Political Community Research Articles

A populist desecuritisation? Mélenchon, left-wing populism, and the fight against Islamophobia in France

Abstract While there is literature on ‘populist securitisation’ and on the ‘securitisation of Islam’, the possibility that some populists may desecuritise Islam is not sufficiently explored. Left-wing populist parties have demonstrated solidarity towards Muslim minorities in Europe through a discourse based on inclusionary rhetoric and deconstruction of the securitising narratives promoted by mainstream and populist right-wing parties. However, their attitude towards Islam can be ambiguous. This paper argues that left-wing populists tend to desecuritise Islam. However, desecuritisation happens in ways that do not always accommodate Muslims’ religious freedoms. This happens because the driver of the left-wing populist desecuritisation of Islam lies in the left-wing thick ideology surrounding populism and not in the populist thin core. I illustrate this argument through the case study of Jean-Luc Mélenchon, leader of the left-wing populist party La France Insoumise. Through a discourse analysis of texts from 2009 to 2022, I show that Mélenchon has predominantly desecuritised Islam. While his desecuritisation is populist, it has not been truly emancipatory for Muslims. Although a more committed fight against Islamophobia has emerged since 2019, Mélenchon’s ideological attachment to laïcité hinders a full rearticulation of French political community based on genuine recognition of Muslims’ religious freedoms.

The role of historical knowledge among contemporary Druze in Lebanon: applying anthropology to preserve intangible cultural heritage

The millennium-long history of the Druze continues to shape members’ sense of ethnoreligious particularism and relations with other groups in Lebanon. Their contemporary heritage narrative and processes of enculturation are associated with basic knowledge of community history in the region. Participant interviews provided insight into the role that knowledge of history and dogma plays in shaping the identity politics of the Druze community. An applied anthropological and political economy approach offers contextualization of the factors that shape contemporary Druze cultural heritage. This work seeks to identify the connections among the community’s social problems, including exogamy, apathy, poor relations with other religious groups, and a self-described knowledge gap. By exploring the role of formal and informal cultural resources among the Druze, this study offers new insights into the role of history in shaping attachment to ethnoreligious community identity.

Denying “The Right to Have Rights”: Europe’s Imposition of Mandates in Greater Syria and the Rise of Islamist Movements

Abstract In 1920, the Syrian Congress at Damascus ratified a democratic constitution that would have been beyond the dreams of activists in the 2011 Arab Spring. Under the leadership of the leading Islamic reformer of the day, Sheikh Rashid Rida, the constitution disestablished Islam as a state religion, guaranteed one-third of parliamentary seats to non-Muslim minorities, and promised autonomy to the majority Christian territory of Mount Lebanon. Unlike the Ottoman constitution that had once reigned in Greater Syria, the Syrian document granted the preponderance of power to parliament, not the monarch. Nonetheless, the British and French colluded in the willful destruction of this nascent democracy. And with League of Nations’ support, they divided the Syrian Arab Kingdom into sectarian mandatory states. By stripping Syrian Arabs of a self-determined political community, Europeans denied them the “right to have rights,” as Hannah Arendt argued. The political backlash against European rule transformed the minority question in Syria into a polarized and violent contest, leading to the sectarian conflicts that overwhelmed Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine in the remainder of the 20th century.

Have we (really) done enough? Strengthening “outcome responsibility” in assessing moral duties toward refugees of protracted crises

ABSTRACT This article seeks to advance the discussions on our moral obligations towards refugees of protracted crises by proposing a nuanced application of outcome responsibility. Differentiating causal and outcome responsibility through intention, involvement, and side-taking principles has both symbolic and practical significance in assigning reparative and remedial duties. The framework utilizes domestic analogies to help explain the refined version of these two responsibility types. It examines the Syrian crisis within this paradigm to offer a clearer understanding of the actors that are ‘morally obligated and more likely’ to help. This argument addresses political communities instead of their states, emphasizing their pivotal role as bearers of the consequences of state decisions. Employing an outcome responsibility-based sense of ethical duty (ORSED) can foster more inclusive and welcoming environments, mitigating resentment regardless of border controls or burden allocation.

The Land and its People: The South African ‘Land Question’ and the Post-Apartheid Political Order

Why is it that South Africa’s ‘land question’ is so stubbornly resistant to resolution? This think piece re-examines 30 years of debate, concentrating on the disjuncture between the discourses of policy deliberation and those of contentious politics in debates about land in South Africa. It argues that the South African land debate as it unfolds in the public realm is best understood as a displaced discourse indirectly addressing the terms of political belonging and the nature of the post-apartheid political order. Far from being a distraction, this is a challenge that urgently needs to be confronted in its own terms. Drawing on the work of Ivor Chipkin, the paper argues that confronting the crisis of the post-apartheid political order requires a rethinking of the terms in which national identity is conceived. The paper explores the possibilities and challenges facing a politics of belonging centred on the Constitutional invocation of a political community ‘for all who live in it’ and what this might imply for a more constructive and productive engagement with land struggles in urban and rural South Africa.

#EverydayNile Correspondences

Building on Tim Ingold’s theory on human correspondence, this visual essay plays with the photos of #EverydayNile, a project involving photojournalists from different Nile basin countries to re-picture the river through stories of everyday water practices. # EverydayNile's initial query was: how can we use photos to elicit a conversation and promote shared understandings about the river across countries? The idea of correspondence invites weaving together images from different stories around knots defined by specific photographic elements: focus, composition, time, framing, and light. This visual essay shows how through corresponding we can practice imagination in communication, to create a political community engaged in a dialogic conversation on the river as a common.

“New food cultures” and the absent food citizen: immigrants in urban food policy discourse

AbstractMulticultural cities in the Global North are rapidly developing and releasing urban food policies that outline municipal visions of sustainable food systems. In turn, these policies shape conceptions of food citizenship in the city. While these policies largely absorb activities previously associated with “alternative” food systems, little is known about how they respond to critical food and race scholars who have noted that these food practices and spaces have historically marginalized immigrants. A critical discourse analysis of 22 urban food policies from Global North cities reveals that most policies do not meaningfully consider immigrant foodscapes, foodways, and food-related labour. Many promote hegemonic and/or ethno-nationalistic understandings of “healthy” and “sustainable” food without recognizing immigrants’ food-related knowledge and skills. Policies largely fail to connect the topic of immigrant labour with goals like shortening supply chains, subject immigrant neighbourhoods to stigmatizing health discourses, and lack acknowledgement of the barriers immigrants may face to participating in sustainable food systems. Relatedly, policy discourses articulate forms of food citizenship that emphasize individual obligations over rights related to food. This jeopardizes the potential for immigrants to be seen as belonging to dominant political urban food communities and benefitting from the symbolic and material rewards associated with them.

Digital Reconstruction: A Critical Examination of the History and Adaptation of Ku Klux Klan Websites.

In response to the data revolution, academic research and media attention have increasingly focused on the technological adaptation and innovation displayed by the far right. The greatest attention is paid to social media and how groups and organizations are utilizing technological advancement and growth in virtual networks to increase recruitment and advance radicalization on a global scale. As with most social and political endeavors, certain technologies are in vogue and thus draw the attention of users and regulators and service providers. This creates a technological blind spot within which extremist groups frequently operate older and less well regarded technologies without the oversight that one might expect. This article examines the less well-studied traditional and official websites of the Ku Klux Klan, the most established and iconic of American far-right organizations. By incorporating non-participant observation of online spaces and thematic analysis, this research analyzes the evolution of 26 websites, from their emergence in the early 1990s to the present day. We examine the ways in which traditional printed communications and other ephemera have progressed with advances in technology, focusing on the following central elements of Klan political activism and community formation: Klan identity, organizational history, aims and objectives; technology and outreach, including online merchandise and event organization; and the constructions of whiteness and racism. The results add value and insight to comparable work by offering a unique historical insight into the ways in which the Klan have developed and made use of Web 1.0, Web 2.0, and Web3 technologies.

A “big depressing dazzling joke”: The Limits of Hospitality in “The Aspern Papers”

Abstract: This essay explores the politics of community and hospitality in Henry James’s “The Aspern Papers.” Drawing on studies of hospitality, developed and inspired by Jacques Derrida, it considers the gestures of hospitality occurring in the story and shows that the bond of the Misses Bordereau is challenged by conditional terms of reciprocity that cause rifts in their community. Looking also at some of James’s essays on Venice, the essay argues that the novella provides insight into the possibility or not of domestic and national hospitality within the contexts of property ownership, mobility, and tourism and places women at the center of the confrontation between self and other, community and alterity.

EAducation: Letters from Hawai'i to Palestine

Abstract: This essay explores ways to strengthen solidarity from Hawai'i to Palestine, in our classrooms and organizing spaces. We are particularly interested in the role that stories have to play in forging relationships of care. We look to the power that stories hold in creating bonds of friendship that are at the core of political community, and to their importance in EAducation, which we contend is central to solidarity. (As it includes the word EA , or sovereignty, breath, rising, the term EAducation bridges liberation and learning inside and beyond the classroom.) Written as a series of letters, to our readers and to one another, we theorize the significance of letters as what the Palestinian scholar and organizer Sarah Ihmoud calls "material expressions of an abolitionist praxis of decolonial love." In their form, our letters also put into practice the principles we embrace. As we explore and enact ways to build solidarity, we look to the work we do in our own classrooms, and to organizing we have done as members of Students and Faculty for Justice in Palestine at the University of Hawai'i (SFJP@UH). In documenting this history, we hope that the stories we tell will help to inspire more such stories, strengthening what Steven Salaita calls "inter/nationalism," and what Haunani-Kay Trask calls "the rope of resistance."

CONTEMPORARY GLOBALIZATION PROCESSES IN THE CONTEXT OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC DIMENSION

Modern processes of globalization and their demographic interpretation are the latest trend of political reality for the states of the modern world. The processes inherent in the world community have really acquired a real global character. For a certain time, the states have been addressing issues in the field of demography and its impact on political reality in a fairly timely manner. At the same time, the researched topic has really raised the question of the effectiveness of governments and the conglomeration of the world community in the face of demographic challenges that have acquired a global character. The authors of the presented article, relying on the research of a wide range of recent and diverse sources and using the methods of scientific research, tried to reveal the essence and mutual influence of globalization processes and demography. The main results and conclusions of this article make a certain contribution to the study and prevention of the latest threats and challenges at the level of sovereign states and their associations for joint prevention of political, social, cultural and other problems. In addition, there is an objective need to conduct a different range of research on the widest range of issues related to globalization and demographic processes, such as population ageing, the growth of the middle class, and the impact of new technologies. In this regard, the authors of the article highlight the relevance of the analyzed data and the situation in the world in the context of prevention of world threats in the globalizing political community.

Federal fractals: review of Stephen Tierney, The Federal Contract

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

Imagining ecopolis: Visions of ecofeminist political theology and ecocriticism in Latin America

Although often overlooked by mainstream accounts of political theology and ecocriticism in the Global North, powerful visions of an ecopolis have been emerging in Latin America. In this article, we review the status of mainstream approaches to notions such as subject, citizen, and personal dignity and put them in a critical dialogue with Latin American Ecofeminist Political Theologies (LAEPT). We argue that those notions, often conceived from a Western and anthropocentric perspective, show their limits when interrogated from the perspective of LAEPT. Accordingly, we suggest that their main contribution lies not only in their critique of the Western paradigm but also in advancing alternative conceptions of an ecologically conscious political community that considers the Earth as sacred, and nature as a reflection of the divine. We conclude that such conceptions can also be seen at work in the rights of nature enshrined in the so-called new Latin American Constitutionalism.

More than deliberation is needed: Potential for agonistic moments in community wind energy planning

Although community project planning is widely understood as crucial to equitable wind energy infrastructure planning, involved members of the public nevertheless perceive such participatory interventions as merely pseudo-participatory. Drawing on agonistic planning literature, we argue that this disposition towards tokenism can only be tackled with a (re)politization of community project planning practices. This includes an explicit (re)integration and cultivation of dissent and the potential overthrow of traditionally consensus-oriented formats that follow the deliberative paradigm. For radically political community energy project planning, however, public discourses must be fluid and participants must be open towards dissent, which largely contradicts the typical postures of a deliberative citizen who is supposed to argue in a rational and objective way, using the best arguments to convince others. To examine the feasibility of agonistic approaches for community wind energy planning, we conducted a quantitative discourse analysis on the data set of a large regional survey of an on-going wind energy planning project in Switzerland. We focused on estimating the degree of hegemony of public wind energy discourses and the willingness of residents to engage in participatory settings that can facilitate radically political community project planning (e.g., substantive participation settings). Our results show that for planning individual wind energy projects, the potential for agonistic planning approaches is low, not only because the discourses are already too hegemonic, but also because there is no real willingness to engage in radically political community wind energy project planning. In the context of early, comprehensive, and integrated community planning, however, agonistic approaches could provide the ground for open and innovative participatory planning of renewable energies.

Examining the Impact of Digital Jury Moderation on the Polarization of U.S. Political Communities on Social Media

Examining the Impact of Digital Jury Moderation on the Polarization of U.S. Political Communities on Social Media

Inventing a Nation: Envisaging Tamilised Saivism in Colonial Tamil Society

This study seeks to analyse the complex and contentious relationship between Saivite revivalism and the nationalist aspirations of Tamils during the colonial period in India. One of the versatile faces of Saivite revivalism in modern Tamil society—Maraimalai Adigal, who engaged with the crises of colonial modernity, Brahminical Hinduism and Sanskrit supremacy, is celebrated to have offered nascent nationalist consciousness among non-Brahmin Tamils. Many scholarly works strongly approved his contributions as vital for the modern Tamil society as his passionate exegeses were believed to have laid the foundation for a nation to be imagined by non-Brahmin Tamils. This study disputes such a claim by delineating the inherent supremacy of ascriptive ideology in his Saivite revivalist paradigm. By invoking the conceptual framework of Ernest Gellner, who insisted that a nation is a self-conscious political community where some deep, permanent and profound changes take place in which society is organised. This article seeks to explicate how the contributions of Maraimalai Adigal and his Saivite revivalist fraternity firmly prevented the emergence of a new Tamil society to be organised with a reordered culture as a meta-local homogeneity or of power as a new political community.

Inscribed in Liberalism: racism in International Relations and abolition of slavery in Brazil

The beginning of 20th Century was a moment of great transformations, amongst which the first impulse in institutionalize a field of knowledge of International Relations. A structural change that happened 30 years after the abolition of slavery in Brazil. Despite the fact of being unrelated historical phenomena in objective terms, I argue that the possibility of analyzing them in tandem widens the critique to the racist premises of liberalism, a powerful ideological motivator in both events. The vitality of critical studies in IR has helped denounce the premises upon which the discipline is grounded and the definition of what is within the scope of its interest. The disciplinary critique is reconstructed in the first section and, in the second, I present the marginalization inscribed in legal norms of late 19th and early 20th Century Brazil. The technique of developing conditions for the segregation of a sector of the population disguising it from full-citizens by granting conditional-citizenship to former enslaved people is a sophisticated use of liberalism. Such use not only presents in full the critique of structural racism developed by the critique to this political project, already advanced by IR scholars, it also presents another discussion that has yet ground to cover in the field: the unchallenged premise of homogeneity within political communities.

The Boundaries of Popular Control in Late Medieval English Towns

Abstract Scholarship on pre-modern popular politics often focuses on speech, identifying the ways in which people outside the elite could have a “voice” in government. Using examples from late medieval English towns, this article argues for the existence of a particular kind of popular politics that centered on seeing and hearing rather than speaking. This type of politics—labeled “popular control”—concerned the right of the urban political community at large to observe rituals of governance and to audit financial accounts. Through these acts of collective witnessing, lesser citizens and non-citizens exerted an indirect political power to restrict leaders’ freedom of action and to ensure that their performance of office abided by set rules. The unusually detailed Hall Rolls and Hall Books produced by the civic government of Lynn in 1412–13 and 1418–25 illustrate that “popular control,” far from being a vehicle for increasing the urban commons’ “voice” in municipal decision-making, often stood in opposition to principles of elected representation. After 1418, more people were being admitted to the inner sanctum of virtuous individuals deemed capable of offering rational counsel to mayors and jurats, but there were fewer opportunities for the wider public to witness performances of governance by this expanded group of decision-makers. The crux of debate in fifteenth-century English towns—and, perhaps, in the tumultuous world of late medieval Europe more generally—was often less about who should exercise political influence and more about how popular political power could be exercised most appropriately and effectively.

Sovereignty of and through food:

“Food sovereignty,” a term conceived by peasant agriculturalists in South America, has become ubiquitous worldwide in academic and activist circles advocating for greater local control over local food. Its use has been adopted by various actors in North America, most notably by agriculturalists that tend to be small-scale, family-run, or permaculture focussed. While Indigenous food sovereignty has emerged as an adaptation of this concept, ecological, economic, social, and political opportunities and constraints in different locations across Turtle Island make its widespread application challenging, especially in contexts where communities do not want, or cannot (for a variety of reasons) eat exclusively from the land. In addition, “food sovereignty” can become a chimera in contexts where the “Crown” has absolute and final “sovereignty” over the land, which they have demonstrated through multiple enforcements across Turtle Island. Using a decolonial feminist lens within a political ecology community of practice, this paper describes and critiques current and historic framings of northern Ontario boreal forests as variously and simultaneously scarce and abundant. It also analyzes the ways that these framings have been discursively and materially constructed through colonial social, ecological, economic, and political impositions. It asks whether the concept of food sovereignty adequately challenges these constructions. Ultimately, this paper suggests that thinking about Indigenous food sovereignty as sovereignty of and through food may better describe the process, importance, and potential inherent in traditional and alternative Indigenous food harvesting and distribution practices in First Nations communities in northern Ontario, and indeed, beyond.

Polarization dynamics: a study of individuals shifting between political communities on social media

Polarization dynamics: a study of individuals shifting between political communities on social media