal practice in Norway. The Norwegian cost of unpaid assistance was almost identical to the Swedish cost that was the lowest found across the countries in the European study. When related to illness severity, the cost per patient increased, and the patients’ experienced quality of life decreased with increasing EDSS levels in line with what has been found for other countries. Cost-of-MS studies have been carried out for a number of countries. Together they contribute to our understanding of the economic consequences of multiple sclerosis and, if their results are related to illness severity, also provide valuable information for further economic analyses of treatment and medication. Our study adds to this.

Baptizing Adorno's Odysseus

The question Adorno and Horkheimer leave the reader of the Dialectic of Enlightenment with is: How, finally, are we to supplement the project of the Enlightenment, so that it may attain its libratory potential? As I find Adorno's answers to the question of the proletariat's political failure troubling, in leaving little possibility of reform or hope in concrete terms for continuing successfully in the project of liberation, I intend to provide an alternative narrative of human liberation based on a critical rereading of Adorno and Horkheimer in light of René Girard. Specifically, I argue that Girard can provide a model of human liberation that enables the transcendence of the Odyssean disposition to self-sacrifice that Adorno and Horkheimer see as a key to the failures of the proletariat. In Girard's terms, I argue that the strategy of Penelope rather than Odysseus can provide a model for a psychology and praxis of liberation.

A "Collective Black" Liberation in the Face of "Honorary White" Racism? A Growing Edge for U.S. Black Liberation Theologies

James H. Cone argues that the liberation of African Americans from the scourge of white racism must be at the foundation of any true Christian theology in the U.S. This essay investigates what this might mean when the racial structure within the U.S. is changing. As sociologist Eduardo Bonilla-Silva points out, the paradigm is now comprised of three racial strata—"whites," "honorary whites," and "collective Blacks"—and exhibits a "color blind racism" that continues white dominance in a more subtle way. My study is a theological investigation that employs a mutually critical correlation to bring the theological work of Cone into dialogue with the sociological work of Bonilla-Silva. I discuss Cone's and Bonilla-Silva's projects and using their work suggest possible new theological avenues for U.S. Black Liberation Theologies to consider while continuing the praxis of Black Liberation.

After Liberalism

Taking Daniel Deudney and John Ikenberry’s demand for a ‘more selfconscious and robust liberal statecraft’ as its point of departure, this article considers whether this demand can be realised in practice, given the apparent contradiction between a desire for a self-conscious Liberalism and a desire for a robust Liberalism. By weaving a path through the work of Deudney, Ikenberry and Kant, and through the film District 9, this article suggests that Liberalism and especially Liberal Internationalism 3.0 fail to provide an ethical basis that could supply a ‘non-negotiable demand of human [and “alien”] dignity’, which is what a more self-conscious Liberalism ought to strive for. This failure is down to the way Liberalism draws its limits on political subjectivity. It is these Liberal practices that we cannot be ‘after’ in a temporal sense so long as Liberalism carries on. And so we need to be ‘after Liberalism’ in a different sense of being after — of calling it to account by being aware ourselves of how the core principles of Liberalism are both beneficial and destructive in their crafting of all political subjectivities.

Availability of contraceptive choice

When considering contraceptive choice for women in the UK, a Pandora’s box of social, political and ethical dilemmas is opened. Contraceptive choices should be motivated by a woman’s right to control her fertility. However, increasingly, we are presented with headlines suggesting that the UK is failing in this challenge on a daily basis. Sexual behaviours in all ages of the population have seen a shift towards more liberal practice from the 1980s at the height of public awareness of HIV. There has been an increase in sexually transmitted infections, particularly chlamydia, and rising abortion rates. 1 This is particularly true in the under-18 and over40 age groups, with teenage pregnancy rates now among the highest in Europe. To combat this public health problem, publications including ‘Next Steps’ guidance from the Department of Health and Department for Children, Schools and Families actively promote ‘equitable access to the full range of contraception methods and provision of high quality advice and support’. A key to the success in improving contraceptive choices is through understanding our local and often diverse populations. Although teenagers typically obtain their information from their peers, or more successfully from television campaigns, they are the highest users of local family planning or sexual health clinics. The percentage of women over 40 attending family planning or sexual health clinics is low, suggesting they are either not seeking advice or attending their local GP. Cultural diversity and religious beliefs also contribute signifi cantly to freedom of access and choices. 2

La discrimination intersectionnelle: la naissance et le développement d'un concept et les paradoxes de sa mise en application en droit antidiscriminatoire

RésuméSuivant le postulat selon lequel le traitement isolé des motifs de discrimination contribue à la marginalisation des individus et des groupes subissant des discriminations multiples et imbriquées, l'article examine le processus d'intégration de l'intersectionnalité dans la pratique judiciaire antidiscriminatoire canadienne. Après avoir retracé la naissance et l'évolution de l'approche intersectionnelle de la discrimination, et examiné les critiques qu'elle formule à l'endroit du droit antidiscriminatoire, l'article établit, à partir de l'analyse d'un corpus jurisprudentiel comprenant une trentaine de plaintes de discrimination intersectionnelle traitées au cours des vingt dernières années à différents paliers juridiques canadiens et québécois, quatre modes d'appréhension de la discrimination par les tribunaux: moniste, compartimentée, cumulative et holiste (intersectionnelle). L'institutionnalisation de l'intersectionnalité dans le droit antidiscriminatoire peut être une piste prometteuse qui permet de reconfigurer les dispositifs juridiques de protection de l'égalité pour mieux lutter contre les formes imbriquées d'oppression et de discrimination. Mais elle peut aussi se transformer en une pratique libérale de «management de la diversité», faisant fi des inégalités structurelles et consacrant un discours axé sur les vulnérabilités individuelles.

The Relationship of ‘Systems Thinking’ to Action Research

This article investigates the relationship of systems thinking to action research by reviewing the main developments in systems thinking and relating these to action research. There are two main lines of thought in systems thinking that lead to wholly different conceptions about action research. The first (systems thinking) advocates thinking about real social systems that it assumes exist in the world. The second (systemic thinking) supposes only that the social construction of the world is systemic. Greater emphasis is placed on systemic thinking consistent with its greater importance to contemporary action research. The article concludes that systemic thinking when taken to its practical conclusion from a critical perspective offers to action research a somewhat unique liberating praxis. Concern that any liberating praxis could remain hollow is addressed through a certain kind of ‘spiritual’ awareness that is suggested by wholeness.

Public Health,Genomics and Biopolitics: Human Security Vis-À-Vis Securing ‘Exception’

‘Biopower’ has been the building block to address human beings as global mass with liberal government practices. The sovereign power continuously categorizes the population between ‘political life’ and the ‘other’ mute bearers of ‘bare life.’ To ensure human security to all, threats to human security have been broadened beyond the realm of military security. Equitable health and development, therefore, should constitute a central goal of human security. Global health has always been economic opportunity and security -sensitive to United States .Genomics can explain the complex interactions of genetic and environmental factors in health and disease .The post-genome biology have been characterized by higher stakes, lower threshold and proven capabilities. If the dual-use Genomics is left without vigil and intervention by global governance since its very take-off, it may usher in an era of catastrophe, much more disastrous than that of genetic engineering. The cause of ‘war against terror’ has transformed biomedical research into a subset of weapons development. The military -industrial elites have been so powerful that opportunities for a counter veiling power has been precluded. The intrinsic nature of knowledge and its ever extending horizons have engendered the planetary arena.

Does Soft Power Matter? A Comparative Analysis of Student Exchange Programs 1980–2006

Democratic governance depends not only on the building of democratic institutions but also on citizens’ knowledge about how these institutions should function in their everyday lives. I argue that US-hosted educational exchange programs are one mechanism whereby citizens of nondemocratic states might experience life firsthand in a democratic country. Their experiences may impact the political institutions and influence political behavior in their home countries. In order for this process to take place, I argue that at least three contextual conditions are important: (i) the depth and extent of social interactions that occur while abroad, (ii) the sharing of a sense of community or common identity between participants and their hosts, and (iii) the attainment of a politically influential position by the exchange participant when they return home. In this article, I test these hypotheses and find support for what advocates of soft power often contend: US-hosted exchange programs can play an important role in the diffusion of liberal values and practices across the borders of authoritarian states. The current war in Iraq has illustrated the difficulties of imposing democratic institutions in states where democratic norms are underdeveloped and citizens have little previous experience of the everyday functioning of democratic practices. One consequence has been calls for the United States to engage in a ‘‘war of ideas’’ with nonliberal forces that have impeded the spread and development of democratic norms and practices. But how might the United States actually ‘‘fight’’ such a war? Soft power advocates, US policy makers, and scholars have frequently claimed that US-hosted educational exchange programs might provide one strategy for the United States to effectively engage its ideational adversaries (e.g., Nye and Owens 1996; Nye 2004; Williams 2004; Rice 2006; US White House 2006; Phillips and Brooks 2008). While such claims are made, there has been little attempt to systematically evaluate them. Exceptions are a few studies that have argued that attendance by foreign military officers at US military schools has had a positive impact on the development of democratic institutions (Cope 1995; Gibler and Ruby 2002; Atkinson 2006; Miller 2006). The research presented in this article complements and expands the scope of these studies by empirically evaluating the impact of both military and civilian exchanges. When we think about what is meant by liberal practices, two observable phenomena come to mind: first, whether a state’s institutions are democratic or authoritarian, and second, whether leaders respect the life and fundamental liberties of their citizens. Building the political institutions of democracy is certainly

Why Feminism and Liberalism Need Each Other: The Case for Reconciliation

In the 21st century, both feminism and liberalism are far more influential than they are popular. Reports of the death or terminal condition of each ideology are frequent. No candidate for national office has accepted the “liberal” label since 1988, when that adjective and all it implies helped the Democrats lose the president election. Now, “the traditional media are so petrified of being called ‘liberal’ that they are prepared to allow the Breitbarts of the world to become their assignment editors, while “mainstream journalists regularly criticize themselves for not jumping fast enough or high enough when the Fox crowd demands coverage of one of their attack lines. “While “I am not a feminist” (with or without the “but”) has faded from ordinary discourse, public figures who accept the label self-consciously limit its scope. But, even as “feminist” and “liberal” have become terms of opprobrium, feminist and liberal practice persist. They don’t exactly thrive, and they exclude too many people, but we still have the adversary system of justice, individual rights remain a priority; public accommodations are racially integrated, and gender gaps continue to narrow. The Obama administration is displeased about the leaking of war-related documents, but it hasn’t gone to court the way the Nixon administration did with the Pentagon Papers. This discontinuity between theory and practice intrigues me because of my intellectual roots in both ideologies. I was raised a liberal, and became a feminist. In the time and place where I grew up, liberalism was the only respectable political philosophy. Words like “conservative,” “Marxist,” or “Communist” were spoken in tones ranging from the derisive to the contemptuous. Nobody found it necessary to defend freedom of expression, the separation of state and religion, the exclusionary rule, or workers’ right to strike; but if you asked, answers were provided. Capital punishment was wrong because people might be convicted in error. Adding the words “under God’ to the Pledge of Allegiance sent a hostile message to nonbelievers. Laws that prohibited contraception were as ludicrous as the idea of any duty to obey them. People who disagreed with these positions were considered too stupid to understand. Reason trumped emotion, as far as public policy was concerned. The brain trumped the heart, the gut, the hunch, the instinct, and the inclination. I learned to perceive the world as the adults around me did. Not all these principles extended to children, but I conceived of adulthood as a stage of life when these rights would be mine, too. But liberal individualism was not all I absorbed. Questions about rights were not the only questions that occurred to me. Why did the boys enter the school at the front door and the girls at the back? When the class was divided into teams, why were the captains always boys and the lieutenants girls? When my parents had dinner guests, why did all the women head for the kitchen while all the men sat in the living room? The responses, verbal and otherwise, to my questions ranged from “When you’re older, you’ll understand,” to Ring Lardner’s “’Shut up,’ he explained.” Some things were not subject to critical scrutiny. Male supremacy trumped reason. These contradictions may or may not have had anything to do with the fact that I got interested in political theory before I knew what it was. My interest led me to John Stuart Mill in high school, Erich Fromm in college, and David Riesman in graduate school. Mill and Riesman sensitized me to the possibility of liberal theory that did scrutinize and reject male supremacy. But Fromm wrote a book called Man for Himself. In Growing up Absurd, Paul Goodman wrote, “the problems I want to discuss in this book belong primarily, in our society, to the boys: how to be useful and make something of oneself. A girl does not have to, she is not expected to, ‘make something of herself.’ Her career does not have to be self-justifying, for she will have children, which is absolutely self-justifying, like any other natural or creative act. With this background, it is less important, for instance, what job an average young woman works at till she is married.” When the feminist movement re-emerged in the late 1960s, I jumped in.

“I Saw a Peach Tree in Full Bloom”: Transformative Spirituality and Mission in an Interreligious Context

AbstractThe crisis in Sri Lanka, which is rooted in the politics of ethnicity and reached a new stage in May 2009 when the government forces militarily defeated the Tamil Tiger rebels, forms the backdrop to this article. Transformative spirituality in this context is demonstrated in the strong bond of friendship between the author, a Sri Lankan Sinhalese, and a colleague who is a Sri Lankan Tamil. The article draws upon four principles of transformative spirituality in the interreligious context articulated by Sri Lankan Jesuit priest Aloysius Pieris. First, it must take the context seriously, which, in the Sri Lankan context means its grinding poverty and its rich religious diversity, to which must now be added the devastating war that has just concluded. Second, robust interreligious dialogue requires that Christians look beyond typologies such as exclusivism, inclusivism and pluralism, and engage other religious traditions on their own terms. Third, unless religions engage with the other core‐to‐core, rather than engage the kernel of Christianity with the husk of Buddhism, there cannot be genuine transformative spirituality. Fourth, transformative spirituality is only possible when the core of Christianity meets the core of Buddhism in the praxis of liberation. Acknowledging that dialogue never engages only the participants' religious identity, but engages the other as a whole person with multiple identities, the article applies Pieris' interreligious dialogue principles to conflictual ethnic relations seeking to provide dialogue as a model for other types of reconciliation.

Bloch, Gramsci e Paulo Freire: referências fundamentais para os atos da denúncia e do anúncio

A apropriação e aproximação das formulações de Ernst Bloch, Antonio Gramsci e Paulo Freire constituem parte importante das reflexões que compartilhamos em nosso coletivo de trabalho, que tem como tema de estudo organização e práxis libertadora. Neste artigo fazemos uma apresentação de nossas leituras situadas destes autores, seguida de um exercício de aproximação entre suas formulações. A realidade como processo histórico e a libertação do ser humano das condições de opressão (materiais e intelectuais) estão presentes nas obras dos três autores. Para Freire a libertação do oprimido é também a libertação do opressor; para Gramsci os subalternos devem tornar-se hegemônicos pela concepção de uma nova direção intelectual e moral que seja comprometida com o mais alto valor do ser humano: a própria existência; para Bloch a libertação é imanente à existência humana. Por conseguinte, a libertação também é concebida pelos três autores como um processo, da mesma forma que a hegemonia, que nunca é total, fixa ou definitiva, ou a realidade que está sendo o tempo todo. Bloch, Gramsci e Freire autorizam posições que vinculam a crítica ao sistema com a utopia presente e concreta, em nossa aprendizagem na interação com os movimentos e lutadores sociais.

Changing attitudes towards the care of children in hospital: a new assessment of the influence of the work of Bowlby and Robertson in the UK, 1940–1970

It is generally believed that the work of Bowlby and Robertson was new and decisive in changing the hospital conditions for young children. The fact that parents in the UK and other European countries can now visit their sick child at any time they wish or even room-in is attributed to an acquaintance with Bowlby's findings and Robertson's well-known films about the potentially detrimental effects of hospital stays for young children. In this paper we shall argue that this picture is incomplete and that, historically, things were rather more intricate. Bowlby and Robertson were neither the first nor the only researchers who tried to change hospital policies. Moreover, the older hospital policies were not uniformly bad. Long before Bowlby and Robertson began their plea for reforms, several individuals and hospitals had already introduced conditions that we now still regard as exemplary. The whole change towards more liberal, flexible, and humane practices in children's wards took place over several decades and was fuelled by both worried medical doctors, pressure groups of parents, sympathetic editors of medical journals, and emerging new research findings such as those provided by Bowlby and Robertson. In that societal debate, the voices of Bowlby and Robertson were influential but not necessarily new or decisive.

Nationalism, Democracy and the Left in Turkey

The Turkish left, in both its ‘Social-democrat’ and ‘Communist’ manifestations, grew up in the garden of Turkish nationalism. And although in Turkey these two branches have quite different origins (unlike in many countries in Europe), the common point between them is their closeness to nationalism. In the last few years the nationalism of both social democrats and socialists has intensified, leading to a peculiar – in terms of leftist movements in most European societies – alliance between the Turkish left and the Turkish State and military. In this paper I trace the historical development of leftist politics in Turkey since the 1950s, noting both certain changes in ideology and political practice but even more strikingly much enduring continuity. The result in the present is a deep crisis of democracy in Turkey, partially produced by the Turkish left. Indeed, irrespective of European prejudices regarding Turkey's entrance into the EU, the open or secret opposition of the majority of leftist parties and groups to European integration is a key factor as to whether Turkey itself will genuinely continue its application. Why does the Turkish left resist the push by other social actors to join the EU? The answer is the close identification between the left and the institutions and ideology of Kemalism in Turkey, which has never been a liberal political practice.

Theological Vision and Praxis for Liberation: Facing Destructive Conflict

Theological Vision and Praxis for Liberation: Facing Destructive Conflict

The Zen of Anarchy: Japanese Exceptionalism and the Anarchist Roots of the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance

AbstractThis essay explores the political origins and implications of Beat Zen anarchism, a cultural phenomenon located in the intersection between American anarchist traditions and Zen Buddhism in the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Focusing on the writings of D. T. Suzuki, Alan Watts, Gary Snyder, and Philip Whalen, it shows how Beat Zen emerged not primarily from an Orientalist appropriation of “the East” but rather from an Occidentalist, Japanese-centered criticism of American materialism that followed from the complex legacy of the World’s Parliament of Religions at the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition. In staking their claims to Zen, in other words, Philip Whalen and Gary Snyder—the Beat poets on whom this essay focuses—along with Alan Watts expressed the views not of cultural imperialists, as one might suppose, but of converts to what they regarded as a superior way of life.The Beat adoption of Zen intersected with a broadly libertarian and specifically anarchist social milieu in San Francisco that congregated around Kenneth Roxroth's Libertarian Club and Anarchist Circle. The individualist, anti-statist, and anarchist political outlooks of Beat Zen anarchists were directly confirmed by the writings of D. T. Suzuki, who presented Zen as a practice of personal liberation from cultural conditioning. Suzuki's rhetorical approach—which treated Japanese Zen as both a pinnacle of Asian civilization and a key to the liberation of Western humanity from its stifling and destructive rationalism—was informed by Meiji-era Japanese nationalism and exceptionalism and by the universalism that Buddhist missionaries brought to their explanations of Zen to Westerners. Arguing that Beat Zen poets, in adopting Buddhism as it was presented to them, were foremost Occidentalist rather than Orientalist in outlook, this essay concludes that the Beat Zen anarchist cultural formation suggests a libertarian alternative to Orientalism and also reconfigures common conceptions of American radical literary history as primarily Marxistinflected.

Big Money as an Obstacle to Democracy in Russia

Established Western social science theory equates democratization with rising levels of wealth and the associated establishment of a middle class that has an interest in the peaceful resolution of conflict through a political process. The case of Russia under Putin suggests that there is no necessary link between wealth as such and democratization. During his two terms as president, Putin benefited enormously from the rapid rise in world oil prices, but this economic security did not translate into liberal democratic political practices – quite the reverse. Indeed, the swift pace of economic growth and rising standard of living has not pushed Russia's rulers in the direction of democracy but rather, has encouraged a form of authoritarianism that in its use of rewards for favourites and supporters is reminiscent of aspects of feudal rule. The Russian middle class, secure in its wealth, is not a bulwark of democratic values, and those who have spoken out – and, more importantly, acted – in support of democratization have been silenced. It is Russia's poor, rather than the wealthy elite, who are critical of Putin's anti-democratic actions. The transfer of office from Putin to Medvedev in May 2008 is unlikely to change this tendency.