Political Questions Research Articles

Witnesses to the Living God: Three Paradigms for Approaching the Politics of Nouvelle Théologie*

Witnesses to the Living God: Three Paradigms for Approaching the Politics of <i>Nouvelle Théologie</i>*

The Struggle for Inclusion: Muslim Minorities and the Democratic Ethos by Elisabeth Ivarsflaten and by Paul M. Sniderman

One of the biggest political questions across North America and Western Europe is how societies will adjust to increasing levels of ethnic, racial, and religious diversity. For many years, scholars have focused on the people who oppose diversity because their views are considered objectionable and in need of explanation. Ivarsflaten and Sniderman join a growing group of scholars who take a different approach and analyze the rest of the population: people inclined to support diversity. This is a crucial population segment because under the right conditions, they are the ones who will promote more tolerant and inclusive societies in the twenty-first century. Ivarsflaten and Sniderman use an impressive range of original surveys—with an approach they call “sequential factorials”—to analyze the conditions under which Europeans are more likely to support the inclusion of Muslim minorities. “The sequential factorial” approach conducts many small experiments that replicate previous findings (increasing confidence in the results) and then extend the insights into new directions. Throughout the book, Ivarsflaten and Sniderman use 34 different experiments on over 21,000 survey respondents from Norway, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Denmark, the United States, Germany, France, and Sweden.

The Role of Philosophy in Hume’s Critique of Empire

ABSTRACT The British Empire found itself in uncharted territory during the global competition over military and commercial hegemony in the eighteenth century. Many thinkers questioned the wisdom of empire by comparing Britain’s overseas expansion with the fate of ancient Rome and the government’s controversial colonial policy. David Hume distinguished himself from these critical voices by adopting a detached philosophical approach. His detachment nonetheless ended in scepticism. This article reconstructs Hume’s doubts about empire in order to illuminate the way philosophy interacts with practical political questions. Working at the intersection between political philosophy and epistemology, Hume demonstrates how scepticism shapes his remark on the perennial republican dilemma concerning the trade-off between empire and liberty. His philosophical approach shifts the focus of the debates from attempting to reconcile the two to diagnosing the crux of political instability in modern empires. I argue that Hume defended philosophy's use by highlighting the epistemological aspect of the problem. For him, ideational factors, such as extreme and false beliefs, could provoke public frenzy. This meant that popular politics posed a substantial challenge to modern imperial rule. Governing the passions for empire should therefore be made a matter of a national priority. By pinpointing in this way the role of the citizenry, Hume clarified how epistemic questions remained central to modern politics.

Deterritorialized Threats and the “Territorial Trap”: The Geographical Imaginaries of Piracy in the Gulf of Aden

This paper investigates how modern theories of international security are being revised in relation to a perceived “deterritorialization” of the global security environment. Using the case of piracy in the Gulf of Aden, I examine how geographical imaginaries of security and insecurity are reproduced in relation to non-state, global threats. I show that while the objects to be secured from threats like piracy are interpreted in relation to networked and deterritorialized space, diagnoses of threats themselves, their origins, and their movement, rely on a territorial imaginary of political order. This attributes a one-way spatio-political directionality to global threats, as incubating in zones of local disorder before crossing into the complex, networked space of the global. Drawing on recent research into the territorialization of modern sovereignty and its relationship to European colonization and imperialism, I underscore continuities between contemporary geographical imaginaries of security and threat and those of the early 20th century. This analysis helps make explicit the spatial heuristics that are usually implicit in global security research and highlights the kinds of empirical and political questions that these heuristics sideline. The case of Gulf of Aden piracy foregrounds the material effects of these threat diagnoses, which shape particular geographies of bordering, surveillance, and state and non-state violence.

Valuing Diversity Without Illusions: The Anti-Utopian Agonism of Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies

ABSTRACT This article offers a novel interpretation of Karl Popper’s influential yet controversial book, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). Popper, it argues, sheds light on a pivotal social and political question: How can we value genuine human plurality without succumbing to the illusion that enmity can be removed from the socio-political realm? What we find in Popper, I argue, is an “anti-utopian agonism,” that is, his conception of an open society harbors significant agonistic elements—a commitment to human plurality, an endorsement of (some) social and political struggles, and an acute awareness of the tragic dimensions of political life. Simultaneously, Popper’s distinctive anti-utopianism makes an important contribution to agonistic theory on two fronts. First, his concept of “the strain of civilization” reveals a deeper notion of tragedy, which gives him the edge over the rather shallow notion of tragedy we find in the agonistic tradition. Secondly, he develops a tripartite notion of enmity, which is theoretically interesting and practically relevant. The aim of this article is not only to contribute to the scholarship on Popper and agonism but, first and foremost, to demonstrate how The Open Society still matters as an inspiring work that illuminates the practically relevant question of how to value diversity without illusions.

The Political Philosophy of the Dark Knight Trilogy

Christopher Nolan once described The Dark Knight as massively subversive, but scholars have been slow to realize just how accurate that confession was. Nolan’s Batman trilogy shows little interest in propagandizing on behalf of ephemeral partisan politics, but its films deeply engage fundamental political questions. Batman Begins explores the violent nature of governance as the wielding of fear and compares three different theories of justice to suggest the virtue is best defined by its fostering of social harmony. The Dark Knight centers on the question: Who rules? Nolan’s masterpiece sharply critiques democratic legitimacy in favor of something more primal: Those who can rule well should. And The Dark Knight Rises explores the nature of the demagogic class struggle most likely to lead to the collapse of social order. These films are not mere entertainment–they also constitute one of our age’s great meditations on power.

Introduction: What is Fracking a Case of?

When we started to plan this special issue, shale gas extraction and hydraulic fracturing (“fracking”) as a technology and its related social conflicts seemed to be—except in very few countries, such as the United States—an environmental issue in a state of “fading away,” while still being of historical interest. However, things changed after Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. Beyond creating immense human suffering and massive destruction of Ukraine's infrastructures, the invasion has affected, and is affecting, distant countries, their peoples, and economies around the world, in various ways. One major issue at stake is the effect on energy markets and energy mixes in European countries, where strong dependencies on Russian fuels exist. Energy prices have skyrocketed, and several European governments (especially, Germany) had to reconsider their past politics of energy supply and transition. The war, so to speak, has unexpectedly opened a new window of opportunity for re-evaluating shale gas as a player in the energy transition (Teuffer 2022). This is mainly due to economic questions regarding energy prices, and political questions regarding energy autonomy and mixes.

Politics of the Visible and the Invisible

Abstract In this article, we analyze and compare photographic images from some of the most widely circulated Japanese and American high school history textbooks regarding their treatment of the Pacific War. We focus on the visual component of war technology, the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the visibility or invisibility of women, especially regarding the comfort women issue. We argue that images in the textbooks are articulated by a dialectic relationship between the visible and the invisible as a political question, thinking about the “off-screen space” as the structural principle of what we see. The textbooks’ visual memories about the Pacific War are not only influenced by what is shown but also by what is omitted and virtually depicted in the surrounding media.

Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

Breathing Room: Working Principles of Independent Art Spaces in African Cities

Breathing Room: Working Principles of Independent Art Spaces in African Cities

Crear entre mundos: Nuevas tendencias en la metaficción española ed. by Iana Konstantinova and Sabrina S. Laroussi

Crear entre mundos: Nuevas tendencias en la metaficción española ed. by Iana Konstantinova and Sabrina S. Laroussi Olga Bezhanova Konstantinova, Iana, and Sabrina S. Laroussi, editors. Crear entre mundos: Nuevas tendencias en la metaficción española. Albatros, 2021. Pp. 283. ISBN 978-84-7274-386-2. Studies of Spanish metafiction tend to concentrate on the novel, and the value of the collection of essays Crear entre mundos: Nuevas tendencias en la metaficción española edited by Iana Konstantinova and Sabrina Laroussi resides, to a large degree, in the meticulous attention that it pays to a variety of genres that use metafictional techniques. To reflect its openness to different kinds of metanarrative, the volume is divided into two parts. The first analyzes audiovisual narrative and contains three articles dedicated to film and one each to television and photography. The second part addresses literary narrative and includes two chapters on short story, four articles dedicated to the novel, and two that address metafictional elements in contemporary Spanish theater. Between the two parts, the editors placed a section titled “Interludio: Entre mundos” that echoes the title of the volume and invites us, through the two chapters that compose it, to explore works of art that bring together the literary and the audiovisual. The first chapter is authored by Samuel Amago, the author of two foundational volumes on metafiction in Spanish literature, and film and is titled “Estéticas reflexivas en el cine español contemporáneo.” Amago’s exceptionally well-structured and densely packed essay points to a variety of potentially fruitful veins of analysis of self-reflexive cinema in Spain. One of the most intriguing [End Page 142] suggestions that Amago makes relates to a contrast between, on the one hand, movies created by Spanish film-makers to explore the complexities of the country’s historical legacy and current socio-political troubles and, on the other, American movies filmed in Spain that tend to advance the intellectually and historically hollow vision of ‘Spain as a brand,’ a marketing concept that has been particularly useful to justify the neoliberal austerity measures after the crisis of 2008–09. Critical studies of metafiction often suffer from an excessive degree of self-referentiality, concentrating on whether a specific work of art can be considered an example of metafiction. Of particular interest among the chapters of Crear entre mundos are those that step outside the confines of the debate about the definition of metafiction and, instead, explore the ways in which self-reflective art invites us to consider crucial political and social questions of the day. Joanne Britland’s “El Selfie de la España poscrisis: Una autorreflexión a través del mockumentary,” for instance, argues that self-reflexive narratives are of great value at a time when Spaniards need to reflect on how to process the consequences of the economic crisis of 2008-9. Vilma Navarro-Daniels’ exceptionally well-argued chapter, “‘Sobreviviremos como dos robinsones’: La pérdida de referentes sociopolíticos como disolución del sujeto en ‘La muerte mientras tanto’ de Ignacio Martínez de Pisón” demonstrates that the metafictional elements in a short story by Martínez de Pisón allow the author to refer to and question the political and social consensus of the Spanish Transition. The careful structuring of the volume allows the editors to weave together, in a coherent and meaningful fashion, valuable studies of different forms of artistic expression while maintaining the critical thrust signaled in the introduction. In the part of the volume that is dedicated to the audiovisual arts, a chapter titled “Cinematic Intertextuality and Self-Reflexivity in El Ministerio del Tiempo” by Linda Bartlett discusses a popular Spanish TV series and questions the ways in which Spanish identity is articulated in the globalized world, echoing the considerations articulated by Amago in the first chapter. In the part that explores literary narrative, Mónica Botta closes the volume with an insightful article titled “Indagaciones sobre el acto de lectura en El chico de la última fila de Juan Mayorga” that elegantly brings the readers back to Amago’s observations on the complex and fruitful interplay between metafiction and reality. Several of...

Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

Market Affect and the Rhetoric of Political Economic Debates

The criminal law's person By C.Lernestedt, M.Matravers (Eds.), Oxford: Hart. 2022. pp. 216. £85.00 (hbk). ISBN: 9781509923748

The criminal law's person By C.Lernestedt, M.Matravers (Eds.), Oxford: Hart. 2022. pp. 216. £85.00 (hbk). ISBN: 9781509923748

Democratic responsibility in the digital public sphere

Democratic responsibility in the digital public sphere

When to Preach About Poverty: How Location, Race, and Ideology Shape White Evangelical Sermons

AbstractSocial scientists have long been interested in how intergroup contact or elite messaging can reduce or eliminate racial biases. To better understand the role of religious elites in these political questions, we show how a church location's income and racial characteristics interact with racial and economic ideologies to shape the political content of sermons. Testing our theories through both quantitative and qualitative analysis of an original data set of more than 102,000 sermons from more than 5200 pastors, we show that contact is only effective as a means of decreasing prejudice to the extent that actors—in our case, pastors—are ideologically capable of reconciling their potential role in economic inequality. White Evangelical pastors rarely preach about issues of poverty or racial justice overall, but the context of the preaching matters. We find that the greater the share of Black population there is in a church community, the less likely White Evangelical pastors are to mention issues of poverty or racial justice, and when they do mention it, they hold to ideological commitments that avoid blaming systems for racialized economic inequality.

Impacts of cultural factors and mode of administration on item nonresponse for political questions in the European context

ABSTRACT We tested the impacts of Hofstede’s cultural factors and mode of administration on item nonresponse (INR) for political questions in the European Values Study (EVS). We worked with the integrated European Values Study dataset, using descriptive analysis and multilevel binary logistic regression models. We concluded that (1) modes of administration with an interviewer lead to an INR lower than those without an interviewer. In terms of Hofstede’s cultural factors, we concluded that (2) the higher the power distance index in the country, the lower the INR, (3) the higher the rate of individualism in the country, the higher the INR, and (4) the higher the uncertainty avoidance index, the lower the INR. These findings stress the importance of sensitive work with cross-national data, especially with increasingly abundant data from mixed-mode surveys.

The situated power of computational empowerment

Processes of computational empowerment necessarily involve changing the relationships of power between children, digital technologies, and social contexts. However, research into computational empowerment rarely explicates a theory of power nor reflects on the dynamics of power implicated in attempts at empowerment. The purpose of this article is thus to investigate the problem of power in computational empowerment. The method applied is one of empirical philosophy. The article utilizes three paradigmatic cases describing how the power of computational empowerment is a matter of situated knowledge and agency, an outcome of invisible work, and a question of ontological politics.

Value magic

The urban process encompasses vast structures and practices engaged in creating, extracting, and accumulating value in and from the urban landscape. But what is value and how does it attain its coercive power over urban life? The unreflective deployment of axiomatic assumptions regarding the source and substance of value constitutes a form of magical thinking conjuring something out of nothing and transforming an immaterial abstraction into a material force that is real in its consequences. Unpacking the concept of value reveals a contentious debate regarding the ontological status of value as a driver of the urban process. Alternative formulations posit value as intrinsic or extrinsic, objective or subjective, residing in the world or constructed in the mind, driven by universal law or spatially and temporally contingent. Transcending all such dualisms, a transactional approach drawn from Deweyan pragmatism understands value as a co-constitutive interrelation among a valuing subject, an object of valuation, and the enveloping context in which valuation occurs. The delineation of value's ontology is fraught with political consequences for reproducing or altering the urban status quo. The move toward desired outcomes begins with articulating the foundational assumptions that underlie the value practices propelling the urban process in specific situations. Pluralizing value assumptions focuses the problem on the political question concerning whose value(s) prevail in a given situation. This redefinition shifts the focus from ameliorating current practices of extracting value to politically contesting the value commitments at work in the world.

Review: Meat the Future, by Liz Marshall

Review: <i>Meat the Future</i>, by Liz Marshall

Introduction

Archives are powerful. On this, at least, historians agree. But when it comes to why they are so powerful and how that power should be used, a great deal is up for debate. Some see the archive as the bedrock of empirical work; if not objective, the archive is as close as we can get to a shared source base from which to tell authoritative histories. To others, the archive’s power is wielded by those who assemble and oversee it—sometimes, against those whose names and lives appear within its boxes. Archives are fetishized and feared, at times by the same people; their boundaries can be policed with vigor or rendered porous through critique. But at the end of the day, they are powerful—and that is what keeps people coming back year after year, attempting to draw out their secrets or tear down their walls. It is almost harder to imagine history without the archive than to imagine a world without history.This is one way of framing the dilemma of the archive; another would be to acknowledge the many senses in which researchers might be “in” the archive. Some—especially those researching histories of racial violence, dispossession, and displacement—often confront themselves in the boxes they call up, an experience that brings the dilemma of the archive to a fine point. How can scholarly norms of objectivity and distance be maintained when one’s own history and identity are part of the materials out of which history is supposed to be made? And how can the lessons and methods produced in these moments transform the kinds of histories scholars are encouraged to produce?Each essay that follows presents a dilemma of its own, offering reflections on what it means to wrestle with these issues alongside the need for new methodological and narrative approaches to overcome them. They evoke and even provoke the boundaries around “history” and “evidence,” exploring what Katherine McKittrick calls the “fictive perimeters” of science and its norms—as well as the power to breach them.1 They grapple with the history of science’s incurable absences, haunting presences, and gaping wounds, making visible the affective labor necessary to document the unwritten and capture the unsaid. They remind us that history is never objective, much less an objective science, but is also (always) an instrument, a tool for getting along in the world. Whether that tool is wielded for domination and erasure or imagination and reparation is a political question—as, indeed, all matters of evidence, objectivity, and knowledge must be.We would like to thank Joanna Radin and Deborah Coen for inspiring and encouraging our collaboration in this issue.