Political Autonomy Research Articles

“The Foundations of Freedom and Civilization”: The Durham Report, Municipal Institutions and Liberalism

AbstractLord Durham was sent to Canada to investigate the causes of the Rebellions of 1837–1838 and to propose constitutional reforms to restore stability in the province. In his report, presented to the Colonial Office on February 4, 1839, he recommended the legislative union of the two Canadas, as well as the implementation of responsible government. He also noted that the proper functioning of such a government required the creation of a system of municipal institutions. This article offers a new reading of Lord Durham’s recommendations concerning municipal institutions, included in the last section of his famous report. By placing the document in the context of the debates raised by the constitutional and administrative reforms conducted in Britain during the 1830s, it shows that its author understood autonomous municipalities as an essential components of a modern mixed government. Such language was then employed by reformist Whigs in order to justify the policies which they thought were necessary to strengthen the country’s political institutions by adapting them to changing social circumstances. The analysis presented here challenges the interpretation provided by most contemporary commentators on the report. Many of them have concluded that Lord Durham’s understanding of local institutions is based on a liberal conception of political life, found in the writings of Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill. These studies tend to reduce early British liberalism to philosophical radicalism. They seek to demonstrate that liberals wish to deprive local communities of their political autonomy by integrating their institutions into the juridical structure of a highly centralized state. By focusing on the rhetoric used by Lord Durham to write his report, this article allows us to appreciate the heterogeneity of the definition of the municipality developed by liberalism.

PEMEKARAN KABUPATEN MUSI RAWAS UTARA DI PROVINSI SUMATERA SELATAN TAHUN 2013-2016

The Birth of the Act No. 22 of the 1999 on Regional Government and revised by Law Number 32 Year 2004 on Regional Government become a fresh breeze for the region to immediately accelerate of development and prosperity in the region. Musi Rawas Utara (Muratara) be concreate evidence on enactment of Law No. 32/2004. The Problem arise when terms the formation of new autonomous regions must meet three (3) main requirements, namely the Administrative Terms, Conditions Physical and Technical Terms. In this case, some of the terms such as goverment facilities and infrastructure; Sosio-cultural factors; Social adn Politics factor; Defense (Including the boundaries of regions); and security deemed inadequate. Based on the results of research, readiness of the Human Resources to manage their own region are still very limited when viewed from their education levels. Not to mention if you see the political culture society which adopts a parochial and Kaula, provide a loophole for elites and oligarchs be able to infiltrate into the joint life of society and power interfering with the welfare of society. The impact, within a period of three (3) years after the division of the District Muratara designated as disadvantaged areas by the central government.Keywords : Political Autonomy, Musi Rawas Utar.

An Indigenous Leader and his Missionaries: A Biographical Account of the Salesian Mission of Puerto Casado, Paraguay, in the Twentieth Century

This article narrates the history of the Salesian mission of Puerto Casadoin the Paraguayan Chaco, from its foundation in the 1920s to the end of thecentury, by following the life story of René Ramírez, a Maskoy representativeand one of the most relevant Paraguayan indigenous leaders of the lastdecades. In particular, it focuses on how Ramírez emerged as a leader, howhe successively negotiated his political power within the mission, and howhe finally decided to break his alliance with the church in order to be ableto forge a space of political autonomy on the same level as non-indigenouspeople. Through this specific case study, the article also shows how theSecond Vatican Council (1962-65) and the Barbados Symposium of 1971implied a fundamental change of direction for the Catholic missionaries inParaguay in their way of relating to indigenous communities, leading toimportant struggles and alliances at a local level.Keywords: Salesian missions; Chaco; indigenous territories; BarbadosDeclaration; Maskoy

Sharia in the Nigerian Constitutions: Examining the Constitutional Conferences and the Sharia Debates in the Drafts

<p align="center">The paper examines the socio-ethnic and religious configuration of Nigeria and the nature of Sharia debates in the Nigeria constitutions of 1977/1978; 1988/1989 debates and Constitutional Conference of 1994/1995. The paper argues that the genesis of the Sharia debates can be traced to 1956. The Constitutional Conference of 1994/95 was not bedeviled by a serious acrimonious debate over the Sharia. However, the 1999 constitution brought a new dimension to the issue of the Sharia. To some extent, the enactment of Sharia law in Nigeria is a prime example of the relative success of Nigeria’s multi-state federalism in regards to governing diversity. Particularly the political autonomy to establish a Sharia Court of Appeal with civil jurisdiction on Islamic personal law. The paper concludes that the constitutionalization of the Sharia has subjected it to the vagaries of the political wind and made it easy prey to political fortune-seekers. Thus, the matters relating to religions should be removed from the future deliberative process in the country.</p>

La Australia argentina (1898): a utopia patagônica de Roberto Payró

La Australia argentina (1898), livro de viagem de Roberto Payró (1867-1928), escritor, intelectual socialista e repórter do importante jornal La Nación, de Buenos Aires, retrata a Patagônia mais de uma década depois da Conquista do Deserto (1879-1885). Em uma visão inspirada pelo determinismo geográfico e pela obra “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1893) do historiador estadunidense Frederick Jackson Turner, Payró identifica na região um potencial civilizacional subaproveitado, em função da administração política demasiadamente centralizada e da herança colonial espanhola. O autor advoga pela modernização da Patagônia por meio de uma maior autonomia política e econômica e por meio da imigração europeia, especialmente a de colonos e pioneers anglo-saxões. Payró, aliás, revela um posicionamento fortemente anglófilo, em um período de afirmação da latinidade na intelectualidade hispano-americana, no contexto da Guerra Hispano-Americana (1898).

Algunas consideraciones sobre el valor y su relación con la democracia y otros fetiches capitalistas

The paper tries to show the binding relationship that exists in the mode of capitalist production between merchandise, value and profit, as its basic categories, and politics as an artificially separated sphere of society. This is intended to reveal on the one hand the false appearance of the autonomy of politics in these societies, and on the other the illusory forms of democracy that accompany him, because the demands of value made as capital prevail above any social, political, moral, aesthetic or religious considerations.Since the objective possibilities of gaining surplus value and profitability due to capital overaccumulation are currently stuck, a decline in the democratic realizations –and specially in the options of reformism- in the political sphere are given in correspondence, as the later manifests itself as an expression of the law of value.

Homes for the Poor? Public Housing and the Social Construction of Space in Baghdad, 1945-1964

Public housing in Iraq has been unduly subsumed into narratives of a declining monarchy propped up by oil wealth and international expertise at the onset of the Cold War. According to this narrative, it was a minor concern of an Iraqi government whose infrastructural investment plans contributed little to improving the national economy. A detailed analysis of the labor and expertise that flowed into Iraqi public housing between 1945 and 1958 gives rise to a different narrative, in which migrants to the city participated directly in extending and reshaping the urban fabric. According to this narrative, housing developers sought design and construction methods that would diminish laborers’ political autonomy. In practice, however, public housing construction methods empowered economically and socially marginalized city residents to direct its future growth.

Politiche regie e conflitti nell’Emilia orientale: la fisionomia del fisco regio, San Silvestro di Nonantola e le lotte per il regno dopo l’875

The foundation of Nonantola abbey in 752 by Duke Anselm with King Aistulf’s endorsement marked the shape of eastern Emilia profoundly. The Lombard King and his Carolingian successors granted the abbey several fiscal estates with the aim of subtracting them from the ordinary control of the officers of the kingdom, reserving them for their own direct disposal. After 875, the close relationship between the abbey and the political power at court weakened, Nonantola and its considerable patrimony of fiscal resources became the prey of some of the most eminent episcopal figures of the Kingdom. The paper investigates the political competition among the Carolingian kings, the Italian bishops, and the Abbot Theodoric, who aimed at the political and patrimonial autonomy of Nonantola.

Institutional collapse and shifting balance of ontological security: role of Malaysia’s dual identity in the decay of ASPAC in the 1960s and 1970s

This article examines the causal process of the institutional collapse of the Asia Pacific Council (ASPAC) in 1973 by focusing on Malaysia’s foreign policy behavior, and highlights implications for today’s ASEAN. Specifically, it argues that the institutional collapse of ASPAC was caused by Malaysia’s withdrawal, which stemmed from a shift in its balance of ontological security from security dependence on the UK and the West to greater political autonomy in Southeast Asia. This occurred after a change in the regional distribution of power caused by the UKs withdrawal from East of Suez, and to a lesser extent, US disengagement from Southeast Asia. In the 1960s and 1970s, Malaysia demonstrated the conflicting duality of ontological security, consisting of strategic and aspirational identities. Malaysia’s strategic identity was its association with the West, particularly the UK, which was nurtured through Malaysia’s routinized strategic interaction with them in the security realm. This identity prevented Malaysia from easily or completely abandoning its security ties with them, even when the strategic benefit was significantly marginal. On the other hand, Malaysia’s aspirational identity was to attain greater political autonomy without external interventions, particularly from great powers, which Malaysia experienced during its colonial period. Such sentiments emerged at the end of World War II and the following decolonization process, and were partly illustrated by Malaysia’s pursuit of the non-aligned movement.

Свобода как феномен европейской истории и ее современная апология

<p>Среди универсальных ценностей человеческого бытия, сохраняющих актуальность проблематики в современном быстро меняющемся мире, особое место занимает феномен свободы. В статье анализируется феномен европейской свободы, рассматриваются его основания, эволюция, трансформации, которые претерпевает свобода в различные периоды европейской истории. Показано, что на всем протяжении истории свобода неизменно сопровождает человечество: многоликая и многогранная свобода является одним из важнейших онтологических оснований антропогенеза. Ее семантика варьируется в зависимости от ракурса рассмотрения, предлагая в словарях и энциклопедиях различные дефиниции. Личная независимость или осознанная необходимость; отсутствие гнета и угнетения; возможность выбора; самоволие и самостийность; политико-правовая автономия, оформленная законом или закрепленная традицией, — все эти определения характеризуют ее разнообразные смыслы, принадлежа одному и тому же референтному полю. Очевидно, в той или иной степени в анализе должны быть задействованы все семантические коды. В статье прослеживается процесс формирование самого феномена свободы в смысле, привычном современному обществу, где свобода понимается как в политическом смысле, так и в духовном, будучи опосредованной кантовской телеологией. Автор показывает, что процесс формирования такого феномена, как свобода, достаточно сложен, а история развития — длительна. В современном понимании понятие свободы оформилось в границах классической эпохи, эпохи Просвещения и было впервые сформулировано в Декларации прав человека и гражданина.</p>

Tying legitimacy to political power: Graded legitimacy standards for international institutions

International institutions have become increasingly important not only in the relations between states, but also for individuals. When are these institutions legitimate? The legitimacy standards for international institutions are predominantly either minimal or democratic and cannot capture the large variety of international institutions. This article develops an autonomy-based conception of legitimacy based on the justification of political power that is applicable to both international and domestic institutions. Political power as rule-setting is a particular normative threat to the personal and political autonomy of its subjects. The more political power an institution exercises, the more demanding the legitimacy standards it needs to fulfil in order to be legitimate. The article argues that an increase in the four dimensions of political power (scope, domain sensitivity, applicability and impact) raises the legitimacy burden for the institution. Finally, graded legitimacy standards are proposed. These are sensitive to the differences between international institutions in respect of their levels of political power, i.e. level of competences. In contrast to minimal or democratic legitimacy standards, the article suggests that different standards of accountability, participation and human rights have to be fulfilled according to the institution’s level of political power.

Institutions and the “Resource Curse”: Evidence From Cases of Oil-Related Bribery

While some resource-rich countries are highly corrupt, others have transparent and well-functioning governments. What explains this wide variation in so-called “resource-cursed” states? I show that these differences result from domestic institutional choices over how resource extraction is governed. Some governments grant procurement authority—the ability to award contracts for production rights—to state-owned enterprises, whereas others place this authority in ministries. Building upon agency theory, I argue that this choice matters: The relative political autonomy of state-owned enterprises compared with ministries fosters an opaque regulatory environment that incentivizes malfeasance. Using new data on transnational bribes in 59 oil-producing countries, I show evidence for a robust link between oil-related institutions and bribery, even after addressing the endogeneity of institutional choice via instrumental variables analysis. This research has implications not only for the political economy of the resource curse hypothesis but also for existing theories on corruption and regulatory independence.

Jewish Communal History in Geniza Scholarship: Part 2, Goitein’s Successors

S. D. Goitein’s nuanced description of the structure, functioning, and administrative reach of the Jewish community, most fully articulated in the second volume of A Mediterranean Society, was enlarged on, revised, and challenged in the work of two subsequent generations of scholars. Addressing the mixture of hierocratic and democratic elements that Goitein identified within the medieval Jewish community, this growing body of scholarship has examined anew and in greater detail such issues as the balance of power between the centralized leadership and the local community, the extent of the Jewish community’s political autonomy, and the influential role in communal affairs played by wealthy and well-connected elites with access to the Muslim court.

Por Nenhum) Decreto

[(By None) Decree] The present text, scripted as an essay, was prepared to the event organized by the Researchers Groups in Contemporary Political Theory; Ethics, Aesthetics and Philosophy of Literature, and Literary Studies, entitled Interlocutions between Literature, Philosophy and Law, which occurred in 06 and 08 of December of 2016, in the Federal University of Rondonia. The aim of the essay is to demonstrate, from a transdisciplinary reading of Paulo Leminski's poem Bem no Fundo, that the alleged struggle of society in general, and of social movements in particular, by an regulamantation more comprehensive and particularized of all aspects of the human life - juridicization of life - is, in fact, a trap that we ourselves have armed to the detriment of our freedoms, autonomies and potentialites. When this juridicization meets the judicialization of life and politics, the path to totalitarian rule is, as it were, perfectly paved. Therefore, there will be no more life, but only Law and Sentences, and with them the respective “little problems”. The essay, therefore, is also intended to be a warning sign and a sign of the need to renew the democratically founded struggle for moral and political autonomy, indifference to difference and the preservation of our freedoms in the form of potentialities of yes or do not.

Education for Democratic Tolerance, Respect and the Limits of Political Liberalism

Criticisms of autonomy‐based justifications of toleration as an educational aim and as a political principle assume that personal autonomy can provide only a partial justification of toleration and that it serves as a basis for illiberal educational enforcements of a particular conception of the good. In this article, I defend an autonomy‐ and respect‐based conception and justification of education for tolerance as a democratic virtue against its critics. I will first provide a short analysis of the concept of toleration as well as of some methodological problems concerning the application of general normative conceptions and rationales to particular cases. In a second step, I reconstruct key elements of the specific normative role and function of toleration in educational circumstances. This leads me to the third section, in which I criticise political liberal conceptions of equal respect, that tend to ignore the pivotal educational role of personal autonomy in grounding and facilitating political respect and the virtue of democratic toleration. In the case of developing agents who have not yet acquired a stable conception of the good (and thus no stable reasons for objection or acceptance), educators appropriately express their respect for them as persons and future citizens by enabling them to question and criticise their socially acquired convictions about themselves and the political world. My discussion will show that personal and political autonomy are inseparable and coordinated educational and political ideals and that the demands and preconditions of autonomy, political respect and education for tolerance as a democratic virtue are mutually supportive and intertwined.

‘Third‐class’ Slovak Roma and inclusion: Bricoleurs vs social engineers

This article addresses social inclusion/integration with reference to peripheral Slovak Roma. Based on ethnographic data, it argues that even in communities of so‐called ‘unadaptables’, integration has progressed considerably, but not necessarily along the lines envisioned by the agencies which are propelling ‘Roma inclusion’ as a pan‐European project. The article considers early motherhood, juvenile prostitution and unconventional municipal politicians as examples of bottom‐up inclusion efforts that don’t threaten traditional notions of cultural and political autonomy.

On Federalism and Public Policies

As a Brazilian scholar, I started my studies focusing on the tensions between social guarantees granted to all Brazilian citizens under the Constitution of 1988 and the decentralized implementation of the corresponding policies by local governments endowed with political, administrative and fiscal autonomy. Since that Constitution, local governments constitute a third level of the federation. Both the potential diversity of decisions and inequalities of capabilities between them could challenge the national objectives of these policies. But, curiously, this is not what the Brazilian political literature has shown in the last decades.

Shared intentions, public reason, and political autonomy

AbstractJohn Rawls claims that public reasoning is the reasoning of ‘equal citizens who as a corporate body impose rules on one another backed by sanctions of state power’. Drawing upon an amended version of Michael Bratman’s theory of shared intentions, I flesh out this claim by developing the ‘civic people’ account of public reason. Citizens realize ‘full’ political autonomy as members of a civic people. Full political autonomy, though, cannot be realised by citizens in societies governed by a ‘constrained proceduralist’ account of democratic self-government, or the ‘convergence’ account of public justification formulated recently by Gerald Gaus and Kevin Vallier.

Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory by Brent M. Rogers

Reviewed by: Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory by Brent M. Rogers Amy S. Greenberg (bio) Key Words Mormons, Utah Territory, Popular sovereignty, Utah War, Expansionism, Gender Unpopular Sovereignty: Mormons and the Federal Management of Early Utah Territory. By Brent M. Rogers. ( Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2017. Pp. 402. Paper, $32.00.) "What is this popular sovereignty," asked the Bangor Daily Whig on April 18, 1857, "if under it the Mormons may not keep as many wives [End Page 183] as they please? It protects slaveholding, according to democratic doctrine; why not polygamy?" Although the newspaper's equation of slavery with a marriage practice northerners and southerners alike deemed barbaric was deliberately provocative, the question was not without merit. Popular sovereignty is virtually synonymous with the Kansas–Nebraska Act in the historical imagination. But Brent Rogers's welcome study of Mormon struggles for self-governance in Utah Territory reminds readers that Bleeding Kansas wasn't the sole locus in the national debate over the exercise of power in federal territories in the second half of the 1850s. His close examination of events in Utah joins Christopher Childers, The Failure of Popular Sovereignty: Slavery, Manifest Destiny, and the Radicalization of Southern Politics (Lawrence, KS, 2012), in inviting a reconsideration of reigning narratives of this crucial political concept. The 1856 Republican Party platform identified slavery and polygamy as the "twin relics of barbarism" (15), but because much of the Mormon experience has been treated as exceptional within mainstream historiography, it's been easy for scholars of antebellum political development to bracket the second twin. Not so for non-Mormons in the 1850s. While proslavery and antislavery forces battled to control Kansas, Mormon settlers were busy establishing a theocracy in the far West that onlookers considered deeply disturbing. Mormon settlers driven west to the territory they called Deseret after persecution in Missouri and Illinois were desperate to gain statehood and political autonomy, but the sect was denied the authority it craved by a federal government that questioned Mormons' loyalty. The Compromise of 1850 brought Utah into the union as a territory governed by popular sovereignty. Mormons, like southerners, opportunistically embraced popular sovereignty out of hopes that it might offer them protection for their "peculiar institution." But Democratic support for popular sovereignty was undermined by events in Utah. The doctrine of plural marriage was deeply threatening to the gender norms of non-Mormons, and the presence of U.S. soldiers in Utah infuriated Mormon men who grounded their masculinity in their ability to control Mormon female sexuality. At the same time, ongoing fears of Mormon–Indian conspiracy were exacerbated by Mormon Indian policy, directed by Superintendent of Indian Affairs Brigham Young, which clearly undermined Federal authority. Mormons proselytized among Indians, and expended federal funds to ingratiate themselves [End Page 184] with tribal leaders. Territorial expansion made the sect increasingly hard for the rest of the country to ignore. Lodged in the path of the much-desired transcontinental railroad, the Mormons were "perceived by most Americans as a subversive imperium in imperio threatening to halt progress and emigration across the plains, and take possession of that critical regional crossroads" (143). The presence of Mormons thus jeopardized the expansion of both monogamy and national territorial sovereignty. The Buchanan administration was forced to choose between supporting its own doctrine of popular sovereignty and asserting federal authority in the West, knowing full well that actions contrary to the interests of local inhabitants would exacerbate southern fears of federal power, and that "repudiating popular sovereignty in Utah might strike a blow to the potential of slavery expansion in the new territories" (149). In 1857, Mormons disguised as Indians killed 120 California-bound immigrants. Brigham Young declared martial law four days after the massacre, forbade armed forces from entering the territory, and ordered the territory militia to prepare to defend the Salt Lake Valley. This clear act of rebellion drove Buchanan to send in the army. The Mountain Meadows Massacre was not the cause of federal assertions of authority over Utah; Rogers argues that "was already well in motion" (180) but the resulting Utah War of 1857, the "antebellum period's most influential display...

The Monstrous Flesh: collective bodies and the State-Form in Modern Mesopotamia

Abstract: The Middle East is in chaos. Having been described as monstrous, the Islamic State (ISIL) has been defeated only to come back as a chronic guerrilla style insurgency and the shadow of further conflicts that are still looming in the region. The following article takes up this situation through the concept of the biopolitical monster as the common body of resistance and struggle, exploring the liberatory aspects of this concept in terms of organization and political autonomy, and argues that ISIL has more in common with the State-form than with the monstrous. Discussing the colonial and neo-colonial aspects of the situation, the case of Kurdish Northern Syria will be presented in contrast to the ISIL. It continues to argue for a social monstrous flesh as the performative body of contemporary protest movements, tracing back the rhizomatic etymologies of monster to Aristotle and early Islamic philosophers, drawing inspirations mainly from the tradition of immanent thought and its contemporary thinkers such as Foucault, Deleuze, Guattari, and Negri.