Political Meetings Research Articles

Community Care in Palestine: When Grief and Politics Meet in the Body

Community Care in Palestine: When Grief and Politics Meet in the Body

Intolerant majorities: the breakthrough of ‘the meeting’ in Belgium, 1860s

ABSTRACT According to Charles Tilly, nineteenth-century public meetings were both composed and cosmopolitan affairs in which citizens tried to sublimate parliamentary proceedings as best as they could. Through a case study of political meetings in the city of Antwerp in the years of the censitary suffrage system (1872–93), this article argues that in the port city this was not the case. On the contrary, meetings were quite boisterous affairs with a very local horizon. This article investigates the role and dynamics of mass political meetings in nineteenth-century Antwerp, Belgium, with a focus on the events leading up to the parliamentary elections of 1863. Challenging the conventional view of these gatherings as mere reflections of parliamentary proceedings or training grounds for parliamentary etiquette, the article argues that these meetings operated under distinct rules and codes. Rather than serving as a mimicry of parliamentary norms, the meetings were seen as a necessary correction to what was perceived as an elitist and exclusive parliamentary democracy. The article explores the complex relationship between the parliamentary institution and mass meetings, with a specific examination of the tensions surrounding the inaugural mass meetings in Antwerp in 1862. It contends that these gatherings did not aim to refine or sublimate parliamentary proceedings; instead, they presented a counter-image of parliament characterized by a louder, more intense, and sometimes xenophobic discourse.

Capitals as bad equilibria

AbstractThroughout the recent pandemic, governments used digital video technologies to facilitate social distancing during political meetings. In addition to enabling social distancing, a theoretical advantage of virtual political governance is that it has the potential to mitigate the hierarchical administrative relationship between capitals and regions and the differences in real estate prices and wealth that often follows from such hierarchical structures. However, hardly any governments are currently planning a long‐term transition to work‐from‐home digital governance. On the contrary, several countries are doubling down on the centralization model of government by building new capitals in new locations. This article proposes that in a time of digital alternatives, physically centralized “capitals” could be considered examples of bad equilibrium.

Gardeners and the democratisation of urban parks

ABSTRACT The creation of municipal parks was the most significant development in gardening in the nineteeth century. More than 2,000 parks were made between 1840 and 1914, all financed from the public purse. This paper will explore the genesis of the parks’ movement from the community of gardeners, assisted by an underswell of support from the working-class population. It will show how the radical policies of the main progenitors, John Claudius Loudon and Joseph Paxton, helped to ensure that public parks were of the same high quality as the landed estates of the elite and that they provided not only the health benefits which were essential in overcrowded urban areas, but also suitable recreational facilities. A cadre of gardeners, led by Paxton and the Chatsworth School, with the requisite landscaping and engineering skills acquired whilst working on landed estates, designed and built the first municipal parks. The parks which they created fulfilled their ideals of benefiting the working classes by being universally free of access and providing amenities tailored to their needs, including sporting facilities which formed the crucible for the nascent Football Association. The parks were of particular benefit in providing safe spaces for women and children, and venues for gatherings such as shows, fetes, children’s events, and political meetings. Head gardeners with the necessary horticultural and management competency were appointed to maintain and supervise the parks once built. Gardeners succeeded in capturing control of the parks’ movement creating for themselves more employment opportunities, with greater responsibilities and enhanced job security. In doing so they freed themselves from the remnants of servility, becoming the masters.

Педагогическое образование в Кот-д’Ивуаре

In recent years, there has been a significant reinforcement of mutually beneficial cooperation between Russia and African countries on the broad agenda. Russia builds these relations, taking into account new African realities and on the principles of sovereignty respect, national interests and equality. Today, the African agenda actively reflects in political meetings, economic forums, and scientific conferences, where the most famous is the Russia-Africa Forum of 2019 and 2023. In Ivory Coast, a diplomatic mission first appeared 7 years after gaining sovereignty, but then the ties were severed on Ivorian initiative due to the remaining significant French influence. Since 1986, the relations have been friendly and today they cover political dialogue, security, trade and economics, investments, energy, mining and new technologies, scientific exchanges, cultural, educational areas, etc. The educational sphere has traditionally been represented only by the practice of studying Ivorians in Russian universities. Nowadays, Russia participates in educational projects already in Ivory Coast. But their educational system is very poorly covered in Russian scientifical literature. The objectives of the article are to identify specifics of teacher training in Ivory Coast and to determine its problems and achievements.

Can Free Food Attract Attendees to Political Meetings? An Analysis of Attendance Buying to Political Meetings Using Multi-method Approaches with a Particular Emphasis on Scheduled Caste

Vote-buying has become such a frequent kind of electoral ‘malpractice’ in India that it has become conspicuous in election culture. Despite this, we know very little about how it operates, its consequences, and how voters perceive it. While there is a significant body of literature on vote-buying in Indian elections, the research focuses specifically on attendance buying and its impact on diverse demographic groups and caste categories. By examining attendance buying, the research adds to the existing literature on vote-buying tactics, which can inform future studies and policy interventions to reduce electoral malpractice. We investigate and add to the contemporary literature on vote buying by analysing attendance buying and how it relates to diverse perspectives like low income, age, gender and education or regarding it, focusing on two different categories of caste, that is, dominant and Scheduled Caste. We conducted a survey experiment in the North 24 Parganas district of West Bengal to seek the effect of attendance-buying in the municipalities of Ashokenagar. The focus is on attending middle-sized political meetings rather than smaller meetings, where we thought its efficacy was prominent because of the number of free food and drinks. We found that the effect of the free foods and drinks over the larger meetings is more prominent than in local-level meetings. Our survey could not state that Scheduled Castes voluntarily engage at local-level meetings regardless of free food and drinks.

A Field Study on Political Socialization of Political Science Students

Political socialisation refers to a process in which every individual who is born into society learns the basic values, institutions and rules of the society into which it is born and becomes compatible with the political culture. In this process, the individual learns the boundaries of their own society unconsciously, the roles in that society, the forms of behaviour deemed legitimate and political beliefs. In political socialisation as a learning process, institutions such as family, friendship networks, school, mass media and religion have constructive and transformative roles in the process. Political socialisation processes of individuals are shaped by these institutions worldwide. This study claims to reveal the factors affecting the political socialisation processes of political science students in Türkiye. The field research part of the study was carried out with quantitative research methods and survey design. In this context, a survey was administered to 426 students who continue their education in the department of political science in Türkiye. The hypotheses determined for the study were tested by analysing the survey data in the SPSS package programme. The findings of the study show that students who continue their undergraduate education in political science in Turkey frequently discuss politics with their families, but their families do not want to support their children in joining a political organisation. Political science students do not respond favourably to invitations from their friends to attend political meetings, and although they frequently follow politics through mass media, they avoid interacting even online platforms. In addition, the hypotheses of the study show that there is a significant relationship between political socialisation and gender and political ideology.

Emotion recognition at a distance: The robustness of machine learning based on hand-crafted facial features vs deep learning models

Emotion estimation from face expression analysis is nowadays a widely-explored computer vision task. In turn, the classification of expressions relies on relevant facial features and their dynamics. Despite the promising accuracy results achieved in controlled and favorable conditions, the processing of faces acquired at a distance, entailing low-quality images, still suffers from a significant performance decrease. In particular, most approaches and related computational models become extremely unstable in the case of the very small amount of useful pixels that is typical in these conditions. Therefore, their behavior should be investigated more carefully. On the other hand, real-time emotion recognition at a distance may play a critical role in smart video surveillance, especially when controlling particular kinds of events, e.g., political meetings, to try to prevent adverse actions.This work compares facial expression recognition at a distance by: 1) a deep learning architecture based on state-of-the-art (SOTA) proposals, which exploits the whole images to autonomously learn the relevant embeddings; 2) a machine learning approach that relies on hand-crafted features, namely the facial landmarks preliminarily extracted using the popular Mediapipe framework. Instead of using either the complete sequence of frames or only the final still image of the expression, like current SOTA approaches, the two proposed methods are designed to use rich temporal information to identify three different stages of emotion. Expressions are time-split accordingly into four phases to better exploit their temporal-dependent dynamics. Experiments were conducted on the popular Extended Cohn-Kanade dataset (CK+). It was chosen for its wide use in related literature, and because it includes videos of facial expressions and not only still images. The results show that the approach relying on machine learning via hand-crafted features is more suitable for classifying the initial phases of the expression and does not decay in terms of accuracy when images are at a distance (only 0.08% of decay). On the contrary, deep learning not only has difficulties classifying the initial phases of the expressions but also suffers from relevant performance decay when considering images at a distance (52.68% accuracy decay).

WE/Time/Trembling/Softly

The choral body is heterogeneous and homogeneous, it is composed of many parts into one mass - for a time. It emerges, fades away and emerges anew in a different place. It is migratory by nature, forming structures of mutual reinforcement and resonance. It brings knowledge from external spheres into other, even foreign or intimate contexts. And it makes itself heard: many voices become one. Anne Brannys and Edith Kollath take its constitution, its techniques and mechanisms as a starting point for their investigation "WE/Time/Trembling/Softly: Chorus for ten voices out of 173467349034879236587595356416534“, which focuses on the chorus as a form of democratic expression. Different situations are illuminated in which the chorus appears: ancient places of cult, the theater stage, the Thingspiele of the German national socialists, political meetings and demonstrations, current art exhibitions and last but not least the space that is formed between the interacting beings of our environment. On a formal level, the text is structured into ten voices that represent the different aspects of the reflection on the chorus. Each of these voices has its own tempo, its own timbre. One can imagine how these sound one after the other or with each other, how they harmonize, interfere, complement or cancel each other, how a chorus shapes itself in each reader.

Synoptic Images: Truth and Temporality in Pictorial Journalism During the 1840s

The 1840s saw the creation of weekly illustrated newsmagazines in several European countries, with titles like the Illustrated London News, L'Illustration, and the Illustrirte Zeitung. This article questions the common assumption that these influential periodicals contributed to modern news time primarily by speeding up the consumption of visual information through rapidly produced and consumed eyewitness accounts. An analysis of the many images of staged public events, like inaugurations, political meetings, and parades, that were published during the early years of illustrated news instead shows than they were often produced as translations of information from different sources (both visual and verbal) and created as pictorial summaries of events in a way that can best be described as “synoptic.” Rather than ephemeral reflections of an ever-changing present, such visual condensations also served to commemorate and make lasting and thus contributed to establishing the very events on which the experience of a fast-forward movement of time was based.

The Evolution of Popular Politics in 19th-Century Sweden and the Road from Oligarchy to Democracy

In the 20th century, Sweden distinguished itself as one of the most organized and participatory democracies in the world. But in the late 19th century the situation was much the opposite – Sweden had for Western Europe a low degree of suffrage, and low political participation. To explain the turnaround, this paper explores the evolution of a democratic political culture in the final third of the 19th century, in opposition to the oligarchic system. The empirical material consists of digitalized newspapers from the south of Sweden in the period 1866 to 1900, studying about 2700 articles that mention ‘popular meetings’, folkmöten, which was the contemporary description of political meetings. In the 1860s and 1870s a farmer-centred democratic critique dominated, combining proposals for widened suffrage with criticisms of banks and the bureaucracy. In the 1880s and 1890s, the social base was widened as urban workers – socialist and antisocialist – took a greater part and the ideological composition became more heterogeneous. The paper suggests that the folkmöten constituted an important arena for democratic socialization in a country with an oligarchical political system, creating a road forward for democratic reforms and a democratic society.

The Foreign Policies of India with the United States

Based on common democratic principles and a growing union of interests on bilateral, global and regional concerns, India and the United States have grown their bilateral relations into a "global strategic partnership." The concentration on growth and decent governance by the Indian government has given a chance to strengthen bilateral ties and cooperation under the mottos "Sanjha Prayas, Sab ka Vikas" (Shared Effort, Progress for All) and "Chalein Saath Saath" (Forward Together We Go), which were adopted during the first two summits between Prime Minister Modi and President Obama in September 2014 and January 2015, respectively. India and the United States were described as "Enduring Global Partners in the 21st Century" in the summit-level joint statement released in June 2016.
 Regular high-level political meetings have sustainedly boosted bilateral cooperation, and the extensive and expanding dialogue architecture has laid the groundwork for future India-U.S. engagement. The business and funding, security and defence, educational, and other facets of the bilateral relationship between the United States and India have all expanded and become cross-cutting. Active interpersonal communication and support from the public in both countries help to strengthen our bilateral relationship.

Analysis of Administrative Structures and Economic Programs of the Ahmad Shahi’s Era

Shah Ghazi Amanullah Khan is the founder of a new and modern Afghanistan. Throughout his reign, significant changes and innovations have taken place in Afghanistan’s economic, legal, and social aspects. One of his most precious and valuable achievements was taking freedom from the British Occupation. In all his political meetings, trips, and gatherings, Ghazi Amanullah Khan discussed civil and political freedom with a resolute intention and high morale in this regard. The purpose of study is to deeply analyze the administrative and economic structure of Ghazi Amanullah Khan’s government; to identify those factors which positively affect the economic and administrative structure; to explain the overall leadership. The descriptive, explanatory, and analytical research approaches are used in this work. It is worth mentioning that this research study is entirely based on library sources. Most of the sources are reputable and trustworthy textbooks, published journal articles, law reports, and websites. According to well-known historians and the study of history in terms of administrative and economic structure and achievements that one of Ghazi Amanullah Khan’s reforms was that he created national symbols such as state emblems, national days, national anthem, national flag, medals, and national currency. All of these were part of Ghazi Amanullah Khan’s reforms. The researcher suggests and recommend to the central government and to the local governments of Afghanistan as well as to the regional governments that to deeply study the administrative and economic structure, achievements, and reforms of the Ghazi Amanullah Khan’s era and try to implement them in their central and local institutions. Furthermore, the researcher has a suggestion to work on the military, political, and social structure of Ghazi Amanullah Khan’s government in order to squinch the academic thirst of the researchers and academia.

A Research Perceptive on Deep Learning Framework for Pedestrian Detection in a Crowd

In populated cities, we often find crowded events like political meetings, religious festivals, music concerts, and events in shopping malls, which have more safety issues. Smart surveillance systems are used in big cities to keep crowds safe and make crowd security less complicated and more accurate. However, the surveillance systems proposed for a crowd are monitored by human agents, which are inefficient, error-prone, and overwhelming. Even with deep learning-based feature engineering in crowds, many variants of crowd analysis still lack attention and are technically unaddressed. Considering this scenario, the smart system requires the most advanced techniques to monitor the security of the crowd. Crowd analysis is commonly divided into crowd statics and behavior analysis. This paper explores more about crowd behaviour analysis, pedestrian and group detection which describes the movements that are noticed in the crowd image. Subsequently, the issues of the current methodology of pedestrian detection, datasets, and evaluation criteria are analyzed. Keyword : Crowd Analysis, Pedestrian and group detection, deep learning, Crowd IoT analysis, Human Activity Recognition.

The Illusionist

The Illusionist

Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women's Suffrage Movement

Feminism and the Servant Problem: Class and Domestic Labour in the Women's Suffrage Movement

OEA y la democracia en Américas Latina: a treinta años de la Convención de Santiago y a veinte años de la Carta Democrática Interamericana

The Organization of American States (hereinafter OAS) is the only setting for dialogue and political meetings of all the countries of the Hemisphere, and in recent years democracy has become a priority objective and value. Therefore, the aim of this article is to analyze the role that the OAS has had and may have in Latin American democracies, through its political commitments and its normative body. It is stated that the capacity of the OAS to promote and defend democracy depends on the existence, or not, of an ideological consensus in the political systems of the region on the priority that this universal value has, and that only with a vocation of greater supranationality will it be able to promote and defend to democracy.

Meeting of Rulers in the Scepus Region (1214)

The personal meetings of medieval rulers were of great importance just like the political meetings of our present days. Yet, in most cases only the fact of the meeting has remained to us, without any information on thé détails, thé pérsons présént théré, and thé duration of thé participants’ stay étc. In this paper we intend to reconstruct the meeting and its circumstances based on the events prior to that and on its consequences.

The Contested Right of Public Meeting in England from the Bill of Rights to the Public Order Acts

AbstractThe ‘right of public meeting’ has historically been a key demand of extra-parliamentary political movements in England. This paper examines how public assembly came to be perceived as a legally protected right, and how national and local authorities debated and policed political meetings. Whereas previous histories have suggested that a ‘liberal governance’ dominated urban government during the nineteenth century, this paper offers an alternative framework for understanding the relationship between people and the state. It points to rights paradoxes, whereby the right of free passage and to ‘air and recreation’ often conflicted with the demand for the right of political meeting in challenges to use of public spaces. Local authorities sought to defend the rights of property against political movements by using the common law offences of obstruction and ‘nuisance’. By the first half of the twentieth century, new threats of militant tactics and racial harassment by political groups necessitated specific public order legislation. Though twentieth-century legislation sought to protect certain types of assembly and protest marches, the implementation and policing of public order was spatially discriminatory, and the right of public meeting was left unresolved.

When Diaspora Politics Meet Global Ambitions: Diaspora Institutions Amid China's Geopolitical Transformations

Through a case study of China, one of the largest emigration states and a rising global power, this article probes how a homeland state envisions diaspora politics amid geopolitical transformations. Drawing on historical, policy, and interview data, I argue that China's changing positioning toward Chinese emigrants, triggered by the state's geopolitical vicissitudes, has reshaped and repurposed diaspora institutions. I find that since the 2010s, China's diaspora policies have shifted away from soliciting diasporic support for domestic economic growth and national unification and toward liaising externally with migrants to expand Chinese soft power abroad. In consequence, diaspora institutions with more extensive overseas connections and flexible working experiences have taken precedence over formal state agencies specialized in domestic policymaking. This article makes two theoretical contributions to a multilevel understanding of diaspora politics as traversing simultaneously the domestic and global political fields. First, following neo-pluralism, I examine China's diaspora bureaucracy as composed of a diverse set of state entities with distinctive, or even contradictory, interests, orientations, and philosophies. These organizational variations shape diaspora institutions’ different strengths and fluctuating significance in China's shifting geopolitical strategies. Second, by situating emigrants and diaspora institutions in the macrohistorical framework of world politics, this article pushes research on diaspora politics into more profound dialog with world-systems theory. Rather than assuming an asymmetric interdependence between weaker emigration countries and hegemonic immigration countries, I demonstrate how an aspirational homeland state seeks to challenge this established world order and accomplish its geopolitical ascendancy through diaspora re-strategizing and institutional reshuffling.