Oppositional Voices Research Articles

MISUSING PREVENTIVE DETENTION IN SECURITY LEGISLATIONS: A HISTORICAL ANALYSIS FROM THE LENS OF PERSONAL LIBERTY

Preventive Detention is an extraordinary instrument used during times of crisis to prevent the commission of criminogenic behaviour by curtailing individual liberty on the apprehension of a criminal act, in the interests of national security. However, within Indian law, this extraordinary power holds a peculiar position in the sense that it is applicable during peacetime as well, an anomaly from the juristic position that it occupies in other jurisdictions. The historical roots of this power are traceable from the colonial era, wherein it was used as a means to silence dissent against the colonial State, yet, even after independence, it was given constitutional recognition and included and incorporated into the constitutional mechanism within Article 22. This is perhaps attributable to the exceptional circumstances surrounding the birth of this nascent nation, yet, over the past seven decades, it has been used as a means of silencing dissent and curtailing the voices of opposition, primarily due to its loose, imprecise, and vague connotation, as well as the blanket power that has been constitutionally granted on the State to exercise preventive detention. Curiously, although the judiciary has historically been an avowed protector of individual liberty and freedom, petitions challenging the validity of preventive detention legislations have often fallen on deaf ears, with the judiciary repeatedly valuing the principles of national security that these legislations envisage to protect over the individual rights of liberty and freedom. Thus, over the past seven decades, the misuse and abuse of preventive detention have become a dark spot in Indian legislative and judicial history. Against this backdrop, this paper is interested in examining the historical development and application of preventive detention laws in India, starting from the colonial period and expanding the discussion to the present, to understand the reasoning for its implementation during the British era, its subsequent inclusion within the constitutional framework, its use and misuse over the decades and the judicial opinion towards its imposition, to try and understand the nuances that this extraordinary power has carried in Indian jurisprudence.

Signalling media professionalism: comparative social constructions of RT and CGTN

ABSTRACT The messaging content of Russia Today (RT) and China Global Television Network (CGTN) provides alternatives to those offered in mainstream western media. Comparative studies point to RT’s aggressive, ideological rhetoric and CGTN’s more tacit, celebratory, and culture-focused approach. This study adds to these understandings by examining how messaging strategies construct media professionalism – one of the four historic pillars of media systems analysis – to delegitimize media systems of rival states and build credibility of their own platforms and by assessing the dialectical role of key oppositional voices to Western media hegemony in the digital sphere. Using a mixed methods approach, we analyzed thousands of RT and CGTN’s Facebook posts across language accounts between 2017 and 2022. The study documents that RT and CGTN utilise arguments by comparison to assess competing news outlets and redefine scholarly modes of assessing media professionalism. The study identified four metrics used by RT and CGTN to evaluate media professionalism: source attribution, adherence to positive news values, distinctions from negative news standards of competing outlets, and relative commitment levels to free expression. It further reveals differences in RT and CGTN’s language-based, message targeting in relation to media professionalism.

Unpacking Gender Norms in China: A Discourse Analysis of Opposition Voices to Selling Sanitary Products on Trains

Recently, there has been an online debate about whether sanitary pads should be sold on China's high-speed trains. In this paper, the author puts a major focus on those distasteful and malicious comments by male participants in this controversy and examines how these reflect the conflicts and complexity that exist underneath gender roles for women in contemporary Chinese society. Discourse analysis is used in the study. Twenty-five social media posts and comments are systematically coded according to their tones, themes of opposition, and implied gender dynamics. As a result, it is discovered that a large number of comments exhibit gender stereotypes and are insensitive to women's needs; this reveals the general negligence about and misconceptions regarding womens sanitary needs. Additionally, the predominant tone of these comments is sarcastic and hostile, which shows adherence to traditional gender role norms and disdain for public discussion on women's health issues. Concerns about economics and practicality are also mentioned but tend to be lost amid the overall dismissal of women's needs. This study reveals how public awareness and attitudes toward women's sanitary needs are influenced by the tension between traditional gender views and progressive social thought.

How to consolidate quickly: The cases of Algeria and Tunisia

Several governments in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) have used pandemic measures to silence opposition voices and curb human rights. This article delvers deeper into this dynamic in Algeria and Tunisia by systematically analyzing regime use of preexisting authoritarian legal frameworks to target perceived regime opponents. Notably, unlike other regimes in the MENA, COVID-19 pandemic-specific laws (such as curfew violations) were not heavily relied on to arrest and prosecute prominent opponents. Instead, foundational laws that restrict free speech and assembly with intentionally vague language, which often date back decades, were reused. Several of these laws were enhanced during the pandemic to grant the executive more leeway in their use and expanded fines and prison sentences. Interestingly, despite the very public use of these laws, regimes in both countries have maintained relatively high public approval ratings. This is remarkable, given that past autocrats were overthrown for similar abuses. This demonstrates that pandemics grant aspiring authoritarian regimes greater leeway in the use of general legal mechanisms to restrict free speech and assembly. These kinds of crises can help maintain approval ratings despite extensive oppressive action by the state. This was especially true for Tunisia, where it appears that the pandemic created a rally-’round-the-flag effect that allowed the executive to consolidate his power in a dramatic democratic backslide.

Stop the Immigration Bill: Fighting to End Human Rights Violations and Xenophobia in Japan

Abstract In March 2023, the Japanese Cabinet submitted a controversial amendment bill to the Immigration Control and Refugee Recognition Law to the ordinary Diet session. As an association working with refugees and foreign workers living in Japan, we strategically formed a protest movement against the bill both inside and outside the parliament. The parliament ignored opposition voices and approved the bill, but this result was far from the opposition’s defeat. The protest movement helped reveal multiple facts that had been concealed by Immigration and caused a drastic increase in recognition of Immigration issues in Japan.

Bowed, Bent, & Broken: Duterte's Assaults on Civil Society in the Philippines

The Philippines has historically been known to have one of the most robust and politically active civil societies in the world. With a deep affinity with democracy, civil society became a reliable bulwark against abuses of power and endemic corruption. However, it came under attack under the populist, illiberal Duterte administration (2016–2022) through intimidation, persecution, massive disinformation, and even outright violence. This article examines why Philippine civil society – despite its attempted pushback against democratic erosion – was generally neutralized by Duterte. Apart from its weakened state given polarizing elite conflicts in the 2000s, Duterte engaged in executive assaults against civil society through the four strategies of exploiting divisions within civil society; securitizing public; regulating civic space to weed out opposition voices; and controlling the media environment. This article concludes by examining the implications of a weakened civil society and prospects for its reinvigoration under a restored Marcos dynasty, which won the 2022 Philippine presidential elections.

Religious heritage in the North

The article takes as its point of departure the notion that the Scandinavian countries have been dominated by a monocultural Lutheranism. This notion is nuanced by focusing on everyday life and oppositional voices. In the nineteenth century, the Lutheran state churches began to interpret their past as religious cultural heritage. Focusing especially on Norway, it is argued that this monocultural perspective has been replaced by a multicultural one with emphasis on ethnic minorities and indigenous religious heritage, dialogue and tolerance.

The Practices and Positionings of a Postcolonial Counterpublic: An Analysis of Black Lives Matter in Denmark

Drawing on postcolonial critique to analyze the work and political purpose of activist groups on social media, this article asks the question: How do digital media communications simultaneously reinstate binary oppositions and invite rhizomatic relations? While the concept of counterpublics is helpful when it comes to understanding the voices of opposition in public discourse, it is also necessary to introduce postcolonial critique and geopolitical and historical distinctions in order to grasp the particularities of global digital activism (Brouwer and Paulesc 2017; Blaagaard 2018). This article does exactly that: Illustrating the postcolonial, hybrid, and cosmopolitan qualities of digital activism on social media platforms, the article presents a discursive analysis of Black Lives Matter Denmark (BLM-DK) as they operate on the social media platform Facebook. The group’s posts are dedicated to juridical and political struggles over discrimination and racial violence in Denmark and the United States, thus producing a counterpublic. The posts moreover introduce and connect two very different geopolitical and historical contexts, thus showing social media’s potential for creating rhizomatic relations.

“Ready to Die”: The Notorious Cuff, a Resistant Enslaved (Akan) Male in Eighteenth-Century New Jersey

Abstract This essay explores the little-known yet fascinating 1767 murder of Daniel Hart at the hands of his enslaved male named Cuff, an alleged Akan person from Ghana, West Africa. The murder provides a crucial interpretive window into eighteenth-century New Jersey and the hostile relationship between bondmen and their male enslavers that could be described as warfare, that is, as a constant state of conflict that involved violent coercion. In its attempt to hear Cuff's muted oppositional voice, the essay engages a range of sources, including a popular rap song from the 1990s. In doing so, the essay refutes the portrayal of Cuff as evil, lazy, and hence, historically irrelevant. It frames the bondman as empowered by his Akan culture, which encouraged him to resent his existence under a white patriarchal system that degraded him in various ways, and in a larger white patriarchal society that policed his Black body, thereby making permanent escape an impossibility. Feeling boxed in by slavery and the larger society, Cuff took Hart's life and then his own, with the idea of making a spiritual journey to the ancestral realm. Armed with the weapon of cultural suicide, Cuff had reached the point in his war with Hart where he was, to borrow from rapper Notorious B.I.G., “ready to die.” Cuff's obscured story sheds important light on the destructive ramifications of New Jersey slavery, suggesting that Blacks fought whites for the preservation of their bodies and sense of self-worth with powerful (hidden) weapons.

Analyzing Media Coverage on the fall of Kabul A Critical Analysis of National and International Newspapers

The present study aims to investigate the portrayal of the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan in the news coverage of Pakistani newspaper Dawn, the U.S. newspaper, the New York Times, a Russian newspaper, the Moscow Times, and the Indian newspaper, The Hindu during the fall of Kabul from 16 July to 14 September 2021. The purpose of the study is to investigate how the newspapers of the selected four countries cover the withdrawal in the light of their respective national interest. This study analyzes the media and government relationship, whereas the study mainly revisits the application of ‘indexing theory’ in the context of the media’s coverage of the issue of Afghanistan quantitatively and qualitatively to determine the soft or otherwise critical relationship between media and government. The results, which are mixed in their nature, suggest that the elites’ differences on the issue of the US forces’ withdrawal from Afghanistan, coupled with the state of uncertainty over the issue of Afghanistan. Revisiting the Indexing Theory in the context of activated oppositional voices in the United States, hence the US newspaper The New York Times, and even the Russian newspaper, the Moscow Times, were found more critical to the governments than Dawn and The Hindu, which highlighted the issue of Afghanistan more in the context of ‘proximity’ extended support to their respective governments respectively.

"Dummy Grandpa, Do You Know Anything?": Identifying and Characterizing Ad Hominem Fallacy Usage in the Wild

Today, participating in discussions on online forums is extremely commonplace and these discussions have started rendering a strong influence on the overall opinion of online users. Naturally, twisting the flow of the argument can have a strong impact on the minds of naive users, which in the long run might have socio-political ramifications, for example, winning an election or spreading targeted misinformation. Thus, these platforms are potentially highly vulnerable to malicious players who might act individually or as a cohort to breed fallacious arguments with a motive to sway public opinion. Ad hominem arguments are one of the most effective forms of such fallacies. Although a simple fallacy, it is effective enough to sway public debates in offline world and can be used as a precursor to shutting down the voice of opposition by slander. In this work, we take a first step in shedding light on the usage of ad hominem fallacies in the wild. First, we build a powerful ad hominem detector based on transformer architecture with high accuracy (F1 more than 83%, showing a significant improvement over prior work), even for datasets for which annotated instances constitute a very small fraction. We then used our detector on 265k arguments collected from the online debate forum – CreateDebate. Our crowdsourced surveys validate our in-the-wild predictions on CreateDebate data (94% match with manual annotation). Our analysis revealed that a surprising 31.23% of CreateDebate content contains ad hominem fallacy, and a cohort of highly active users post significantly more ad hominem to suppress opposing views. Then, our temporal analysis revealed that ad hominem argument usage increased significantly since the 2016 US Presidential election, not only for topics like Politics, but also for Science and Law. We conclude by discussing important implications of our work to detect and defend against ad hominem fallacies.

A Comparative Study of Female Imagery in the Poetry of Emily Dickinson and Zhai Yongming

Zhai Yongming and Emily Dickinson are two modern poets who are particularly concerned with women's issues. Both poets use a female perspective to look at themselves and the human world as a whole, even if in distinct ways. Previous academics have concentrated on the feminine imagery employed by Zhai Yongming and the feminine issues generated from Dickinson's natural imagery separately. This dissertation will investigate how Zhai Yongmings, and Emily Dickinson's poetry reject or criticize patriarchal-centered culture through female imagery that associates with sexuality and animality, and explore how feminine consciousness traverses geography, time, and nation. This comparative study indicates that for Zhai Yongming, women have recognized their own particularity and are seeking to break free of their confines but suffer from problems. For Dickinson, women have been so undervalued and subjugated by society that their voices of opposition are weak. This study establishes the framework for future research on women's poetry, proposing suggestions for comparing Chinese and Western poets, and hoping that scholars might use the imagery of both poets to re-examine the challenges women confront in society today.

Russia’s Invasions

Abstract The paper provides a discussion of various aspects of Chechen relation to the war in Ukraine, including oppositional voices as well as discourses and actions of those supporting the Russian position. The article compares and contrasts the war in Ukraine with the two wars Russia waged against Chechnya in 1994 and 1999. Commenting on the war in Ukraine, the author focuses on the phenomenon of the ‘Kadyrovites’ (Chechen auxiliary troops fighting on the Russian side) on the one hand and Chechen units fighting on the Ukrainian side on the other. It is argued that the silence of the international community in the Chechen war afforded Russia a sense of impunity, thus reinforcing its reckless military strategies.

Opposing Memories: Contest and Conspiracy over 1970s Romania

Abstract The history of Romanian dissidence during the Cold War often seems rather barren. Yet, as this article demonstrates, the legacy of Romanian opposition to Cold War communism is vexed with conflicts over ownership in a fragmented circle of late Cold War era oppositional voices and actors. A daring attempt to cross the Danube by a young Romanian German student in 1970 and an earthquake in the year 1977 provide the historical backdrop to these post-communist internecine battles over opposition and conformity. The prominence of the German-speaking community in these conflicts is not accidental but is itself a commentary on the structural problems related to dissidence in Romania. This article’s focus on specific individuals – Anton Sterbling, Paul Goma, Carl Gibson, Herta Müller – reveals differing interpretations of dissidence and opposition, a diverse social fabric of Romanian dissidence, and a long tail of psychological battles over the memory and the ownership of opposition to Romanian communism after 1989.

Introduction India as a ‘civilizational state’

The (re)turn in interest around the concept and projections of civilizational states has followed the recent surge of different authoritarian-populist versions of this discourse, notably in China, India, Russia, Turkey and the United States. In the case of India, the election of Prime Minister Narendra Modi in 2014 supercharged the ideology of Hindutva (the ‘Hinduness’ of the nation) within government, carefully stoked by decades of ground-level social programming and activism by the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh (RSS) and other parts of the Sangh Parivar (the Hindutva family of organizations). Compared to the 1990s and early 2000s, when the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) first came to national power espousing the ideas of Hindutva, India is now wealthier (albeit highly unevenly, and with considerable economic weaknesses and fault-lines); and its nationalistic undermining of democratic, liberal norms is deeper, but also more widely mirrored among some western and other southern states. The forces of Hindutva show no signs of abating, and oppositional voices—from secularists, young people, academics, think tanks and human rights organizations, among others—are being openly suppressed. What to external observers may seem a largely benign, even banal, international projection of yoga, traditional medicine and classical dance, and perhaps rather arcane debates over the origins and travels of Aryan peoples, religions and languages, are understood on all sides domestically as existential battles over what constitutes India and being Indian.

The Rhetoric of Women’s Humour in Barbara Pym’s Fiction by Naghmeh Varghaiyan

Reviewed by: The Rhetoric of Women’s Humour in Barbara Pym’s Fiction by Naghmeh Varghaiyan Emily Stockard THE RHETORIC OF WOMEN’S HUMOUR IN BARBARA PYM’S FICTION, by Naghmeh Varghaiyan. Stuttgart: ibidem Press, 2021. 220 pp. $39.15 paperback; $23.99 ebook. As Naghmeh Varghaiyan makes clear in her introductory chapter of The Rhetoric of Women’s Humour in Barbara Pym’s Fiction, critics and reviewers have been in no doubt about the importance of humor in Barbara Pym’s novels. But there is also no doubt that critics, while recognizing this central feature, have failed to give it the close attention it deserves. The book’s importance, then, lies in Varghaiyan’s willingness to take on an essential, yet essentially impossible task (no one could be expected to convey how funny Pym is) head on. A more theoretically informed study could hardly be imagined. Her lengthy first chapter, “Characteristics of Women’s Humour,” cites studies by leading theorists (Eileen Gillooly, Regina Barreca, Nancy Walker, and Hélène Cixous among them) to set out how women writers make distinctive use of humor, the comic genre, and other narrative features such as irony and open-ended conclusions— all of which are employed by Pym in her narratives. Such a survey is valuable in its own right, but the collation of this abundant and complex material proves an unwieldy job, which Varghaiyan’s presentation reflects. Even so, the primary point stands out clearly: women writers use humor (which Varghaiyan expands to include their handling of the comic genre) as a rhetorical strategy that doubles as a survival mechanism, enabling the author (and her female characters) to subvert the authority of patriarchal structures, often doing so covertly. When Varghaiyan applies these theories to Pym’s novels, she shows herself well-versed in the relevant criticism, citing major studies of Pym by scholars who take a variety of approaches. Among these are Katherine Ackley and Robert Long (on Pym’s characteristic themes); Mason Cooley, Annette Weld, and Ellen Tsagaris (on Pym’s unusual use of genre conventions); and Judy Little and Deborah Donato (on Pym’s unique use of discourse and language). Varghaiyan devotes a chapter each to Pym’s first three published novels, Some Tame Gazelle (1950), Excellent Women (1952), and Jane and Prudence (1953), giving close analysis of the techniques of women’s humor as applied to standard figures from Pym’s repertoire: the spinster, the “excellent woman,” the clergyman, the male academic. In all cases, she argues, including the male figures, Pym’s humor, in accordance with women writers’ techniques, aims to ridicule not the individual characters but the cultural system that has produced the absurdities on show— a claim more often asserted than supported. Some Tame Gazelle receives by far the most attention, and “Some Tame Gazelle: Construction of Women’s Veiled Humour” presents a thorough reading admirable in its close attention to Pym’s text. Here the most valuable feature of Varghaiyan’s study is [End Page 168] her original and telling look at Pym’s use of a prominent feature of women’s writing, “double-voiced discourse,” to present the middle-aged spinster Belinda Bede (p. 12). That is, Belinda’s spoken dialogue conforms to, and her actions carry out, the cultural expectations of the dutiful “excellent woman” that she appears to embody (p. 5). But Pym’s narrative voice also relays Belinda’s subversive thoughts, which contradict her outward appearance. In this way, Pym both presents and then undercuts, in a humorous way, the patriarchal view of women like Belinda, as well as the extent to which she has internalized that perspective. That Pym uses double-voiced discourse to achieve a similar effect in Excellent Women proves a more difficult case to argue. For unlike the third-person presentation of Belinda’s thoughts, Mildred Lathbury’s first-person explanations of her behavior and speech, strictly speaking, do not constitute an oppositional voice completely separate from her actions and dialogue. Rather, both her commentary—her reflections on her actions—and her outward appearance are tools by which Pym constructs Mildred’s character. Thus, the novel lacks a true double-voice; there is no separate voice...

Tupaia’s Endeavour by Lala Rolls

Reviewed by: Tupaia’s Endeavour by Lala Rolls David Lipset Lala Rolls, Producer/Director. Tupaia’s Endeavour. Random Films, New Zealand, Island Productions, 2019. 1:59 minutes. Color. Their land claims having been contested, lost, but lately reinstated in some cases, during the past several decades, Pacific peoples living in settler colonial states have sought to re-assert and reclaim nothing less than the legitimacy, authority, and moral agency of their indigenous identities. Cultural sovereignty movements promoting the teaching of Polynesian vernaculars and dances, the reinvention of technologies, such as outrigger canoes, and the restoration and protection of sacred sites, have been strong voices in broad opposition to political subordination and exploitation. However sympathetic cultural anthropology should and must be to them, particularly in light of their long history of land alienation, racism, disease, and violence to which they respond, as an integrated ideology, sovereignty movements like this constitute centripetal voices, rather than outwardly oriented, synthetic ones. They feature and privilege voices of a cultural self speaking to a restricted audience, rather than to a more cosmopolitan one. “Tupaia’s Endeavour,” Lala Rolls’s video about the Tahitian navigator who joined James Cook as he voyaged south, is part of this political discourse. As such, its achievement and flaws both stem from the primary audience to which it seems to be addressed, namely, its Polynesian peers in Tahiti and Aotearora/New Zealand. On the one hand, the movie offers fascinating insights into the southern voyages of the HMS Endeavour from the perspective of Tupaia, a Tahitian nobleman, navigator, and Arioi Society initiate. But, on the other, the narrative, although rich and intricate, is hard to follow. It juxtaposes gorgeous reenactments by Polynesian actors with voiceovers read from journals of Cook and other British on board the Endeavour. It tracks the making of the [End Page 201] film. It weaves emotional discussions among the actors with poignant interviews, and performances by, contemporary Polynesian artists, singers, and painters. And, not least, the renowned anthropologist and historian, Dame Anne Salmond, among many others, provides commentary. The portrait of Tupaia that emerges is one of a contradictory prophet, brilliant, vastly knowledgeable, yet marginalized. As an Arioi Society initiate, he lived in the constant presence of Oro, the war god. Moreover, as a navigator who read and communicated with the stars, he also lived with these astral manifestations of the ancestors. Being in the company of other Arioi initiates, he knew of the prophecy one of them had made six years before predicting that a great canoe “without an outrigger” would arrive and spell the “end of custom.” Thus, when the HMS Dolphin arrived in 1767, under the command of Samuel Wallis, Tupaia stood with the chiefess, Pudea, to greet the ship, perhaps with the prophesy in mind, Anne Salmond suggests. Tupaia had been living in exile on Pudea’s land in Tahiti, having been driven from his home village and land by neighboring islanders who had conquered it and desecrated his temple. Cook arrived two years later; when several Tahitian men were killed, Tupaia paddled out to the Endeavour with a chief to restore order and impressed the great British explorer with his knowledge and intelligence. In Salmond’s view, he was a “courageous man, who took big risks.” One of Cook’s goals in the Pacific was to track Venus and the solar system. As a star navigator, the new arrivals must have struck a chord with Tupaia. Along with Taiapu, a young Arioi Society acolyte, he made his intentions to accompany Cook upon the departure of the Endeavour. One of his living descendants claims that the reason he wanted to go along had to do with his belief that he had kin living in New Zealand, who had sailed there at some point in the past. A contemporary Tahitian tattoo artist discloses a family secret: among them, Tupaia was regarded as a “traitor” who left with the British and gave them intelligence they then used to defeat and conquer the islanders. On board, Tupaia bonded with the botanist, Joseph Banks, learned to paint from Sydney Parkinson, the natural history artist, spent time with the other foreigners aboard, and amused himself by...

Activism in Isolation: The Tudeh party of Iran in British Left Discourse during the Long 1980s

In 1983, the arrest of Noureddin Kianouri, the first secretary of the Tudeh Party of Iran came as a shock to the international community. In a letter of condemnation, communist parties from Indonesia to Jamaica pledged solidarity with their Iranian comrades. The optimism initially brought by the 1979 revolution was severely reversed and the suppression of the Iranian Left by the Islamic government was regarded as an attack on the international Left. A significant voice of opposition came from Britain, with the Communist party of Great Britain (CPGB), the British Labor party, the trade unions and solidarity groups coming out in full support of the Tudeh and to take on the cause of Iran as their own. Although interest had existed since the 1940s, it was the 1979 revolution that firmly placed the Tudeh within the discourse of the British Left, energizing the movement and solidifying its internationalist credentials. Similarly, for the Tudeh, which had become side-lined in Iranian politics and had lost members to more radical strands of the Iranian Left, the attention it received helped renew its activism and sense of purpose.

The ambiguities and contradictions of the state-socialist way of women’s emancipation in Hungary (1948-1989). Overview and search for the traces of feminist resistance

The literature about the ex-state-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe raised the questions in what way women benefited from the legislation guaranteeing equal rights and the measures of emancipation during the decades of state socialism. The authors that also argued after 1990, the time of the social, economic and political transitions in the region, that women became the big losers of the changes. The paper aims to reflect on these examinations of gender relations during the state-socialist period and point out the contradictory ways of the introduction of women?s emancipation that led to ambiguous results in the propagated program of gender equality. Furthermore it discusses in which ways women?s positions remained subordinated and how the sexist representations of women increased in public life, the media and culture in Hungary after the 1970?s. A review of the main findings of earlier research accumulated so far concerning women?s lifes and gender relations in Hungary during state socialism will be followed by the question of in what ways these controversies of the system were articulated by the contemporary oppositional voices. Did the activists of the dissident Hungarian democratic opposition embrace the ideas of feminism and women?s issues in their criticism of the one-party system? On the base of contemporary documents and recent interviews with ex-activists it will be examined how feminist voices were articulated, yet controversially marginalized among the dissidents.

Who owns the land owns the wind? Land and citizenship in the Isthmus of Tehuantepec, Mexico

AbstractWind energy expansion across rural areas interacts with various interests at the local level, generating multiple reactions within communities. The Eólica del Sur wind farm implementation pathway in Mexico is a paragon of different positions vis‐à‐vis this industry after trying to install 132 wind turbines in other towns since 2006. This paper argues that there is a bias in studies of the politics of wind energy development in favour of oppositional voices, as opposed to groups that endorse wind energy expansion or that have stakes in the sector but neither support nor oppose wind projects per se. Based on fieldwork conducted over three years and semi‐structured interviews with Eólica del Sur stakeholders, the paper argues that different responses to wind energy are linked to contrasting ownership claims over land in the region and competing notions of the institutions that should legitimize these claims.