Political Logic Research Articles

YUMUŞAK GÜÇ YANILGISI

Yumuşak güç kavramı sert güce alternatif olarak algılanır hale gelmiştir. Ancak yumuşak güç, sert gücün alternatifi olacak şekilde yumuşak bir güç olmayıp çoğu durumda ileri bir sanayi ülkesinin sert gücünün uzantısı olmaktadır. Uluslararası politikada güç bölünemez bir kavramdır. Yumuşak güçlerin tümünün aynı zamanda “sert güç” olması ve “sert güç” olmayan bir “yumuşak güç”ün bulunmaması günümüzdeki uluslararası sistemin gerçeklerini açık bir şekilde sergilemeye yeterli olmaktadır. Güç kavramında köklü bir değişim, ancak uluslararası sistemin de köklü bir değişimden geçmesi halinde mümkün olabilir. Kaldı ki, mevcut durumda yumuşak güç, gerçek anlamıyla güç kavramının gereklerini karşılayamamaktadır.

Class Project of Multitude

The concept “multitude”, popular in political philosophy, largely owes its entrance into the modern political vocabulary to the efforts of Antonio Negri, the Italian philosopher. His research from the 1980s and 1990s gave rise to a synthetic philosophical theory that views multitude as a key element in the political struggle of the left, thereby giving a theoretical impetus to a rebirth of the seemingly forgotten concepts of political philosophy. The article attempts to analyze the formation of the political logic of multitude and demonstrates how this phenomenon became part of the Marxist criticism of the modern society. The first part of the article traces how the idea of multitude as a positive element of politics grows out of the materialist interpretation of Baruch Spinoza. According to the author, Negri by interpreting Spinoza as a “savage ano maly” laid a theoretical foundation for the entire modern discourse of multitude. The conceptualization of the differences between the notions of potentia and potestas made it possible to distinguish between multitude and the people. The people can be seen as an element of potestas — political power that mediates relations between people by introducing the principle of transcendence in the form of representation and the figure of a sovereign. In contrast to the people, multitude with its collective power-potentia embodies a collective plan of immanence that resists representation i.e., a subject of constituent power that does not need representation. The second part of the article is devoted to the analysis of the class approach to multitude, which appears in the works of Negri co-authored with Michael Hardt, where the ontology of multitude is transformed into a political project based on the understanding of class as a political subject that opposes the global capitalist world order.

Conflicting visibilities: Police and politics among border migrants in Chile

The inhabitants of the squatted settlements in the border city of Arica, mostly indigenous migrants from the Peruvian–Bolivian highlands, feel the effects of the racialized geography of northern Chile through social discrimination, economic exploitation and deprivation of political rights. In these settlements, their migrant residents make palpable the pervasive tension between a mode of visibility that I analyse in terms of a ‘politics of presence’ and another kind of visibility that is created by the state’s ‘legibility’ techniques. Three aspects come together in this process of conflicting visibilities: (1) the reciprocal influence between a borderland and its police order; (2) the relationship between biopower and the (in)visibility dynamic of migrant lives; and (3) the generative relationship between a redefinition of security and altered citizen practices. Through an analysis of these sets of relationships, the article provides a richer understanding of how, in the struggle between the political logic of equality and the police logic of domination, border migrants forge cunning and rebellious political subjectivities that challenge the border regime in which they find themselves by questioning both the basis on which rights are defined and the boundaries of citizenship.

CHURCH-STATE SYMPHONIA: ITS HISTORICAL DEVELOPMENT AND ITS APPLICATIONS BY THE RUSSIAN ORTHODOX CHURCH

AbstractThis article analyzes the origins of the concept of symphonia, its historical development, and its utilization by the Russian Orthodox Church as a normative ideal for church-state relations. In various historical contexts, this concept has referred to different normative requirements; it relied on different paradigms in Byzantium and in medieval Russia and it acquired new meanings in Imperial Russia. The reinterpretations of this concept by the Russian Orthodox Church in order to legitimize its position in the political life of contemporary Russia take this concept far from its original meaning. Using methods from the history of concepts of, among others, Reinhart Koselleck and Quentin Skinner, the author considers how the semantic transformations of symphonia in modern contexts by the Russian Orthodox Church lead to a hollowing of this concept. This conception is hardly reconcilable with the normative logic of the actual Russian political and legal systems.

Humpty Dumpty Populism

This article analyzes Venezuelan Chavismo as an unstable formation gnawed by the unsolvable contradiction between, on the one hand, the politico-theological ambition to totalize sociality as a visible ‘people’ collected around the invisible ‘Spirit’ of Venezuela’s ‘Founding Father’ Simón Bolívar and, on the other, the non-totalizable theopolitical energies of a social field suffused with myriad globalized ‘spirits’ that admits no clear-cut demarcation between ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ or ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’. Incapable of totalizing sociality as a discrete ‘society’, the political logic informing Chavismo, as with other recent populisms, shifts from hegemony to ‘dominance without hegemony’, a situation where, à la Humpty Dumpy, the ‘people’ is whatever is ‘lovingly’ decreed as such from above, always in tension with a host of deconstructive, often theopolitically imbued agencies and spirits.

Two Level Politics and the Backlash against International Courts: Evidence from the Politicisation of the European Court of Human Rights

Are international institutions more prone to face backlash politics than domestic ones? Are international institutions easy targets for satisfying domestic political interests? Using the case of the recent criticism of the European Court of Human Rights (ECtHR), the article explores whether international institutions are more susceptible to face backlash politics than domestic ones due to the dual nature of international politics. The empirical study, focusing on the reform of the ECtHR through the 2018 Copenhagen Declaration, suggests that pre-existing commitments to international institutions might be given up rapidly when significant domestic interests collide with international institutions and their practices. The analysis, however, also shows that backlash politics against international institutions is transformed when seeking institutional reform. Entering a collective bargaining process, backlash objectives are changed by the logic of diplomatic negotiation, academic scrutiny and the interests of the other member states and civil society. This suggests that the two-level logic of ordinary international politics has a mediating effect on domestically fuelled backlash campaigns.

The logic of war: an instituting duel

ABSTRACT At the origin of every war is an existential conflict and a recourse to violence that opens the “ontic” door of the enemy to transform him. Judgement corresponds to political logic, and violent existential transformation to the logic of war, which is engendered in that political matrix throughout the duration of hostilities. The objective nature of that logic structures the rationale of the theatre in terms of “performative” praxis, with two inseparable aspects: a violence that while destroying one order imposes an alternative one. The subjective nature of that logic is generated in its political matrix throughout the duration of the conflict, determining, in a dynamic way, its most basic formalization. Since war is engendered in politics, it adopts its character, a subjective nature that leads it to seek a peace treaty or a victory. In short, when the war begins, the political totality of each one of the belligerents starts to incorporate a new situation and, therefore, two logics coexist: one engendered in the other, and both conditioning each other. The symbiotic relationship between these two rationalities does not allow politics to dominate it according to the parameters of an instrumental reason.

Interplay between labour dynamics, accounting and accountability practices during the rise of a political logic: an Egyptian case study

PurposeThe purpose of this study is to provide a political explanation of management, accounting and control (MAC) practices in a traditional and unstable African setting. This was done by exploring the influence of latest revolutionary politics in Egypt along with labour dynamics in the context.Design/methodology/approachTheoretically, the study uses the institutional logics perspective to understand the effects of higher order institutions on corporate management and workers at the micro level. Methodologically, the study adopts an interpretative case study approach. Data were collected using a triangulation of interviews, documents and observations.FindingsThe study finds that volatile political settings can have different contradictory implications for MAC practices. It also concludes that revolutionary events play a central role not only in the configuration of MAC practices but also in the mobilisation of labour resistance to these practices.Originality/valueThe study contributes to the literature by investigating the different appearances of MAC practices in a volatile, political or revolutionary context, in contrast to highly investigated stabilised Western contexts. This broadens the definition of the social in the area of accounting and control.

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) project legitimisation: The rhetor’s innovation and the US response

The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) has attracted support and critique for its legitimacy and potential success. Its opponents see challenges more than prospects because of American inattention and resistance, and its proponents see prospects more than challenges because of the attention from the rest of the world. While both sides use valid reasons for their explicit or implicit views, they focus on the legitimacy by its taken-for-granted status. The BRI project as innovation is at the legitimisation process stage. To address the legitimisation of the BRI project innovation, we use rhetorical theory to analyse the Chinese official report in 2019, the American versus European media response to the BRI project and the US direct response to the BRI in the Indo-Pacific Strategy in 2019. Our exploratory findings show insights into the subjects, industries and regions. Firstly, the American media attention far exceeds the European media attention. Secondly, the American media attention and direct response to the BRI highlight the political issues, and the European media attention highlights economic issues. The Chinese official report mentions European countries, and excludes the USA. Thirdly, it uses Pakistan more frequently than other countries or regions in its achievement report, but the US has not mentioned Pakistan at all in its Indo-Pacific Strategy. Fourthly, the US political logic diverges from the logic of the BRI project, while the European economic logic converges to the logic of the BRI project. Based on these findings, we contribute to the legitimisation process of innovation, rhetorical theory and policy implications in the world.

The Political Logic of Government Disclosure: Evidence from Information Requests in Mexico

When citizens ask questions, how does their government answer? Requests for government information confront officials with incentives both for and against disclosure. We argue that officials seek to manage political risks in ways that favor requests from government-aligned regions. We study responsiveness in the context of Mexico’s access-to-information law, using publicly available data from several hundred thousand information requests filed with Mexican federal government agencies between 2003 and 2015. Our empirical strategy makes comparisons only among requests sent to similar agencies on similar topics at similar times, while accounting for the complexity, sophistication, and sensitivity of individual requests. We find that requests filed from locales with higher governing-party vote shares receive more favorable responses, across multiple indicators of the nature and timing of responses. Further, we find bias only for requests on publicly relevant topics, providing evidence in favor of a mechanism of mitigating political risks over one of rewarding supporters with greater access to benefits.

Two-level politics and the backlash against international courts: Evidence from the politicisation of the European court of human rights

Are international institutions more prone to face backlash politics than domestic ones? Are international institutions easy targets for satisfying domestic political interests? Using the case of the recent criticism of the European Court of Human Rights, the article explores whether international institutions are more susceptible to face backlash politics than domestic ones due to the dual nature of international politics. The empirical study, focusing on the reform of the European Court of Human Rights through the 2018 Copenhagen Declaration, suggests that pre-existing commitments to international institutions might be given up rapidly when significant domestic interests collide with international institutions and their practices. The analysis, however, also shows that backlash politics against international institutions is transformed when seeking institutional reform. Entering a collective bargaining process, backlash objectives are changed by the logic of diplomatic negotiation, academic scrutiny and the interests of the other member states and civil society. This suggests that the two-level logic of ordinary international politics has a mediating effect on domestically fuelled backlash campaigns.

“Hide a Fact Rather than State it”: The Holocaust, the 1940s Human Rights Surge, and the Cosmopolitan Imperative of International Law

ABSTRACT Historians and legal scholars have used United Nations summary records for decades with little regard for the unsettled nature of these sources. This article grapples with a particular empirical finding with profound implications beyond the specific case under consideration: UN précis-writers systematically removed references to the Holocaust made by Jewish lobbyists from drafting documents associated with the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the 1948 Genocide Convention. It reviews the political and bureaucratic logic that governed these excisions and examines the UN’s process of document creation to illustrate how international legal epistemology stands in stark contrast to processes of historicization favoured by historians. Ultimately, this piece argues that scholars who use summary records of international legal proceedings need to be highly attuned to the ways in which international law’s “cosmopolitan imperative” distorts primary sources.

The Rise of the Investor State: State Capital in the Chinese Economy

The nature and extent of the role of the Chinese state in the economy is fundamental to many empirical and theoretical debates about that country’s political economy. We document and explain the rise of a novel form of intervention on the part of the Chinese state: the expansion of state capital beyond ownership of state firms. We argue that state investment as a mode of state intervention in the economy is conceptually distinct from both “state capitalism” and the “developmental state” in its introduction of new agents to distribute state capital to firms and new mechanisms through which states, especially authoritarian ones, monitor and influence business actors. We document the growth of the investor state in several ways. Case studies of three high-profile shareholding firms in China demonstrate that state capital can be deployed strategically, for example, to respond to financial crisis or facilitate industrial upgrading, but also generates moral hazard, resulting in corruption and resource misallocation, and international alarm about the intentions of Chinese firms. We further compare the rise of state shareholding firms in China to similar phenomena in Brazil and Malaysia, concluding that the practice has both economic and political logics.

1989 as a mimetic revolution: Russia and the challenge of post-communism

Various terms have been used to describe the momentous events of 1989, including Jürgen Habermas’s ‘rectifying revolution,’ and my own notion of 1989 as a type of ‘anti-revolution’: repudiating not only what had come before, but also denying the political logic of communist power, as well as the emancipatory potential of revolutionary socialism in its entirety. In the event, while the negative agenda of 1989 has been fulfilled, it failed in the end to transcend the political logic of the systems that collapsed at that time. This paper explores the unfulfilled potential of 1989. Finally, 1989 became more of a counter- rather than an anti-revolution, replicating in an inverted form the practices of the mature state socialist regimes. The paucity of institutional and intellectual innovation arising from 1989 is striking. The dominant motif was ‘returnism,’ the attempt to join an established enterprise rather than transforming it. Thus, 1989 can be seen as mimetic revolution, in the sense that it emulated systems that were not organically developed in the societies in which they were implanted. For Eastern Europe ‘returning’ to Europe appeared natural, but for Russia the civilizational challenge of post-communism was of an entirely different order. There could be no return, and instead of a linear transition outlined by the classic transitological literature, Russia’s post-communism demonstrated that the history of others could not be mechanically transplanted from one society to another.

The fantasmatic logics of physical literacy

ABSTRACT The history of physical education has seen the embracing of practices that have promised idealized scenarios and visions of the future. These practices are in many respects ideological and this paper explores the ideological workings in physical education with a particular focus on physical literacy. The purpose is to articulate and discuss a set of discursive logics in research and policy on physical literacy in terms of what is claimed in its name. We draw on the logics of critical explanation framework and use recent research, policy documents and organisational web pages on physical literacy to identify the social and political logics that underpin the practice. Specifically employing the concepts beatific and horrific narratives, we explore the fantasmatic logics of physical literacy to reveal the shared ideological workings of this collection. Fantasmatic logics is applied to grasp the visions of what will come to pass if physical literacy is, or is not, implemented in sports and physical education. Together, the logics reveal an increasing seduction of physical literacy and its operation as an all-inclusive grand narrative through the hopes and fears that policymakers, researchers and other stakeholders attach to the practice of physical literacy. In contrast to previous ideologies in physical education where the horrific narratives were strong, it is an over-investment in beatific narratives that is at the core of physical literacy. It seems to be enacted in a relation between ideals and measurement, and in policy the narratives with grand promises of physically literate citizens also seem more opportunistic, not seldom ignoring conflict without recognition that the claims made are incommensurable. This erasure of conflict can become problematic if we don’t continue the debate around what physical literacy reasonably can be held accountable for. Otherwise the well-intended beatific narratives risks over-investment and as a consequence ideological closure.

Omar is dead: Aphasia and the escalating anti-radicalization business

ABSTRACT The article investigates the effects of a terror attack in Copenhagen and the subsequent escalating anti-radicalization business. On February 15, 2015, Omar el-Hussein was shot dead by the Danish police. Earlier that day, Omar el-Hussein had killed two people: a Jewish guard in front of a synagogue and a participant in a cultural event on freedom of speech. A few days later, the government adopted the largest (counter-) terrorism package in the history of Denmark. Although the package was presented as a firm response to the Copenhagen shootings, the legislation primarily targeted ‘Islamic foreign fighters’. Among acquaintances of Omar el-Hussein, the slippage was clearly noticed. Omar el-Hussein had never fought in the Middle East but was known, first and foremost, as a petty criminal who had recently been released from a Danish prison. I argue that a central condition for the change of scale from ‘criminal Danish citizen’ to ‘Islamic foreign fighter’ is aphasia – the occlusion of knowledge surrounding Omar that was consolidated with his death. The empty space of Omar enabled a new political logic that produced new scales of measurement, which, in turn, led to an accelerating anti-radicalization industry that occluded the killing of other Danish Muslim citizens; namely, the victims of a gang war in Danish housing projects. As the anti-radicalization business grew and created an excess of legislation, institutions and policies that targeted violent extremism by Islamic terrorists, it became increasingly difficult to voice and recognise the extreme violence that primarily targeted Danish Muslim citizens.

The Political Logic of Protest Repression in China

ABSTRACT Why do China’s authorities repress some protests, but not others? By how much do crowd size, violent tactics and protest location increase the likelihood of repression? Based on a newly available dataset of more than 70,000 protest events collected from social media, this article tests three competing explanations of protest repression in China. It finds that repression is closely correlated both with the cost of concessions for local governments and protest intensity. A small-scale and peaceful labor protest in an urban locality very seldom encounters repression, but rural riots against land grabs, evictions or environmental pollution are nearly certain to experience state-sanctioned violence or arrests even if the number of participants is low.

Paradigm Shifts in Social Housing after Welfare‐State Transformation: Learning from the German Experience

AbstractWelfare‐state transformation and entrepreneurial urban politics in Western welfare states since the late 1970s have yielded converging trends in the transformation of the dominant Fordist paradigm of social housing in terms of its societal function and institutional and spatial form. In this article I draw from a comparative case study on two cities in Germany to show that the resulting new paradigm is simultaneously shaped by the idiosyncrasies of the country's national housing regime and local housing policies. While German governments have successively limited the societal function of social housing as a legitimate instrument only for addressing exceptional housing crises, local policies on providing and organizing social housing within this framework display significant variation. However, planning and design principles dominating the spatial forms of social housing have been congruent. They may be interpreted as both an expression of the marginalization of social housing within the restructured welfare housing regime and a tool of its implementation according to the logics of entrepreneurial urban politics.

Operationalizing heterogeneity in poststructuralist discourse theory: the heterogeneous logics of international trade politics

ABSTRACT Ever since an intense theoretical debate over a decade ago, the concept of heterogeneity has had a well-established place within poststructuralist Discourse Theory. It captures the interactions between the heart of the space of representation and its margins, between excluded excess and manifest presence; and conceptualizes particularities, differential remainders, and discursive exteriority. The analytical implications of heterogeneity remain underexploited, however. This contribution makes the case that one way to operationalize the notion of heterogeneity in empirical research is by tracing its strategic effects. Since heterogeneity constitutes ‘the primary terrain within which homogeneizing logics operate’, heterogeneous dynamics like the ‘incorporation of new demands’ and ‘the exclusion of others who were previously present’ affect and shape the availability and feasibility of political strategies. This contribution first provides an extensive definition of heterogeneity drawing on the original debate that gave the concept prominence. An approach that captures and explains the strategic effects of heterogeneity is then developed through the integration of heterogeneity into the logics framework. Finally, this approach is illustrated through an exploration of the politics of international trade.

Tensions between populist and feminist politics: The case of the Spanish left populist party Podemos

This paper analyzes the interplay of left populist and feminist politics through a case study of Podemos (‘we can’), a Spanish left populist party that reproduces a dominant gendered logic of politics despite its feminist interpretation of democratic renewal. I argue that this is the result of fundamental contradictions between the feminist and populist projects of political transformation that coexist in the party. Even if left populism offers a more productive terrain for gender equality than right populism, central tenets of populism disrupt feminist commitments and goals. Chief among these are the oversimplification of the political field based on a limited diagnosis, the exclusionary appeals to the homeland and to a homogenizing collectivity of the people, the dominant masculine and personalistic logics of charismatic leaders, the prioritization of electoral success over other forms of political transformation, and the resulting gendered political culture that marginalizes empowerment, inclusion, and participatory democratic practices.