Political Claims Research Articles

Screaming with Laughter: Get Out and the Reinvention of Obama’s Messianic Legacy

Jordan Peele's Oscar-winning Get Out (2017) is a study of suspension, suspending its protagonist between the suburban and the urban, the liberal and the fascist, the stereotypical African American experience and that reserved for the beneficiaries of White privilege in much the same way that Barack Obama's legacy has proven to be suspended between these extremes. Get Out's Chris Washington is a metaphorized Obama whose search for self mimics the former president's Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance in walking its subject through stereotypes and—ultimately—into self-identification with Blackness. However, where Dreams from My Father expresses a hope that suspension between two identities can operate as a means of uniting those otherwise disparate identities, Get Out views suspension as the ultimate hell—if only because it views the state as essentially impossible to achieve, and proven impossible by the critiques leveled at Obama's presidency by both Black and White, liberal and conservative, detractors. Get Out stakes its boldest political claims by selecting racist film tropes that have historically hinged on a character's suspension between divided racial identities, spaces, and paradigms/allegiances. The film then uses these stereotypes to critique fantasies of postracialism, sending Chris on the path of Donald Bogle's Tragic-Mulatto, patient Uncle Tom, and violent Buck in order to dispel the myth of the equally stereotypical Black Messiah's ability to transcend those stereotypes (and consequently, racism).

Online Free Speech and the Suppression of False Political Claims

This article will consider the approach taken in different jurisdictions to the use of restrictions, including criminal law prohibitions, to prevent, deter or suppress the making of false political claims online, especially (but not solely) during election periods. The article will explain, first, how a commitment to freedom of expression ought to make state measures to deter the dissemination online of what the author calls false political “viewpoint” information seem problematic. Secondly, the article will show how a number of jurisdictions, including some liberal democracies, have wrongly been drawn into an authoritarian response to the spread of such false information: a response that tries to set the terms on which people come to give and form political viewpoints. Coercion may legitimately be employed (i) to secure due process at the polls, when this is threatened by the dissemination of what the author calls false “participation” information, and to a limited extent (ii) to support transparency about authorship; but coercion should not be used to deter the propagation of political viewpoint content, simply on the grounds of its falsity.

The Modalities of American Whiteness

Philosophers tend to conceive of whiteness as having only one modality, treating it as a single social, political, and historical phenomenon. Philosophers ought to abandon this habit and instead recognize that there are many whitenesses, that whiteness has a plurality of modalities. Drawing upon Charles Mills’ non-ideal theory, Michael James’s political ontology, and Matthew Frye Jacobson’s cultural history, this study develops a non-ideal political ontology of whiteness that demonstrates various modes of whiteness and the roles they play in the different political claims of various groups of Europeans-descended people in the United States. While an exhaustive account of whiteness’ various modalities is beyond the scope of one essay, this article presents a case study of multimodal whiteness the United States during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, tracing out four modalities of American whiteness: Anglo-Saxon whiteness, Plantation whiteness, Frontier whiteness, and Urban whiteness. By freeing philosophy of race from monolithic conceptions of whiteness, we can better understand and diagnose how reigns of white supremacy are passed from one group of whites to another, and we can see how prevailing political ontologies of whiteness at specific historical times and places shape the resulting white supremacist structures.

Five Challenges in Detection and Mitigation of Disinformation on Social Media

This article discusses five challenges in detection and mitigation of disinformation on social media platforms. We discuss the limitations of fact-checking, the main mitigation strategy currently in place, against influence operations that leverage the low persistence and high ephemerality of social media poststo move from one contentious and unverified frame to the next before fact-checking mechanismscan correctfalse information. We argue that fact-checking, a tool originally devised to evaluate political claims and hold politicians to account, can rarelymeet the scale, speed, velocity, and magnitude of mis-anddisinformation on social media.We also argue that the conflicting priorities of privacyand safety championed by policymakers rendered social media platforms increasingly more opaqueand paradoxically less accountable. We close with an assessment that mitigation strategies available to the academic community are severely limited, and that independent source attribution is near impossible in the wake of data access lockdowns.

Whitewashed Walls and (Un)broken Windows. Notes on Operation Cleanness, 1973

Following the 1973 coup, the Chilean newspaper El Mercurio pushed forward an operation designed to materially and rhetorically erase the traces of a recent past through the whitewashing of urban walls. Taking the episode as a starting point, the following article seeks to render visible the conflation of aesthetic, hygienic, and political claims that the campaign circulated and their reincarnations in a binary narrative anchored on the language of order that arguably still haunts us today.

Shaping alternatives to development: Solidarity and reciprocity in the Andes during COVID-19

• Reciprocity-based initiatives emerged across the Andes in response to the COVID-19 crisis. • COVID-19 forces Andean communities to coordinate efforts to maintain life under strict national lockdowns. • COVID-19 catalyzes long-standing recognition of grassroots processes and claims in the Andes. • Grassroots organization build coalitions towards a mixed economy to erode capitalism. Discussions on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic in the Andean region highlight authoritarian visions and economic interests taking advantage of the pandemic to profit and to reorganize dynamics of exploitation and accumulation. Less visible are the grassroots, organizational initiatives based on reciprocity that emerged across the region in response to the health crisis and in the context of national lockdowns. The pandemic has deepened the danger of famine among the most vulnerable in rural and urban areas. In response, grassroots organizations using reciprocal practices are mobilizing resources to provide food and to prevent and manage the disease. We ask two questions: What reciprocity-based practices are grassroots organizations in the Andes able to marshal in support of basic provisioning during the COVID-19 pandemic? And what is the potential of these practices to shape alternatives to development post-COVID-19? We analyze reciprocity practices as hybrid spaces that combine Andean worldviews, market and non-market motivations and political claims against the state. Based on the case studies of the Cauca Regional Indigenous Council in Colombia (CRIC) and The National Campesino Movement (FECAOL) in Ecuador, this paper develops three arguments. First, as a socio-natural actor, the pandemic forces Andean communities and their organizations to coordinate their efforts to mantain life. Second, the COVID-19 pandemic catalyzes long-standing recognition of grassroots processes and claims in the Colombian and Ecuadorian Andes. The revitalization by the CRIC of reciprocity-based practices such as barters and local markets strongly links self-provisioning with the mobilization of its Indigenous identity and struggles for autonomy. These practices also forge a horizontal ‘solidarity’ with other social movements, consolidating a common framework of self-protection against the neoliberal state. For example, FECAOL does politics and builds coalitions through reciprocity-based action as an expression of its desire to engage with the state at different scales. Fair markets and agroecological baskets are combined with barter and gifts to provide for populations in need and to shift oppressive power-relations in the agro-chain and towards a holistic, bottom-up construction of the ‘public’ to address societal needs. Finally, studied grassroots organizations build coalitions and present their visions of a diverse or mixed economy to the society at large to erode the dominance of capitalism. To become a ‘counter-movement’ post-COVID-19, we conclude, they need to scale up to broader levels of society.

Financial Regulation Debates in Hard Times: A Comparative Analysis of Insider and Outsider Pressure during the Global Financial Crisis

This article analyses the nature of policy debates on financial regulation during the onset of the Global Financial Crisis (GFC) by considering three elements that shape them: the salience of the debate, the actors that dominate the debate, and the degree of anti-status quo pressure. Theoretically, it contributes to Culpepper’s quiet/noisy politics framework by clarifying its multidimensionality and explicitly introducing the degree of contestation. Empirically, it focuses on two regulatory issues: (1) the restriction of banking and financial activities and (2) the debate on the remuneration of bankers. The data captures political claims during the first 12 months of the GFC and covers 19 established democracies. The findings indicate that policy debates were unevenly politicized across countries and issues, and that structural factors are not enough to account for the observed variation in pressure for reform for all types of actors, thus constituting a puzzle for further research.

Historical Consciousness and Transitional Justice in Post-War Sri Lanka

Abstract Historical consciousness is a decisive factor in Sri Lanka with regards to the relationships between Sinhala and Tamil ethnic communities. It functioned as a great divide between these two communities. It was also used as a “charter of right” in order to impose one community’s claim on the other. This has become increasingly problematic in the post-war context after the violent hostilities between the Sri Lankan state and Tamil insurgents ended in 2009. Sinhala-Buddhists, who were politically dominant and identify themselves as the legitimate possessor of the island, desire to consolidate their dominance in the Tamil North and reckon historical knowledge as an effective tool for that end. The historical narrative that Sinhala Buddhists endorsed beginning in the early 20th century proved to be insufficient in countering the rising power of a Tamil counter narrative. Attempts have been made since the mid-1980s to produce a new historical narrative that is capable of challenging Tamil political claims. Although this effort was not fully successful, partial success was achieved during and after the war between the Sinhala dominated state and Tamil insurgents. The new historical consciousness that emerged out of this process proved to be extremely problematic in the context of the growing need for transitional justice for the war-affected Tamils in the North.

Suspicion and expertise: following the money in an offshore investigation

AbstractThis article explores the relation between suspicion and expertise in the context of activist investigations of offshore corruption. I reconstruct one investigation of alleged corruption in the Azerbaijani oil sector, conducted by a British organization called Global Witness, to explore how suspicion is learned and practised in the face of impenetrable offshore secrecy. For these detectives of global capital, suspicion is both a tool for arriving at an understanding of offshore corporate networks and an orientation that helps them overcome the limits of this understanding, allowing them to make political claims that go beyond what is strictly afforded by evidence and libel law. Extending recent anthropological scholarship that revises the disciplinary emphasis on truth and certainty as the mainstays of expert knowledge, I argue that investigative expertise provides imprecise and suspicious understandings of its objects that are useful despite, or even because of, the ambivalence and suspicion it entails.

Political Future of Migrants in Russia: Hypotheses and Models

The political prospects of migrants in Russia are not only an urgent problem, but also require a comprehensive scientific analysis based on the achievements of modern political science. For this reason, the paper attempts to provide scientific and methodological justification and research on the participation of migrants in future political processes. Based on migration dynamics and features of migration behavior, a model-hypothesis - variants and scenarios of political participation of migrants in Russia has been developed. The model includes the following elements: personal and group strategies for the migration future; the trajectory and nature of political participation of migrants; ideological preferences and political attitudes; the content of the political culture of the migration community; the target expectations of migrants in the political sphere; the level of involvement of migrants in civil society institutions; the level of political activity of migrants and leaders of the migration community; the readiness of indigenous people to allow migrants to political processes; the position of the state and government institutions to political claims from migrants. Thus, based on the methodology of contextual instrumentalism, the methodological basis of the political forecast of the future of migrants in Russia is presented, taking into account the basic migration factors and trends, and the main directions of scientific search for ways to verify the formulated hypothesis are also identified.

Not just the facts: an index for measuring the information density of political communication

Misinformation and biased opinion-formation plague contemporary politics. Fact-checking, the process of verifying accuracy of political claims, is now an expanding reseach area, but the methodology is underdeveloped. While the journalistic practice of fact-checking is by now well-established as an integral part of political news coverage, academic research requires more stringent methods than what journalists thus far have used. In order to advance the scientific study of fact-checking, we propose two variants of an index measuring the information density of verbal political communication. The main index combines three dimensions: (1) factual accuracy of political claims, (2) their relevance and (3) the magnitude of observed communication. In the article, we argue for the significance of each of these components. Depending on the research problem and data, the indices can be used for comparisons of political actors across different contexts such as countries or time points, or in non-comparative situations. Using examples, we demonstrate that the indices produce intuitive results.

Gramsci a la luz de Marx: sobre ideología y hegemonía

Este trabajo se propone analizar la reivindicación política del concepto de hegemonía en la obra de Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937) en su aplicación no sólo a la descripción de los mecanismos que sustentan la actual preponderancia del ideario neoliberal, sino también a la pretensión de la izquierda política de construir un nuevo proyecto hegemónico que contrarreste sus efectos. Para ello, examina la concepción gramsciana de la ideología en confrontación con el sentido que este término adquiere en el legado de Karl Marx (1818-1883), con el objetivo de evidenciar las discrepancias existentes entre ambos. Sobre esta base, la estrecha alianza que Gramsci establece entre ideología y hegemonía conducirá a mostrar que, desde la perspectiva marxiana, resulta problemático ligar el concepto de hegemonía a las estrategias de la izquierda política para llegar al gobierno e introducir cambios en el funcionamiento del capitalismo que corrijan la situación de injusticia social que éste genera.

Carnival as Contentious Performance

In the 1970s, in a context of increased racial tensions and growing nationalist claims, the use of rhythms, instruments, and clothing associated with Africa among the black populations of England, Guadeloupe, and Martinique became part of a cultural and political repertoire aimed at resurrecting and denouncing a long history of subordination. Similarly, the mobilization of carnival by Afro-Caribbean activists today can be considered as a tactical choice—that is to say, carnival has become part of the standardized, limited, context-dependent repertoires from which claim-making performances are drawn.
 Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Fort-de-France, London, and Pointe-à-Pitre between 2000 and 2018, this article analyzes how cultural movements have drawn on carnivalesque aesthetics to both memorialize and display the complex history of black Caribbean populations. I argue that Caribbean carnival has been subject to constant reinterpretations since the eighteenth century and that, as such, this repertoire is not only a model or a set of limited means of action, but also a convention through which carnival groups constantly reinvent their skills and resources. Furthermore, this article shows that the repertoires mobilized by the carnival bands I study in Europe and in the Caribbean cannot be reduced to an aesthetic gesture that serves political claims, and that they are part of a historical genealogy that testifies to the irreducible character of a way of life.

El zoon politikon y las aporías de la virtud en la Política de Aristóteles

Este artículo analiza las aporías relativas al intento de conciliar en la Política la virtud ética del hombre bueno con la virtud política del buen ciudadano. Mientras la primera se caracteriza por el saber mandar en el ámbito doméstico sobre seres antropológicamente inferiores, la segunda se identifica con el saber obedecer al mando político ejercido en la polis entre individuos iguales y libres. Por consiguiente, este artículo pretende dar respuesta a la siguiente pregunta: ¿de qué modo Aristóteles justifica que un individuo legitimado por naturaleza a mandar en el oikos acabe por verse obligado a obedecer en tanto que ciudadano de la polis?

Towards a rhetorical understanding of statistics in politics: Quantifying the National Health Service ‘Winter Crisis’

Statistics are a central part of political communication, yet little is known about how they are used rhetorically by politicians. This article therefore develops a rhetorical understanding of statistics in political debate and explores how they function primarily as strategies of argumentation. Through an analysis of how British politicians use numbers in debates on the National Health Service ‘winter crisis’, it is argued that four tropes underpin the use of statistics as a rhetorical device. The trope of dehistoricisation is said to engender consensus over the facticity of statistical arguments, while the tropes of synecdoche, enthymeme and framing are said to enable contestation over their presentation and meaning. The article concludes that a rhetorical understanding of statistics is vital to elucidating the selective, contestable and strategic ways in which numbers function in political debate, thereby challenging the notion that quantification can be an objective or value-free means of establishing political claims.

Populism, Cosmopolitanism, or Democratic Realism?

This article argues that populism, cosmopolitanism, and calls for global justice should be understood not as theoretical positions but as appeals to different segments of democratic electorates with the aim of assembling winning political coalitions. This view is called democratic realism: it considers political competition in democracies from a perspective that is realist in the sense that it focuses not first on the content of competing political claims but on the relationships among different components of the coalitions they work to mobilise in the pursuit of power. It is argued that Laclau’s populist theory offers a sort of realist critique of other populists, but that his view neglects the crucial dynamics of political coalition-building. When the relation of populism to global justice is rethought from this democratic realist angle, one can better understand the sorts of challenges each faces, and also where and how they come into conflict.

Property Lawfare: Historical Racism and Present Islamophobia in Anti-Mosque Activism

This chapter concerns itself with the use of the law, legal institutions, and processes in anti-mosque activism and litigation to advance an social and political agenda that seeks to marginalize, if not expel, Islam and Muslims from mainstream America. It argues that even though anti-mosque activists who seek redress in courts most often lose, they “win by losing”— a phenomenon well theorized by law and social movement scholars. In other words, the strategy of litigating a narrow legal issue is not so much about winning the lawsuit but about using the courts to introduce social and political claims that further an Islamophobic agenda. Regardless of the legal outcome, anti-Muslim groups achieve significant results: their use of the law results in political consolidation of the anti-mosque movement, it keeps alive questions about Islam and Muslims’ ability to “belong” in the U.S., it demonstrates the willingness to fight for a dominant racial ordering that excludes minorities from some neighborhoods, and it forces the internalization of both social and material costs by the Muslim communities that go well beyond the costs of litigation. As critical race scholars and critical theorists have long argued, law itself is a political and indeterminate instrument. The “law is a central, if not the most central, participant in the broader project of Islamophobia.” Khaled Beydoun theorizes that Islamophobia from a legal perspective can be understood as three intersecting dimensions—private, structural, and dialectical. This chapter demonstrates this very intersectionality as it appears in anti-mosque activism. It analyzes how the private Islamophobia of community members can become galvanized into community action and through the use of the structures of the state (zoning commissions and courts) reinforce dialectical Islamophobia signaling that Muslims must explain, apologize for, and justify their actions even where those actions are entirely uncontroversial for other groups.

The third-country effects of CO2 emissions in BRI countries: A verification on China’s impacts by spatial Durbin panel data model

Since the WTO accession in 2001, China’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) and foreign trade have been leaping forward, especially reflected as the “One Belt & One Road” initiative (BRI), proposed in 2013, which has been its largest public product for international community thus far. On that basis, this study focuses on the third-country effects of carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions in BRI related countries, and delves into its spatial interaction from rising impacts of China’s global economic cooperation activities, with the economic & political distance from China as institutional factors, using spatial econometric method in a panel data of 60 BRI countries from 2007 to 2016. Accordingly, the empirical results first significantly reveal the existence of spatial autocorrelation for CO2 emissions per capita in BRI countries by Moran’s I test. Furthermore, according to the main estimated results of the spatial Durbin model with spatial fixed effects, China’s OFDI and imports to BRI countries exert third-country effects or spatial spillover effects; from the perspective of sustainability and emission reduction during BRI, China is required to launch more economic cooperation in emerging and low carbon industries with limited political claims. In response, BRI countries are supposed to develop its high tech and low carbon complementary industries with surrounding countries, so as to keep the CO2 emissions at a low level.

The Politics of Our Selves: Left self-fashioning and the production of representative claims in everyday Indian campus politics

AbstractThrough engaging with everyday practices among student activists in contemporary Indian campus politics, this ethnographic study examines the breadcrumb trail between the left and self-fashioning. It focuses on a performative modality of political representation in Indian democracy by tracing the formation of biographical reconfigurations that implement subject-oriented techniques. The article charts their relevance in producing political legitimacy. It engages with the way in which personal reconfigurations are mobilized to recruit and appeal to both subaltern and privileged communities, thus generating universalistic representative claims and political efficacy.The study discusses self-presentations among leading left activists who are members of five contending Marxist student organizations that are active in Delhi's Jawaharlal Nehru University campus. It shows that reconfigurations are a hallmark of practices of social ‘downlift’ which echo the notion ofdeclassifying, a concept developed by philosopher Jacques Rancière. While embracing secularism and the legacy of political martyrs, the analysis illustrates how self-fashioning attempts to erase signs and habits attached to economic and social privileges through subverting and engaging creatively with sacrificial and ascetic tropes. Conversely, such practices find themselves critically questioned by activists at the bottom of the social ladder who aspire to social upliftment, including members of lower castes and impoverished Muslim communities. I find that the biographical effects of left activism are both long-lasting and renegotiable, shaping campus lives and subsequent professional careers. While such reconfigurations are not inspired by world renouncers of the Hindu mendicant tradition, these practices of the self might exemplify the historical cross-fertilization between long-standing cultural idioms and the Indian Marxist praxis.

Empire, sociality, and political economy in colonial Bengal

AbstractHow to conceptualize the broad dissemination of economic concepts in colonial South Asia? This article uses an essay by a mid-nineteenth-century Bengali, Peary Chand Mittra, as a point of departure to approach this problem in South Asian historiography. In the first part, the essay locates the conditions of possibility for Mittra's political-economic analysis of Bengal's agrarian social order within an imperial and commercial space of extended interdependencies. The aim is not to explain the specificity of Mittra's politics so much as to highlight his recourse to political-economic concepts to ground his analysis. In the second part, the essay suggests that the grounding of political economy's colonial histories within histories of imperial space needs to be supplemented by closer attention to new normative impulses and aspirations emerging directly from agrarian society in the region. This second emphasis provides better grounds for grasping the depth and durability of political economy's reach into political and ethical claims across social space in the Subcontinent in the twentieth century. It thus broaches the necessity of subaltern histories of political economy.