Political Contract Research Articles

Questioning trust in the era of big (and small) data

EDITOR'S SUMMARYInformation policy extends to our acknowledgements of website statements about data privacy and sharing, as we routinely check a box to gain access to a site. Users rarely give much thought to whether they can trust the site sponsor to protect personal information. While privacy is often the chief concern in discussions of gathering, storing and using information, trust in the sponsor, whether governmental or corporate, is crucial. Governing bodies recognize democracy, fairness and a right to information, covering both access and privacy, as part of a social and political contract. Yet with data being collected on a massive scale, legitimate concerns about data misuse can undermine our trust in such fundamental understandings, leaving transparency as a critical element. The ASIS&T Special Interest Group/Information Policy (SIG/IFP) will explore the issue of trust during a workshop at the 2014 Annual Meeting, considering its foundations and evolution and questioning its justification in the age of big data.

Citizenship in Europe and the Logic of Two-Level Political Contracts

How are we to understand the state of citizenship in Europe twenty years after the implementation of the Maastricht Treaty? When answering this question, I focus particularly onsocial citizenship. Social citizenship may be understood as a form of political relationship among citizens extending to each collective protection against the financial risks associated with the life cycle, including dependency when young, ill heath, accidents, and the vulnerabilities of old age. Collective protection against these financial risks takes the form of social rights within the welfare state, including rights to income protection, access to health care, and the provision of education. Within the most economically developed European states, securing these rights has since 1945 been seen as central to the democratic legitimacy of these states, as well as an aspirational standard for democratizing societies seeking to achieve “the concrete substance civilised life” and the associated “general reduction of risk and insecurity”1 at all levels that the welfare state provides.

From Individual to Citizen: Enhancing the Bonds of Citizenship Through Religion in Locke’s Political Theory

This paper examines how Locke employed the notion of religion to answer two questions: What binds citizens together into a community? How are individuals transformed into citizens? In the Two Treatises, Locke creates, through a political contract, a community that proves fragile. The bonds necessary for a civil society are unnatural; they go against the very self-interest that gave rise to a civil society. According to Locke, for a political community to simultaneously appeal to and overcome self-interest, the state must provide an institutional place for religion. To be sure, Locke defends extensive liberty of conscience in A Letter Concerning Toleration. He nonetheless retains a clear role for religion within the state and, furthermore, requires that all citizens in political society belong to some religious society. Locke’s carefully designed argument merges community interest with self-interest, while being built on individual consent.

The Power Struggle in Northern Syria at the Beginning of the 21th Century: A Case Study for the Future of the Relations of Turks and Kurds in Turkey and Mesopotamia

What is the Kurdish agenda regarding the new developments in the northern part of Syria and their relations with Ankara? What is the main demand of the Kurdish movement? An independent state, or a new basis for the cooperation of Kurds and the Turkish state? Which path will Ankara choose regarding its relations with Kurds? Will Ankara choose the creation of a new social and political contract with Kurds, or a policy focused on the containment of the aggressive policy of the Kurdish side? These are the important questions for the future of Turkey and Mesopotamia, which we will attempt to answer in this article.

Carlos Nelson Coutinho: a hegemonia como contrato

Este artigo propõe-se a examinar a originalidade do pensamento político marxista do filósofo brasileiro Carlos Nelson Coutinho (1943-2012), recentemente falecido. O mais audacioso projeto do autor brasileiro em teoria política, sugerido em uma série de ensaios, e na justaposição das démarches teóricas de Gramsci e Lukács, foi o de abordar a questão da hegemonia como contrato. Não se trata de uma abordagem comum: na tradição canônica da filosofia política, hegemonia e contrato atendem a tradições distintas e vistas em geral como antagônicas, respectivamente o realismo político e o contratualismo.

‘Devoir de mémoire’: The post-colonial path of a post-national memory in France

The expression ‘devoir de mémoire’ (‘duty to remember’) started to be commonly used in the French political discourse in the French political discourse in the 1990s, thanks to a reconfiguration of the ‘national narrative’. It implied two new obligations for the French state: to commemorate the memory of the victims for which France was acknowledging its responsibility (Jewish deportees during the Vichy Regime), and the recognition of a community (the Jewish one) victim of genocide. This new political contract also offers one paradigm for post-colonial memories as people sought, at the end of the 1990s, an official recognition of crimes against humanity such as slavery or colonization. These demands were elaborated and negotiated by new actors, carriers of these memories, by means of socialization with the expression ‘devoir de mémoire’. Through an exploration of this ritual of apology in France, specifically on how the ‘Taubira law’ on slavery was created and passed (1998–2001), this text intends to show how the use of the ‘devoir de mémoire’ led to interactions between different collectivities, mentioned as a ‘speech act’ meant to modify social relations through the official understanding of the national past.

Sobre la constitución. Concepto, composición y mecanismos

Se evalúan diferentes comprensiones de «constitución» ensayadas en la historia de las ideas. Se opta por la concepción normativa: la constitución es un producto cultural, fundamento de todo el sistema jurídico. La comprensión elegida, se aplica, inmediatamente, al lenguaje prescriptivo que emana de Constitución Argentina y se destacan sus partes y su mecanismo fundamental: las garantías. Concluyentemente, la constitución sigue siendo un contrato, político y acordado por cada uno de lo ciudadanos que integran las generaciones, ya sea para facilitar y desarrollar la convivencia (expectable), ya sea para obstaculizar la coexistencia (no expectable); al fin y al cabo: es un instrumento humano, perfectible, como toda su obra.The different meanings of «constitution» postulated throughout the history of ideas are analysed. The normative concept is chosen: the constitution is a cultural product, a base of the entire legal system. The meaning chosen is immediately applied to the prescriptive language that stems from the Argentine Constitution, and its parts and its main device are highlighted: guarantees. In conclusion, the constitution still is a political contract agreed upon by each of the citizens of different generations, to enable and enhance coexistence (expected), or to hinder coexistence (not expected). At the end of the day, it is a human instrument and, as any human creation, it is perfectible.

Where are the Missing Masses? The Quasi-Publics and Non-Publics of Technoscience

The paper offers a political-philosophical analysis of the state and publics in the age of technoscience to propose three distinct categories of publics: scientific-citizen publics constituted by civil society, quasi-publics that initiate another kind of engagement through the activation of ‘political society,’ and non-publics cast outside these spheres of engagement. This re-categorization is possible when the central role of the state in its citizens’ engagement with technoscience is put upfront and the non-Western empirical contexts are taken seriously by Science, Technology and Policy (STP) studies. The paper argues that in most of the world the state maintains a political contract with technoscience to form a functional coupling as the state-technoscience duo, which shapes public engagement with science through different functional modalities of government. Civil society is the sphere of legitimate engagement and participation in technoscientific issues for the scientific-citizen publics. The quasi-publics choose to be in the shady zone of political society establishing a paralegal relationship with the state-technoscience duo, while the non-publics come into being due to conditions of extra-legality created by the duo. The non-publics are implicated in the political community paradoxically as an excluded category who cannot be included in deliberation because of their status as being expelled from political community in a ‘state of exception.’ The paper proposes that the scientific-citizen publics are mobilized in contrast to the quasi-publics and with reference to the non-publics, helping STP studies to identify the ‘missing masses’ of technoscience.

Contractual Democracy

Recent contributions suggest that introducing political contracts could make liberal democracy more efficient without altering its fundamental values. Such contracts might foster the public ’s trust in politics. In this article, we review and structure the current state of affairs on Contractual Democracy. We discuss four archetypes of political contracts and ways of implementing them. We outline the certification and control procedures for political contracts, and address the major concerns arising with regard to Contractual Democracy.

El conflicto ocasionado por la introducción de osos en los Pirineos. Diferentes interpretaciones de los contratos natural y nacional

The confilct caused by introducing bears into the Pyrenees, the mountain range dividing France and Spain, seems to be related to two cornerstones of modern life -the natural contract regulating the relationship between humans and animals, and a political contract regulating land ordnance of national territories. With regard to the natural relationship, if the categories of ontology proposed by ph. descola are accepted, against the “naturalism” instituted by science in the present, and the “totemism” revived by the ecology movement, there is also “animism”, promoted by hunters and livestock farmers, who put a very different interpretation on the relationship between humans and animals. notwithstanding land divisions between France and Spain, a type of relationship between the various valleys in the Pyrenees emerges from the political contract, and is one that has existed well before this age. like “animism”, this political social bond has remained on the edge and in some small corners in the order of modern life.

The Politics of What Works: The Case of the Vulnerable Group Development Programme in Bangladesh

This paper explores the political dimensions of the achievements of the Vulnerable Group Development (VGD) programme in Bangladesh, a large-scale programme of resource transfers and development interventions targeted at the poorest women, which has been in place since 1974. It focuses on documenting how political ideologies, interests and alliances at national and local levels have influenced the establishment, evolution and maintenance of the VGD programme. It also attempts to show how research and development ideologies and actors beyond the immediate domestic political scene have shaped the programme’s successes.The paper is based on a review of the programme literature, stakeholder interviews, and on other recent empirical research into the politics of poverty in rural Bangladesh.Section 2 summarises how the VGD programme works and evidence of its impact. Section 3 looks at the political context in which the VGD programme emerged and evolved, and Section 4 at the ideological conditions and research and knowledge about poverty that shaped its origins and evolution. Section 5 discusses the roles of the Executive, donors, NGOs and local political leaders, while Section 6 looks more closely at the political dimensions of key features of how the programme works, focusing on corruption, leakage and bias in beneficiary selection. Section 7 concludes with a brief discussion of the extent to which the VGD has helped establish reasonable expectations among the population of official support for the ultra poor, as a form of social or political contract between the state and the poorest people.

The Politics of What Works in Reducing Chronic Poverty - A Synthesis Report for the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, the Netherlands

There is a growing consensus concerning the forms of politics that are most likely to lead to successful forms of pro-poor policy, including the role of decentralisation and civil society, evidence-based policy and the opening of policy to the poor. This paper critically explores this consensus by examining the extent to which these forms of politics have underpinned actual examples of successful poverty reducing interventions. The focus here is on social protection policies, namely old age pension schemes in India, Lesotho, Namibia, and South Africa, vulnerable group assistance programmes in Bangladesh and Mozambique, and recent efforts to mainstream social protection within national development plans in Uganda and Zambia. This comparative case-study analysis reveals that the consensus bears little resemblance to the actual politics of what works in terms of implementing and sustaining policies for the poorest. A synthesis suggests the need to shift attention towards political rather than civil society, to issues of discourse and ideology rather than simply poverty data, and to a closer understanding of how political contracts for social protection might be supported and developed.

The Scandal of Particularity: Particularity and the Public Square

The Scandal of Particularity: Particularity and the Public Square Paul D. Hanson A personal note Thank you for the opportunity to join your exploration of the Scandal of Particularity, specifically as it focuses on Particularity and the Public Square. David Novak may share my sense of being a ger who has passed over a border, entered a very special land, and been welcomed as a member of your extended family. Your gracious hospitality notwithstanding, I am aware that you have developed bonds of kinship and understanding, the nature and depth of which are unknown to me, even as my own nephesh in large part is unknown to you. Out of my desire to move from the alienation of the stranger toward the communion of a fellow pilgrim on the fascinating journey you have been taking, I am going to share a few thoughts regarding my faith tradition and the bearing it has on the over‐arching theme of your Joint Project, particularly its starting point in the challenge presented by the “erosion of center.” I understand my faith in terms of a specific historical ontology. My identity, my very being, arises out of a relationship with God chronicled in the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures, amplified through a long history of interpretation by rabbis and theologians, and extended to me in a most personal and intimate way by Christian parents within the context of a Lutheran Church that they cherished and supported. The tiny town on the south shore of Lake Superior in which I spent my first seventeen years was unfamiliar with the phenomenon of religious and cultural diversity as it is experienced in most regions of the country today. The Italian and Polish miners attended St. Joseph’s Parish, the Swedish and Finnish foresters attended First Lutheran. There were no people of dark skin in Wakefield, though there was one Jewish merchant. Prejudice against minorities was not blatant, but to deny its latency in our Sunday school materials and the jokes people shared around the dinner table would be tantamount with resigning oneself to a life of bigotry. Fortunately for me, my life has been a journey of border crossings, on which the ignorance that matures into prejudice has been dismantled, one personal encounter at a time: Isaiah Mbang at Gustavus Adolphus College, Tim Lim at Yale Divinity School, Buzzy Fishbane at Harvard University, and on and on. The challenges were not only cultural, they were religious. But unlike the repudiation of a faith tradition that was so common among my academic peers, encounter led me not to renunciation of my ancestral faith, but to a deepened understanding of that faith. That background lies at the heart of my present work on religion and politics. The theo‐political hermeneutic with which I work is simply an extension of an ongoing life‐journey, a stage in the development of my historical ontology. I invite you now to visit with me a very personal moment in my life‐journey that hopefully will help you to understand my personal relation to the problem of the “erosion of center.” We are strolling along the shore of a cove in the Penobscott Bay in Maine, my wife Cynthia, my daughter Amy, my sons Mark and Nathaniel, their spouses and their little ones, my precious grandchildren. This happens every July, this gathering of our family, our mišpahah. The significance of this primal community in my self‐understanding is described by David Novak in “The Jewish Political Contract.”1 As I mentioned earlier, my identity, my being is the creation of a millennia‐long relationship, and I cannot begin to trace the genealogy that preserved faithfully the understanding of a compassionate God through persecution, intellectual assault, and the seduction of assimilation so as to bless me with the key to my understanding of life as gift and responsibility. That sense of heritage at my mature stage in life is the source of profound joy alloyed with a tinge of sorrow. Why this mixture of feelings? Amy, my oldest, and her husband Gary Tatz, the son of an Orthodox Rabbi, are raising Gabriel and Joshua in a family overflowing with parental love and deep compassion toward...

Alternative Market Values?: Interventions into Auctions in Aotearoa/New Zealand

This article discusses the auction market for certain kinds of taonga Māori (Māori treasures or cultural property). The social, political, and economic tensions that emerge from the national regulation of the auction market for Māori artifacts are framed by the complex political dynamic in Aotearoa / New Zealand of biculturalism: a Treaty-based political contract between Māori (indigenous people of Aotearoa) and Pākehā (settlers in colonial New Zealand, primarily of European descent), subject to continual negotiation. The antiquities market, which includes Māori artifacts, is carefully regulated by the government in keeping with (ever-shifting) understandings of Crown sovereignty over national cultural heritage. Interventions by Māori activists and curators complicate this notion of sovereignty and assert a primacy of indigenous title. I argue that these idiosyncratic interventions, within the political context of biculturalism, alter the very form of the market, undermining perceived dichotomies between taonga and commodity, indigenous and market values. Eventual auction results reflect a synthesis of complex intercultural negotiation and opposition between activists, dealers, auctioneers, and collectors. The case studies here raise important issues around the relationship among value, social and political relations, and the form and substance of the marketplace.

Islamic Democracy and Human Rights

This article deals with the basic doctrines of government and politics that were developed during the history of classical and medieval Islam. It aims to elaborate and develop those basic principles that are not contradictory to, and include the seeds of, modern liberal democracy and pluralism, though they have followed different historical paths. These principles include two sets of notions: first, political contract and consensus, and second, tolerance of differences, plu ralism and opposition. Here I aim to both highlight, when possible, and con struct, when necessary, the important ideological and religious arguments on democracy and pluralism that have been under development in modern Islamic political discourses.1 Such arguments can be used in the progressive interpreta tions of Islam vis-vis reactionary and conservative interpretation. For from an historical perspective, progressive interpretations of Islam can be supported by finding the means and ways for the democratization and liberalization of Islamic thought. The article selectively uses the historically developed religious and political formations, especially, those of the period of the governments of the Prophet and the rightly guided Caliphate. This period is seen as formative and constitu tive in the making of Islamic thought because of its distinctive religious and po litical impact on the minds of almost all Muslims. Most Muslim thinkers, phi losophers, jurists, ideologists, and historians employ it to justify one ideology and understanding or another. Because of the importance of that period in validating any Islamic notion or system or, more importantly, in the making of a notion or system Islamic, this study also uses examples from different historical periods. Thus, these periods represent moments of historical practices and interpretations that moved closer or away from the original ideals developed from the first model of the prophet and the rightly guided Caliphate. It is the argument of this article that the notions of democracy and pluralism are not only in harmony with Islamic thought, but that the seeds of these no tions are embodied in many notions of government and politics of Islamic po

The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge (review)

Reviewed by: The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge John Richetti Michael McKeon. The Secret History of Domesticity: Public, Private, and the Division of Knowledge. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005. xxvii+873pp. US$60. ISBN-13: 978-0-8018-8220-3. I have never read a book quite like The Secret History of Domesticity, although McKeon's The Origins of the English Novel (1987) comes close in its ambition, authority, and importance (and indeed this study can be considered a continuation of that book, with many cross-references to the earlier work). Monumental and magisterial are among the many panegyrical terms that describe McKeon's new book, although exhausting and overwhelming also describe this reader's reactions upon finally closing this immense study, with 717 pages of densely argued text, supported by 230 pages of notes, many of them discursive, as well as eighteen colour and black-and-white plates and numerous illustrations. McKeon's scholarship is commanding, his erudition staggering, his systematic rigour and intellectual control steady and sure (or, depending on taste, unrelenting). This work of epic historical synthesis traces in all its myriad complexities the emergence of the modern transformation of knowledge. In his introduction, McKeon outlines the transition that is the historical grounding of his argument as a move away, at a point in the early seventeenth century, from the "tacit" understanding of "traditional" cultures that "saturates social practice" to the self-conscious modern knowledge that is "disembedded from the matrix of experience it seeks to explain" and "is defined precisely by its explanatory ambition to separate itself from its object of knowledge sufficiently to fulfill the epistemological demand that what is known must be divided from the process by which it is known" (xix). I quote McKeon to offer a sample of the uncompromising rigour and analytical density and [End Page 346] difficulty of his style, although after a few hundred pages one grows fairly accustomed to his terms and his systematic approach. McKeon operates at a level of ideological abstraction that is exhilarating but also vertiginous in its dialectical intensity and totalizing frame of reference. Despite the honours heaped upon his Origins of the English Novel, he is aware of the hostility that his work can provoke, and he responds forcefully to those charges of a reductive or abstract teleological master narrative that his ambitions can generate "in some circles of academic study" (xxv). His introduction offers a strong defence in which he says (convincingly if one pays attention in the nearly eight hundred pages that follow) that "abstraction" as he practises it opens up "concrete particularity" and is a matter not of "occlusion but the explicitation of concretion" (xxv). "Explicitation" is one of McKeon's crucially revealing neologisms ("disembedded" and "separation out" are two other key recurrent expressions), for by them he invokes the self-conscious or self-aware qualities of modern knowing, and his approach involves a similar reflexivity in which particular insights and textual features are related to the abstract or general ideological situation that promotes them. As he summarizes his project near the middle of the book, McKeon is evoking the essence of modernity as a long process of privatization and internalization that necessarily involves a reconception of the "nature of the realm of the public, which can, precisely by virtue of its impersonality, acknowledge and comprehend this indefinite potential of private entities" (324). Although there are many strands in the complex weave of his argument, McKeon's master narrative begins with a specific historical moment: the English revolution of the seventeenth century, which he sees as a watershed or a rupture with the past. Paradoxically, he notes, defences of patriarchalism such as Filmer's hastened the decline of the validity of the analogy between the state and the family, and the analogy collapsed in the face of the repeated dynastic failures of the Stuart line that lead to the Hanoverian succession. These historical events contribute to a crucial ideological moment that McKeon calls "the devolution of absolutism" via the rise of political contract theory, the "separation out" of the "political subject" under the paternalistic sovereign into an "ethical subject," who in the wake...

Conceptualising the Politics of Social Protection in Africa

Despite growing international interest with social protection, little is known about the forms of politics that tend to underpin - and emerge from - such interventions. For example, under what conditions do governments and political elites implement and sustain social protection policies? How important are the forms of politics promoted under the 'good governance' agenda, such as regular elections, civil society involvement and decentralisation? What role do donors play as political actors in poor countries? This paper starts to address these questions via a conceptual framework that is derived from synthesising an analysis of politics in Africa with a review of past social protection policies. This framework embraces four key dimensions: political institutions, political actors and agencies, socio-economic forces and the global dimension. It is argued that the notion of a 'political contract' can explain the ways in which these dimensions combine to shape the politics of social protection in Africa, and that this notion can offer a normative and theoretical framework for thinking about and promoting social protection.

Building bridges to 2020 and beyond: the road from Bali

What would the shape of a realistic, yet ambitious, package for the climate regime after 2012 look like? How do we obtain a package deal starting in Bali but building bridges to a post-2020 climate regime? A fair, effective, flexible and inclusive package deal has to strike a core balance between development and climate imperatives (mitigation, adaptation, dealing with the impacts of response measures, technology transfer, investment and finance) to create bargaining space and establish a conceptual contract zone. Within a continuum of possible packages, two packages in the contract zone are identified: ‘multi-stage’ and ‘ambitious transitional’. The latter is ambitious, combining domestic cap-and-trade for the USA, deeper cuts for Annex B countries, and quantifiable mitigation actions by developing countries. It is transitional as a possible bridge to a more inclusive regime beyond 2020. Multi-stage is defined around mechanisms by which countries move through increasingly stringent levels of participation, and must be based upon agreed triggers. Our assessment of political dynamics is that multi-stage is not yet in the political contract zone. Key to this is the absence of a ‘trigger from the North’, in that the largest historical emitter must act earlier and most decisively. But progress will also depend on continued leadership from Annex B countries, as well as more proactive, incentivized leadership in the South. Agreeing on the transitional stage is the critical next step in the evolution of the climate regime. Negotiating any package will require an institutional space for bargaining, political leadership and trust, and a clear time-frame.

Negotiating Peace in Ethnic Wars*

Ethnic war is an asymmetrical military contest for power in which vital interests of the groups are clearly at stake. Wining the war is, therefore, the fundamental objective of the com-batants. Compromise is hard to arrive at in negotiations, so long as the asymmetry of power between the ethnic parties is not altered. Thus, power assumes an important factor in determining the outcome. In this context, finding the linkage between both the war and peace processes, with each influencing the other, this article underscores the relevance of the theory of ‘ripeness’ to explain the phenomenon of war and peace. Power equivalence may induce a negotiation process as a ‘mutually hurting stalemate’ creates ripe moments for the end of the war. However, conditions to start negotiations are different from situations under which a negotiated political settlement is reached. Peace accords in ethnic wars are about power-sharing and autonomy. Generally, the focus is on creating new ethnically balanced institutions, while dismantling some of the centralised political structures. Reforming the State, constituting a part of the solution, would mean, to change its ethnic exclusive character and make it more inclusive one. A durable political solution in an ethnic war may spell out a new social and political contract between the warring parties for peace and development.

Renegotiating the social and political contracts technology and modern social institutions mean we have passed out of the shadow of malthus, haven't we?

Renegotiating the social and political contracts technology and modern social institutions mean we have passed out of the shadow of malthus, haven't we?