Political Stakes Research Articles

Networks rewired: quota enforcement and the unintended mobilization of native place ties

Abstract We explore how institutional designs can have unintended consequences, especially by rewiring social networks. Using archival data on the civil-service examinations in historical China, we argue that the enforcement of a regional quota system in 1427 reshaped group boundaries along native place, turned emotional affinities for one’s hometown into political stakes, and reinforced the influence of native place ties among political elites. Analyzing approximately 30,000 individual records, we confirm this argument by documenting a macro-level shift from a highly unequal to a more balanced provincial distribution of students who passed the examinations following the enforcement of the quota system. As native place became a primary basis for network homophily, elites deliberately cultivated these connections, seizing the opportunity as ad hoc examiners to provide preferential treatment based on shared place of origin. Our micro-level analysis of 12,752 passing students between 1400 and 1580 identifies this in-group favoritism, with examiners often ranking students from their own provinces higher. A mechanism of safeguarding political stakes underscores this baseline effect, which became more pronounced during the quota stage, especially under weaker state capacity, among examiners from disadvantaged provinces, and when examiners had greater vested interest in their hometown. These findings enrich theories of group boundaries and categorization, network homophily and formation, and the unintended consequences of institutional designs while also providing policy insights for affirmative action.

Breaking free from linear assumptions: Unravelling the relationship between affective polarization and democratic support

AbstractScholars increasingly raise concerns about the alleged detrimental impact of affective polarization on citizens’ democratic attitudes. Yet, prior studies on the relationship between affective polarization and democratic support have yielded mixed results: Whereas some scholars report evidence that affective polarization erodes citizens’ support for democracy, others report null findings. In this research note, we posit that one relevant explanation for these mixed results is that the relationship between affective polarization and democratic support is not linear, but rather negatively curvilinear (i.e., an inverted U‐shape). Though extreme levels of affective polarization may harm citizens’ democratic commitments, a moderate amount of affective polarization can strengthen democratic support by heightening the political stakes and stimulating democratic involvement. Employing generalized additive modelling on data from the CNEP collected in Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States, we show strong and robust support for this negatively curvilinear pattern. These findings have important implications for our understanding of the dynamics between affective polarization and democratic support, as well as for the recommended estimation strategies of future studies that aim to explore this relationship.

How to establish a new medical school? A scoping review of the key considerations.

Establishing new medical schools in medically under-served regions is suggested as part of the solution to the problem of doctor shortages and maldistributions. Establishing a new medical school is, however, a complex undertaking with high financial and political stakes. Critically, the evidence-base for this significant activity has not previously been elucidated. This paper presents the first scoping review on this vitally important, yet under-researched aspect of medical education and health workforce planning. To better understand the process of new medical school establishment, this review posed two research questions: (1) What is the nature of the available literature on establishing a new medical school?; (2) What are the key factors to be considered when establishing a new medical school? Five databases and grey literature were searched in 2015 and 2021 for English-language articles, using search terms related to new medical schools and their establishment. Inclusion and exclusion criteria were based on relevance and suitability in answering the research questions. Seventy-eight articles were analysed both structurally and thematically to understand the nature of the literature and the key considerations involved. Structurally, most articles were descriptive pieces outlining personal and institutional experiences and did not make use of research methodologies nor theory. Thematically, thirteen key considerations were identified including reasons for establishment; location choices; leadership and governance; costs and funding; partnerships; staffing; student numbers; student recruitment; curriculum design and implementation; clinical training sites; buildings and facilities; information and technology resources; and accreditation. Significant gaps in the literature included how to obtain the initial permission from governing authorities and the personal costs and burnout experienced by founding leaders and staff. Although, the literature on new medical school establishment is empirically and theoretically under-developed, it is still useful and reveals a number of important considerations that could assist founding leaders and teams to maximise the outcomes and impact of their establishment efforts. Critically, the evidence-base underpinning this complex undertaking needs to be better informed by theory and research.

Chaosmosis: Ethical, Artistic, Political Stakes

Abstract: This essay introduces the concept of "Chaosmosis," as employed by Jean-Jacques Lebel for the collective exhibition of the same name at the Centre Georges Pompidou in Paris in 2024. Considering the intellectual origins of the term, from the writings of James Joyce, Umberto Eco, and Félix Guattari, as well as Lebel’s close friendship with Guattari, it explains how "chaosmos" offers an ethico-aesthetic paradigm with which to conceive of and continue the surrealist revolution.

Silent Speech in Phaswane Mpe's HIV/AIDS Writing.

South African writer Phaswane Mpe (1970-2004) is often canonized and memorialized as a brave truth-teller who broke the silence on HIV/AIDS in the context of government silence and denial. And yet Mpe's writings-including poetry, short stories, a novel, and scholarly criticism-contemplate illness as a problem for truth and representation in works that linger in silence and ambiguity. This article analyses the tension between silence and speech in Mpe's creative writing in response to HIV/AIDS. Using Mpe's works as an illustrative example, I trouble the desire to read illness narratives as forms of truth-telling and silence-breaking. The desire for the transparency of speech in a global archive of illness narratives also informs a colonial politics of representation that instrumentalizes literature as ethnographic evidence. Mpe's writing on HIV/AIDS refuses a demand for authenticity by holding the embodied experience of disease at a slight remove from the reader in order to register the forms of spiritual and epistemological crisis that epidemic and social loss produce. My contention is that the political stakes of this writing lie not in Mpe's ability to render a public health crisis with verisimilitude, but in the capacity for writing to provide solace and sublimity faced with death. Through an analysis of Mpe's fiction and poetry, this article proposes a methodology for reading the politics of illness narratives across globalized space which attends to the world-building potential of creative expression as a radical practice that resists incorporative models of aesthetic intelligibility.

Are Tibetans Indigenous? The Political Stakes and Potentiality of the Translation of Indigeneity

Are Tibetans Indigenous? The Political Stakes and Potentiality of the Translation of Indigeneity

The Political Determinants of Public Support for Obstruction of Supreme Court Nominees

Abstract Despite increased political attention to instances of legislative obstruction in recent years, little is known about the public’s attitudes toward these procedural techniques. I evaluate these attitudes in the context of the last two decades of nominations to the U.S. Supreme Court with three complementary analyses. In the first, nationally representative survey evidence reveals an overriding political dimension to Americans’ attitudes over the use of tactics to delay the confirmation process. The president’s copartisans express considerably higher levels of opposition to delayed consideration of a nominee than individuals politically opposed to the president. In the second and third, evidence from observational surveys and a survey experiment shows that these attitudes vary depending on the type of the obstruction under consideration, with Americans less supportive of the use of forms of obstruction that entirely preclude procedural consideration of a nominee, such as refusing to hold hearings, than more established methods that do not, like the filibuster or document requests. These findings reveal that the American public has internalized the political stakes of judicial nominations and suggest that obstruction may have electoral consequences in an era of extreme polarization.

International Crimes and Double Standards

Abstract The law’s aspiration to impartiality, central to its legitimacy, is impaired by concerns that judicial systems treat similarly situated persons or factual situations differently for improper reasons. In few fields is this truer than the sphere of international criminal justice, where the political stakes are high and judicial institutions are relatively young. The conflicts in Ukraine and Israel/Palestine have fuelled claims on all sides that the search for accountability has been marred by double standards. How these are addressed — by courts, states, and civil society — matters for the victims of grave crimes, and for the international justice project itself. This article argues that, while those who wish to advance international justice cannot eliminate double standards, they can adopt concrete measures to combat and minimize them. Given how important perceptions are in this debate, even small steps matter.

The political stakes of cancer epistemics

We demonstrate a transnationally situated dialogue as a method to bring ethnographic and historical research in Brazil, East Africa (Kenya, Tanzania and Uganda), India, Russia and Spain into conversation to show three cancer epistemics sites (research, detection, and care access) where the politics of cancer epistemics are at play. First, in the field of research, we show how certain ways of knowing, and certain questions about and interests in cancer, are privileged over others. Using examples from Spain and East Africa, we highlight how a shift towards microbiological and high-technology research has outpriced many more locally grounded research agendas, ignoring questions of industrial and capital accountability in cancer aetiology. Second, we look at ways of making cancer visible, how knowledge is mobilised in cancer detection and screening, where and for whom. We discuss the increased individualisation of risk which is reframing cancer surveillance and therapeutic agendas. Using examples from India, Spain and Brazil, we demonstrate how the epistemics of cancer detection generate discourses of blame and responsibility at the individual level and accentuate existing inequities whilst simultaneously absorbing patients and their families into complex networks of surveillance. Lastly, we examine how the epistemics of cancer implicate the very possibilities of accessing cancer care, shaping care pathways and possibilities for patients. With ethnographic examples from India, Russia and Brazil, we demonstrate how an orientation towards the individual shifts attention away from the commercialisation of healthcare and dominance of logics of profit in therapeutics. Throughout the paper, we point towards what is holding these cancer discourses together and grapple with how the politics of cancer epistemics are at play across the globe, even if they appear to be taking many different forms. Our approach highlights how practices are mirrored in the framing, implementation, detection and care of cancer with far-reaching effects.

The Death Knell for Joy?

The essay explores the puzzling relationship between joy and the problems of postmodern culture, which affect the quality of our being in the world. Reflection on the precarious status of joy and its uncertain position in contemporary culture allows for a unique perspective on this relationship. The higher the political, economic and social stakes, the more the search for joy becomes a search for meaning, an essential nourishment for cultural forms. Such joy, filtered through our struggles with life’s challenges, compels us to examine the consequences of its absence (pain, suffering, joyless existence) and its manifestations in art (music), religion (Christianity), and philosophy (freedom). The power of joy lies in recognizing the inevitable imperfection of all solutions to our problems that do not include it as a fundamental component of life.

Semiotics After Geontopower Some Preliminary Thoughts

This essay is part of a book project, tentatively titled, Do We Need a Semiotics After Geontopower? The essay begins with an overview of the atmospheric conditions of an old debate about how to liberate theories of mind, communication and language from their humanist enclosure. It does so by highlighting a few scientific and public debates about what constitutes evidence of prehuman, and nonhuman animal and plant forms of mind and communication. The purpose of this brief foray into complicated debates is to conjure the sense-intuitions circulating around these arguments about the political and ethical stakes of describing a kind of existence as having this or that quality of language and mind. The essay then puts pressure on how these sense-intuitions about communication and mind are scaled—how a sense of the stakes of mind to the treatment of existence becomes a quest to model a general theory of a post-humanist mind. This takes me to the commonalities between a certain way of producing a posthumanist mind and the strategies of environmental protect within the movement for the rights of nature. Why do these approaches feel to some like they are the best way of verifying that prehuman, nonhuman animal and plant forms, and nonlife have semiotic capacities as one supports First Nation and Indigenous earthkin?The essay ends by summarizing the broader content and stakes of Do We Need a Semiotics After Geontopower?

Worldmaking on digital platforms: A study of Cuban comedy in social media

This article studies the digital-cultural labor of three Cuban Instagram comedians and the worldmaking they promote. The comedians, Marlon, Chupetin, and Kende, immensely popular among Cuban audiences, create content that centers their Black working-class and street-smart identity. Through a close analysis of how these comedians utilize performance as rhetorical tools, I examine the entanglements and possibilities that marginalized content creators face when making symbolic and embodied meaning not sanctioned by the nation-state's meta-narratives of normative identity. I draw on theories of performance studies, media anthropology and Caribbean studies, to conceptualize the political, cultural, and personal stakes that come with the ‘world-making’ labor of Cuban Instagram comedians. I argue performances of estranged ways of being, distributed through transnational digital networks, enact aspirations of redressing long-standing desires and anxieties about national identity and personal agency. Ultimately this article situates social media platforms as vital spaces of worldmaking in a digital era.

The household, the citizen and the city: towards a social history of urban politics in the late Middle Ages

ABSTRACT Histories of politics in the late medieval European town present a struggle between town oligarchs and town citizens. While the conclusions that historians draw differ, the stakes of politics are the same: exclusion, participation and representation in town government. Politics is the ‘public’ domain of officeholding, elections and voting, its actors exclusively male, its locations the council chamber, the craft guild, the workshop. Starting and ending with the evidence of a 1532 ‘insurrection of women’ in the English city of Norwich, this article seeks to reconceptualise town politics in the late Middle Ages. Its premise is that urban citizenship was a social and performative practice as much as a formal legal and political status. It argues that the relationship between home, household and family was fundamental to the lived experience of citizenship. The urban household was a complex source of political agency, where the official separation between citizen and non-citizen was difficult to sustain. The 1532 insurrection of women allows us to connect the politics of the household to the politics of the town hall and to write a social history of town politics, in which women were political actors.

Éco-anxiété de l’adolescent et autres avatars des craintes modernes : de quoi parle-t-on vraiment ?

The current climate crisis is leading to speculation of all kinds where the political stakes of power and those related to the economic consequences compete in a permanent media one- upmanship. This context might seem anecdotal if it did not have direct consequences on the population and specifically on the youngest who are particularly worried about the ecological disaster that has been announced. Recent studies conducted among young people have revealed unprecedented reactions grouped behind different terms that are far from gaining consensus, the most emblematic of which is undoubtedly that of "eco-anxiety", which is used without limit. Our contribution provides an overview of what eco-anxiety is, its challenges, the associated disorders and

Land, reconfigured: Defying the laws of physics, upholding the rules of the market in the metaverse

Land ownership, occupancy, and use are enduringly central components of economies and societies across the world. Even in a capitalist economy increasingly mediated through digital technologies, land remains foundational to wide-ranging aspects of social life. However, conceptualizations of land fundamentally transform through virtual environments like the Metaverse, where digital or virtual land is a core feature. This article examines the construction and use of land under digital capitalism, specifically in the online virtual reality environment Metaverse. Studying virtual land markets in this environment, we show how land exists in continuous material and conceptual transformation via myriad landmaking technologies. Virtual landmaking offers new capital accumulation possibilities while simultaneously reifying existing market logics and creating new fictions around land. We emphasize how, despite its newness, virtual landmaking in the Metaverse relates to landmaking efforts that predate digital capitalism, from state-led large-scale engineering projects to land grabs and colonial expansion. Simultaneously, land reconceptualization in the Metaverse reflects new economic dynamics germane to digital capitalism, including commodification and assetization, and the rise of digital platforms as both market creators, through digital renderings, and rentier intermediaries. Throughout, we highlight the distributional and political stakes of reconfiguring land via new technologies.

« Un cri noué en forme de langage » : Malemort, ou la naissance du modernisme antillais

Glissant’s novel Malemort triggered in Chamoiseau a lasting fascination for this style of writing that was both negative and almost impenetrable in its language and narration, but paradoxically liberating in terms of what the novelistic form—a form that this article calls Antillean Modernism—can accomplish. Stylistically marked in its form by Faulkner and Joyce, Malemort’s Modernism is at the same time Caribbean and planetary. The political and aesthetic stakes of Malemort cannot really be understood in isolation and must be put in relation with its direct tributaries and other contemporaneous key works of Caribbean modernism. However, the notion of hierarchical influence must be rejected, and that of generations also further interrogated, in keeping with the non-linear history of the Caribbean, with its spiral temporalities and inherent multiplicity. Finally, this article will put forward that Malemort performs an apparently conflicting but truly fertile relationship between Antillean Modernism and key tenets of Adorno’s aesthetic theory.

Three waves of critical terrorism studies: agenda-setting, elaboration, problematisation

ABSTRACT The past twenty years have witnessed critical terrorism studies (CTS) become an increasingly influential body of work. In this article, I offer the first sustained effort to chart CTS’ development and transformation by positing three successive waves in its evolution. CTS’ first wave, I argue, was characterised by agenda-setting efforts to map the prospects of a distinctively critical approach to terrorism research. Second wave literature elaborated on this nascent project’s scope, strengthening and broadening its empirical, conceptual, and methodological ambitions. More recent third wave work seeks to problematise the underpinning assumptions and commitments of earlier CTS literature, especially in relation to its engagement with race and colonialism. Mapping CTS’ development in this way, I argue, offers three contributions to knowledge. First, it helps historicise CTS research by detailing the academic and wider contexts of its development. Second, it enables engagement with CTS’ pluralism, foregrounding the importance of internal disagreements for its past and future trajectories. And, third, it enables new reflection on the political and normative stakes of differing approaches to, and aspirations for, critical terrorism research.

HISTORICAL ACTION AND NARRATIVE IN THE CONTEXT OF HISTORIOGRAPHY IN RICOEUR AND RANCIERE

The argument of this study is that a critical encounter between the ‘historiographical’ texts of Ricoeur and Rancière on the theme of historical action and narrative provides us with a fruitful approach to the political stakes of the act of writing history. More specifically, I claim that attention to how these two authors frame narrative agency in the construction of our identities in history reveals two points of salience that give orientation to our attitude toward history, namely, disruption and harmony. Framing history as a problem in this way makes visible the centrality of how to conceive agency within the two poles of modern existence: on the one hand, statistical regularities that govern behavior in the form of impersonal forces and, on the other, individual projects, the trajectories of which form a coherent life (and define autonomy for the subject). The merit of narrative history is to bridge these poles; but it thereby occludes the antagonisms characteristic of modernity. It is in order to make these visible that we need a disruptive attention to the way narratives are constructed retrospectively.

Unruly Truth: On Parrhesia and/as Political Refusal

This article employs Bonnie Honig’s concepts of refusal and intensification to conceptualize the ancient practice of ‘parrhesia’ as a form of conflictual, political truth-telling. This entails envisaging political truth-telling as an intense, agonal practice that does not establish unalterable foundations but takes part in world-building practices. To this end, I first reconstruct parrhesia as an agonistic practice of truth-telling. Against this background, I take up Honig’s concept of intensification to make sense of parrhesia’s intricate political stakes with reference to Euripides’s Ion tragedy. Finally, I reenvisage the bacchants’ secession to Cithaeron against the backdrop of Michel Foucault’s analysis of the cynic tradition, where parrhesia turns into a subversive political practice of displaying and prefiguring other forms of existence and social relations.

A reply to my critics

ABSTRACT In this article, I respond to critics of Plato and the Mythic Tradition in Political Thought. First, I defend my choice to carve up the concept of myth into deep myths and literary myths. I address concerns that the effective focus of my book on literary myths risks jettisoning the political stakes of myth, and that it may not solve the definitional problems the move seeks to mitigate. Second, I answer my critics’ invitation to elaborate on the relationship between myth and critical reason. In particular, I attempt to resolve the tension they perceive between my definition of myth, as a medium that is distinctively opaque to criticism, and my argument that it can complement critical thought.