Political Paralysis Research Articles

Is Climate Change a Threat to International Peace and Security?

Is climate change a threat to international peace and security? If so, what actions, if any, should the United Nations Security Council (“Council”) take to combat the climate crisis? Scientists and security professionals alike predict massive climate destabilization this century to include climate migration, competing resource wars, and violent conflict. And four island nations will be uninhabitable by mid-century, threatening their territorial integrity and very sovereignty. In this Article I argue that climate change can no longer be conceptualized as a future environmental and sustainability issue that the Council can ignore. Rather, climate change is a complex security threat that will increasingly stress and test international institutions and existing governance models. Yet is a “Climate-Security Council” truly realistic in light of the Council’s institutional design and current political paralysis? What could spark Council climate action? And how should the Council respond to the climate crisis? I address these questions, and others, proceeding in four parts. I first describe climate change’s security impacts, analyzing climate change’s cataclysmic impacts on international peace and security. Second, I analyze the Council’s gradual willingness to tackle non-traditional security threats, thus offering a possible roadmap for future climate action. In doing so, I analyze climate change’s existential threat to several island nations, a vanguard climate-security challenge that strikes at the core of the Council’s authority and legal responsibilities. Third, I address the challenges and opportunities represented by any Council climate action. I conclude by arguing that the Council should explicitly declare climate change a threat to international peace and security. Doing so unlocks the door to a menu of legally binding Council actions necessary to meet the existential challenges of our “climate security century.”

Falling real interest rates, rising debt: A free lunch?

Deep systemic financial crises tend to be infrequent events, as they leave deep lasting scars on the psyche of consumers, investors, politicians and regulators. Normally, especially given strengthened regulation and, one would not expect another systemic event for many decades. But the situation today is anything but normal. Record high global public and private debt combined with political paralysis and extraordinarily weak leadership outside central banks make today’s uncharacteristically fragile at this point in the debt supercycle.

Late Fascism in Brazil? Theoretical Reflections

Serious reflection on the regime of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil requires considering renewed theoretical and historical debates on fascism. This essay explores recent contributions by Perry Anderson, Dylan Riley, Enzo Traverso, Atilio Borón, and Armando Boito Jr., putting each in conversation with present political and socioeconomic dynamics in Brazil and focusing on the state form and the power bloc, with an excursus on the local militia state in Rio de Janeiro. The essay argues that Bolsonaro is unlikely to establish a fascist dictatorship, given the political paralysis of his regime’s first several months and the difficulties of sustaining a political project rooted in a heterogeneous social base within a context of persistent world-market stagnation and ongoing Brazilian economic contraction. Still, the essay insists that the most compelling theoretical, historical, and political work on the prospects of twenty-first-century fascism in Brazil and elsewhere comes from those who do not rule out the possibility of its success.

A Great Little Man: The Shadow of Jair Bolsonaro

Abstract This editorial perspective attempts to explain the recent rise of Jair Bolsonaro to the presidency in Brazil and to characterise, at least in a preliminary fashion, the nature of the new regime one year into Bolsonaro’s rule. The core argument is that Bolsonaro represents a weak and internally-fragmented far-right regime, with unenthusiastic and declining popular support. Dominant sections of international and domestic capital operating in Brazil lent Bolsonaro electoral backing as a last way out of economic and political crisis, but so far, the new government has failed in sufficiently guaranteeing their most important interests and the markets are withdrawing approval. Themes covered include the political paralysis of the new regime, the social bases of Bolsonarismo, the nature of the current state–capital relation, and the role of evangelical Pentecostalism in far-right Brazilian politics today. A biographical portrait of Bolsonaro is provided, alongside a mapping of the dominant factions of the new administration. Finally, an assessment of the economic outlook in Brazil is developed, together with speculation as to the likely political consequences in the short- to medium-term future.

Brexit is just a symptom: the constitutional weaknesses it reveals have serious consequences for health.

Brexit has direct and indirect negative health consequences, whether from economic damage or from the political paralysis and distraction from public health that it has created. Brexit is a public health problem in its own right, as other literature has shown-but, we argue, it is also a symptom of deeper problems in the governance of the United Kingdom. In particular, the combination of executive dominance, partisanship and opacity that give rise to the constitutional casualism of the Brexit decisions has already affected public health policy and will continue to do so unless addressed.

How to Carry Out a Democratic Ethnobotanical Study

This contribution aims to share some experiences and methodological considerations that arose during an ethnobotanical research project with an Afro-Brazilian religious community in the city of São Paulo, Brazil. By presenting ontological features of plants used in religious practices, and the ways relations are created within this religious cosmology, this work opens a discussion about the political commitments of doing contemporary ethnobotanical science. When the ways of being and living in communities considered “traditional”—here referring to Afro-Brazilian religious communities, and specifically to the Umbanda Afro-Brazilian religion—are treated as equally valid, questions arise about the reaches of our own scientific practices, creating possibilities to construct practices and policies that preserve these communities’ vitality in the face of the overwhelming imposition of colonialism. In this sense, ethnobotanical research is at an analytical crossroads that can give the field an advantage over the political paralysis of the sciences and over the clandestine politicization of science as the spokesperson for a singular nature. These considerations lead to self-reflection on scientific expertise and democratic ways of producing knowledge about plants in plural cultural contexts.

Brexit Means Brexit—or Does It? The Legacy of Theresa May's Discursive Treatment of Brexit

AbstractWith the looming reality of Brexit drawing closer, it is the intention of this article to explore Theresa May's post‐referendum communicative behaviour on Brexit—the very issue that came to define her premiership agenda—and uncover what legacy it has left behind. Building upon, extending and updating the emerging literature on May's discourse, the inquiry helps us understand how May acted through language in order to influence and change other people's attitudes towards and ways of looking at Brexit. The article argues that there are at least seven ways, closely interrelated and feeding into each other, in which her discursive construction of Brexit has left a somewhat bitter legacy, contributing to the Brexit political paralysis and inspiring substantial levels of confusion and exasperation, both within the UK and abroad.

How Water is Reshaping the Political Landscape

New Zealanders place great value on the quality of their freshwater rivers, streams and lakes for recreation, conservation and food gathering. But over the last 25 years they have become increasingly concerned at the deterioration in water quality, the loss of swimming holes and fishing spots, and the impact of pollution on native and valued introduced species and their habitat. The issue has deeply divided the community and become more and more acrimonious. Recreational and conservation groups blame industrial agriculture for much of the decline, and accuse central and local government of turning a blind eye to the problem and failing to protect the environment. Scientists have added their voices to the debate, but big agriculture and its lobby groups have responded aggressively, denying the problem exists, attacking their accusers and warning government against tackling the problem with tighter controls. Public frustration at the political paralysis and inaction has seen water quality become New Zealanders’ biggest single concern. The issue is now firmly established on the political agenda and one any political party wanting to govern the country ignores at its peril.

Becoming a Conscientious Objector

The United Kingdom's decision to leave the European Union, ‘Brexit’, continues to create ripples of concern and seeming political paralysis. Connecting emotionally to the process of ‘conscientious objection’ of previous generations provides inspiration for accepting embarrassment, taking a personal stance, and a making a renewed commitment to trusting our future to young people, including a continued commitment to the role of fostering criticality within academia.

Data and Digital Intelligence Commons (Making a Case for their Community Ownership)

Digital technologies once held the promise to be a great equalizer. As a digital economy takes shape, global inequalities however are rising sharply. Vertically integrated global digital corporations are set to rule every sector of the economy based on their exclusive control over its data, further concentrating economic power. There exists a political paralysis over regulation of such digital corporations. Any shift in the dominant digital model and practices towards greater fairness and sustainability requires first of all an examination of the political economy of data, and the digital intelligence that it contributes. Policy makers around the world are evidently becoming eager to explore ways for wide data sharing, with a view to its easy availability for domestic businesses. But there is a dearth of understanding and political will at the highest levels to develop the required new policies and laws for this purpose, as well as of viable practical models for data sharing. Very little theoretical work explores alternative models for economic governance of data. This paper attempts some new directions in this regard. The digital economy can be understood as comprising intelligent systems running whole sectors, employing data based digital intelligence to re-organize and coordinate them. Within such a macro understanding, it is possible to apply the framework of Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) developed by Elinor Ostrom to examine the management of data and digital intelligence resources at the community level in a given sector, like transport, under the dominant model. Such an analysis reveals very suboptimal results on almost all the key IAD evaluation parameters; from efficiency and equity to accountability and sustainability. The paper then proposes treating data and digital intelligence as common pool resources, under common property regimes. It briefly considers the kind of data governance arrangements that may be possible and necessary for a robust and fair digital economy. The discussion also subsumes key contemporary data related issues like the contestations around free global flows of data and the data rights of platform dependent actors, like taxi drivers and traders.

The Impact of Political Competition on Economic Growth: Evidence from Municipalities in South Africa

AbstractThis paper examines the impact of political competition on economic growth. In this paper, I show that internal political dynamics, distinct from the type of political system, can having different effects on growth. Using results from the 1994 and 1999 elections in South Africa, I show that municipalities with higher levels of political competition have shown lower levels of economic growth. I use individual level surveys to show that this political competition is associated with political paralysis, dissatisfaction with the current democracy and government and lower optimism about the future.

Legal obstacles and social change: strategies of the abortion rights movement in Argentina

ABSTRACT On April 2018, the Argentine Congress began debating a bill proposing the legalization of abortion on request for the first time in the country's history. Although it passed in the Lower Chamber, the bill failed to be approved by the Senate. However, the legislative debate showed the strength of the Argentinean abortion rights movement. Since the mid-2000s, and as a reaction to political paralysis in the area of abortion rights, activists in this country developed three main strands of strategies, which differed in terms of their time-frames, levels of institutionalization, targets, and scales. Based on original field research, this article analyzes the way in which each of these three tracks addressed the state, the current legal framework and the need for legal reform. It argues that, when legal reform is blocked, different movement sectors may develop parallel strategies to increase access to their demands within the existing normative framework. Through their diverse strategies, they test the limits of the law, challenge hegemonic legal interpretations and re-interpret what is permissible in alternative ways. In addition, the interaction between the different strategies created a powerful synergy that strengthened the movement and made the recent legislative debate possible, even under the leadership of an anti-choice president. Given the similarities of the Argentinean restrictive legal framework and movement strategies with those throughout Latin America, these arguments are relevant for the assessment of current developments within abortion rights movements and their interactions with the legal system in other countries in the region.

Writing in and about Prison, Childhood Albinism and Human Temporality in The Book of Memory

SummaryIn its depiction of childhood albinism in a Zimbabwean township in the early 1990s and the imprisonment of females during the height of Zimbabwe’s political paralysis and economic collapse of the early 21st century, Petina Gappah’s The Book of Memory (2015) makes one imagine ways in which human time is constructed and perceived. As a child, Memory, the protagonist, suffers social exclusion because she has albinism, and as a young adult she is falsely accused of murder and is sentenced to death. These circumstances influence Memory’s perception of human temporality as she resorts to the internal resources of memory of the past and future triggered by imprisonment to reflect on the abuse and indignities that she has suffered. The non-linearity of Gappah’s novel is an attempt to escape or at least disrupt the main characters’ feelings of being bound within the contingencies of linear human time. The remembering of the past captured in the novel’s title and the novel’s presentation of the present are all future-oriented, although the future of the protagonist is largely presented as bleak.

Legal Obstacles and Social Change: Strategies of the Abortion Rights Movement in Argentina

On April 2018, the Argentine Congress began debating a bill proposing the legalization of abortion on request for the first time in the country’s history. Although it passed in the Lower Chamber, the bill failed to be approved by the Senate. However, the legislative debate showed the strength of the Argentinean abortion rights movement. Since the mid-2000s, and as a reaction to political paralysis in the area of abortion rights, activists in this country developed three main strands of strategies, which differed in terms of their time-frames, levels of institutionalization, targets, and scales. Based on original field research, this article analyzes the way in which each of these three tracks addressed the state, the current legal framework and the need for legal reform. It argues that, when legal reform is blocked, different movement sectors may develop parallel strategies to increase access to their demands within the existing normative framework. Through their diverse strategies, they test the limits of the law, challenge hegemonic legal interpretations and re-interpret what is permissible in alternative ways. In addition, the interaction between the different strategies created a powerful synergy that strengthened the movement and made the recent legislative debate possible, even under the leadership of an anti-choice president. Given the similarities of the Argentinean restrictive legal framework and movement strategies with those that can be found throughout most of Latin America, the arguments of this article are relevant for the assessment of current developments within abortion rights movements and their interactions with the legal system in other countries in the region. They can also be useful for the analysis of and comparison with movements in countries with restrictive settings elsewhere in the World, such as Poland and the Philippines.

Counting Zero: Rethinking Feminist Epistemologies

This article concerns feminist engagements with epistemologies. Feminist epistemologies have revealed and challenged the exclusions and denigrations at work in knowledge production processes. And yet, the emphasis on the partiality of knowledge and the non-innocence of any subject position also cast doubt on the possibility of feminist political communities. In view of this, it has been argued that the very parameter of epistemology poses limitations for feminism, for it leads to either political paralysis or prescriptive politics that in fact undoes the political of politics. From a different perspective, decolonial feminists argue for radical epistemic disobedience and delinking the move beyond the confines of Western systems of knowledge and its extractive knowledge economy. Nevertheless, the oppositional logic informs both feminist epistemologies and its critiques, which I argue is symptomatic of the epistemic habits of academic feminism. This article ends with a preliminary reconsideration of the question of origin through the figure of zero. It asks whether it might be possible to conceive of feminist epistemologies as performing the task of counting zero – accounting for origin, wholeness, and universality – that takes into account specificities without forfeiting coalition and claims to knowledge.

Фактор Трампа в российско-американских отношениях

The article deals with Donald Trump’s ascent to the White House that may open a new phase in the international relations, and foremost in relations between Russia and the USA. This is determined by the very Trump phenomenon, which is neither accidental, nor confined exclusively to the American politics, but reflects deep changes in the life of many nations and world environment as a whole. Donald Trump is a product of the world’s anti-globalist trend – populism. That is why he remains for the time being one of the most unpredictable politicians. Russian leadership obviously gave preference to Trump during the US election campaign. The main reason of such attitude of the Russian elite towards Trump was his political line of rejecting foreign policy of President Barak Obama, under whom Russian-American relations sank to the lowest point since the end of the Cold War. In order to estimate the possibility of substantial improvement under Trump it is worthwhile once again to address the reasons of the crisis of the recent few years in the relations between the two powers with the purpose of understanding how probable the removal of these reasons in the future. In view of the domestic political situation in the USA and spontaneous nature of Trump’s pre-election declarations, it is still not clear which policy course will be implemented by his administration, if and when it elaborates a consistent foreign policy. This is not the whole present uncertainty, however. No less unpredictable are the changes in Russian policy in reaction to what is happening within the United States and if the changes happen – which direction they will take. Moreover, in the situation of domestic political chaos and actual paralysis of state authority in the United States, the future of the relations between the two powers depends presently more on Russia, its ability to quickly adapt to the changing situation and come out with big, concrete initiatives aimed at directing its dynamics to a constructive channel.

Terrorism and the good life: toward a virtue-ethical framework for morally assessing terrorism and counter-terrorism

ABSTRACTThis paper shows that contemporary political reasoning and action in the context of modern terrorism derives from moral arguments that are seriously flawed. Those arguments are built on a simplistic understanding of terrorism and exclusively adhere to ‘conventional’ act-based ethical, for example, deontological or utilitarian, frameworks for morally assessing the political reality of terrorism and counter-terrorism. As a result, political reasoning and counter-terrorism action fail to take into account certain indispensable morally relevant features of terrorism. It will be argued in this paper that contemporary approaches are therefore unable to grasp the (moral) complexity of the terrorist phenomenon what ultimately leads to political paralysis in the domain of counter-terrorism action. In order to be able to include a more extended notion of morally relevant features of terrorism in an understanding of terrorism and consequently in its moral assessment, this paper develops an alternative ethical framework based on virtue ethics and on a eudemonistic concept of the good life. In a last step, this paper shows how such a comprehensive and integrative, virtue-ethical, framework overcomes the limitations of current dominant approaches and so contributes to promoting morally legitimate, sustainable and effective counter-terrorism action.

Emergency Management 2.0

There are more causes of fiscal distress than remedies. A nascent field is emerging built on the practices utilized to confront fiscal distress. The usual method follows a federal structure in that the state has ultimate responsibility when local governments fail, leaving communities to live in a “new normal” of austere oversight. As more urban areas contend with extended economic downturns, political paralysis, and social apathy in the face of unsustainable governance, there is a need for a strategic approach to the administrative side of fiscal distress management. Although cutbacks, consolidations, and service reductions are the tactical tools of the trade, emergency financial management also requires a guiding strategy that protects the fundamental purpose and character of the local government. This article uses ideas from disaster management and the fiscal crises in Michigan to develop four key elements in a strategic approach to emergency financial management.

Cinematic slowness, political paralysis? Animal life in ‘Bovines’, with Deleuze and Guattari

Cinematic slowness, political paralysis? Animal life in ‘Bovines’, with Deleuze and Guattari

Late Modern Arabic Literature

This dissertation explores the relations between gender and crisis in Arabic literature from the late 1960s to the present. Working in a regional Arab context, I define crisis as an endemic situation of political paralysis and cultural stagnation, one historically connected to the Arab world’s failure to obtain the political freedoms, economic independence, and social reforms aspired to in anticolonial nationalism. Reading a hybrid mix of four novels, a novella, a poetic memoir, and two poems by Ghassan Kanafani (2004), Sahar Khalifeh, Fadwa Tuqan, Mayy al-Sayigh, Rashid al-Daif (2007), Jabbur al-Duwayhi, and Sonallah Ibrahim (2001), I illustrate the dynamic role played by gender in the following national-regional crises: the Israeli occupation of Palestine, the ongoing legacy of tribal and sectarian conflict in Lebanon, and the alliance between comprador capitalism and the police state in Egypt. I argue that the emergence of gender as an active crucible of crisis—as opposed to a mere allegory of crisis—in Arabic literature is specific to the late modern period during which the selected texts were written. The secondary literature supporting my analysis includes Aghacy 2009; Dworkin 1981; Massad 1995; Sedgwick 1985; and Sharabi 1992.