ABSTRACT In a post-dirigiste economy, French policymakers have come to rely heavily on private consultants, raising concerns about the privatization and democratic erosion of policymaking. To assess consultants’ influence, this article focuses on the role of benchmarks as key knowledge instruments through which consultants operate in policymaking. It analyzes the political economy of benchmarks in contemporary France, the social relations between producers and consumers of benchmarks, and the ways in which actors commission, produce, select, and strategically deploy benchmarks. Drawing on semi-structured interviews with benchmark producers in major consulting firms and public advisory bodies, as well as analysis of official reports, the article shows that publicly commissioned benchmarks often serve pre-defined political strategies, while non-commissioned rankings possess the affective power to shape public discourse by generating emotions around national emergencies, amplified by the media, that justify competitiveness-oriented agendas. Benchmarks rarely determine specific policy content; rather they reassure decision-makers, legitimize reforms, and facilitate responsibility-shifting. They are also ideological instruments in struggles over economic governance. Their indicators and comparative frameworks privilege neoliberal solutions aligned with the converging interests of senior civil servants and large corporations, but their influence ultimately depends on domestic actors who mobilize them to defend shared class positions.

ABSTRACT With the commencement of oil extraction from the Naftun oilfields in 1908, the Anglo-Persian Oil Company designated Abadan Island in the southwestern province of Khuzestan, Iran, as the pivotal locus for refining and exporting Iranian oil. This decision transformed the island into a company town while embedding it within the broader geopolitical and economic framework of British imperialism. From its inception, the oil company town of Abadan was conceived as a strategic hub in the British Empire rather than an isolated settlement. Its architecture and infrastructure were designed to standardise spaces, ensuring Abadan’s integration into imperial circuits, in preparation for imperial expansion, powered by oil’s strategic mobility. Two central elements of the project were the reconfiguration of property rights and the cultivation of a spatial imagination that reinforced colonial hierarchies. The result was a racially segregated “island within an island,” where expatriates enjoyed privileged environments while local and non-European labourers were confined to inferior living and working conditions. Drawing on archival materials, including maps, correspondence, and contractual records from British governmental and corporate sources, this paper examines the political, legal, and spatial strategies that shaped Abadan Island and its oil company town between 1908 and the 1930s. It argues that Abadan’s early urban form was a calculated imperial construct, rather than a conventional company town, and thus intended to materially situate a local oil site onto the British imperial map.

This study examines the practices of gifting in the princely state of Swat under the rule of Miangul Abdul Wadud (1917–49) and his successor, Miangul Abdul Haq Jahanzeb (1949–69), highlighting the interplay between personal generosity, political strategy and cultural patronage. Gifts, fines, allowances and material rewards functioned not merely as symbolic gestures of benevolence but as deliberate instruments for cultivating loyalty, securing alliances and reinforcing hierarchical structures within the governance framework. Regular stipends operated as structured quasi-gifts, consolidating authority both within the state and in relations with external actors. Beyond political utility, the Walis’ gifting practices encompassed cultural, educational and recreational domains, including the distribution of books, patronage of literary gatherings and the sharing of hunted game. This study demonstrates that in Swat state, gifting was integral to governance, operating at the intersection of authority, diplomacy and social obligation, thereby illuminating the broader significance of material culture.

The present study analyzes the perceived authenticity of human-computer interactions in Spanish, as measured by computer agents’ use of positive politeness strategies. We explore how AI chatbots’ use of initial comments, emojis, and follow-up questions shapes participants’ perceptions of these interactions. An experimental study reveals that initial comments are the most influential factor in determining whether an interaction is considered authentic, followed by follow-up questions. At the same time, the use of emojis is detrimental to the overall acceptability of stimuli. An exploratory analysis of the variables frequency of AI use, gender, and age shows that regular AI users, males, and younger participants are less sensitive to politeness manipulations. These findings advance our understanding of how politeness strategies affect perceptions of authenticity in human-computer interactions.

ABSTRACT Since achieving independence in 1980, Zimbabwe’s security sector has been the cornerstone of the ruling party, the Zimbabwe African National Union’s (ZANU PF) political survival strategy. The security sector has been notorious for participating in political violence and electoral malpractices, prompting calls for security sector reform (SSR). This paper, drawing on secondary data from a range of open access materials, including textbooks, peer-reviewed journal articles and grey literature, discusses the contentious SSR debate in Zimbabwe. The article contributes to the debate on whether change of leadership (Presidency) automatically transforms regime security perspectives by interrogating whether the post-Mugabe era effectively dismantled the partisan security sector system or perpetuated its continuation. It also provides actionable recommendations for the development of a comprehensive SSR framework, which ensures that the security sector is transparent, accountable and responsive to the needs of all Zimbabweans. The paper emphasises inclusive civilian oversight of security institutions, increasing local ownership and participation in security sector governance, and integrating gender mainstreaming into the SSR concept, both in theory and in practice. It is argued that comprehensively addressing entrenched power structures and the ruling elites’ lack of political will is essential to enhance government agencies’ effectiveness and responsiveness to SSR imperatives.

ABSTRACT This paper theorises vernacular aesthetics as a situated and alternate epistemology that signifies political performances embedded in the textures of ordinary life, transcending institutional categories of art and politics. Using an interdisciplinary lens of political philosophy, performance studies, and art theory, the paper examines prominent cases like the Shaheen Bagh (2019–2020) and the Farmers’ Protests (2020–2021, 2024–2025) to demonstrate how mundane acts such as serving tea, maintaining langaars (community kitchens), or repurposing protest spaces into self-sustaining villages become potent political strategies through sustained repetition and care. Engaging with the shift from aesthetic autonomy and disinterested contemplation to participatory and performative paradigms of art, the paper argues for a reorientation of political aesthetics through the lens of the everyday.

Aims: Finnish gambling policy, long based on a state-controlled monopoly, is set to shift to a license-based regime in 2027. The study investigates the Corporate Political Activity (CPA) strategies and discursive frames used by gambling industry actors, comparing their application among actors and phases of the legislative process in the context of Finland's gambling policy reform. Methods: In total, 36 formal statements were analyzed, including submissions to the public consultation (n = 19) and parliamentary hearings (n = 17). A deductive content analysis was conducted, based on the previous CPA frameworks. Results: The results indicate that gambling industry actors proposed alternative policies and sought to prevent certain parts of the legislation from being enacted. Discursive framings shifted throughout the legislative process: legal rights dominated consultations, while unintended effects, especially increased unlicensed gambling, became more salient in parliamentary hearings. Clear differences emerged among actors. International actors prioritized policy substitution and framed the proposed legislation as excessive and harmful to their legal rights, whereas the state monopoly operator did not prevent enactment of regulations. A further difference concerned proposals to replace some harm-reduction measures with more restrictive alternatives. Conclusions: The growing influence of the gambling industry may risk deprioritizing the prevention and reduction of gambling harm in future gambling policy.

The global wellness industry has multifaceted impacts on health and well-being, including through the sale and consumption of wellness products, the provision of health information to consumers, and the promotion of specific norms and values. Despite its growing prominence, the wellness industry and its impacts on health and policymaking remain understudied. This article examines how the wellness industry operates as a commercial, social, and political determinant of health. We draw on commercial determinants of health and corporate political activity frameworks to analyze the strategies, structures, and discourses of the wellness industry. We examine existing academic literature, regulatory documents, industry data, and media and policy sources to map the wellness industry's characteristics, regulatory environment, and political dimensions, including its role in shaping US public health policy through the Make America Healthy Again (MAHA) movement. The wellness industry deploys political strategies closely resembling those of other harmful commodities industries, including undermining scientists and policymakers, promoting personal empowerment, and lobbying against regulation. While wellness products and practices are often framed as responding to the erosion of institutional trust and health care systems' failure to address persistent health inequities, their promotion may deepen, rather than alleviate, these crises. The MAHA movement illustrates how wellness logics have become embedded in policymaking, platforming individualized wellness while falling short of addressing the systemic drivers of ill health and inequity. Applying a commercial determinants of health lens to wellness highlights the need for stronger regulatory oversight of health claims, demonetization of harmful online health misinformation, and structural investment in equitable health care systems. This is particularly urgent given the MAHA movement's alignment of wellness with populist politics. Further research is merited to systematically document wellness industry practices across diverse national contexts and investigate links between wellness discourse, health inequalities, and political polarization.

This essay examines the methods and narratives employed by the Yugoslav communists in the United States in their public and political activism during World War II. Revisiting the relevant scholarship and relying on press articles produced by key political and public figures as well as their correspondence, it examines how the Yugoslav communists employed a judicious political strategy to build support within the Yugoslav diaspora in favour of the Partisans and a new, socialist Yugoslavia.

ABSTRACT This paper traces the making of Shenzhen’s urbanism as an experiment in governance and design at the frontline of China’s Reform Era since the late 1970s. Drawing on exclusive archival research, interviews, and field studies, it focuses on Overseas Chinese Town (OCT), a ‘new town within the new town,’ as a crucible where the socialist state sought to court global capital, technology, and talent while cultivating markets within a command economy. I argue that OCT exemplifies what I term statecraft urbanism: the use of urban planning and design as instruments through which the party-state inscribes political strategies and economic ambitions into spatial forms. Rather than treating Shenzhen as a case of policy reform or urban planning experimentation alone, the paper demonstrates how urban form, understood as linear city plans, garden city imagery, enclave road system, and themed environment, was actively mobilized to manage political risk, build coalitions across scales of the state, and generate new sources of value. OCT reveals how the art of governance and the art of planning and design were co-produced by central ministries, party organizations, local governments, state-owned enterprises, and transnational actors. The result was not an imitation of global models, but an urbanism of experimentation at once pragmatic and aspirational that reveals how the Communist Chinese party-state imagined, negotiated, and materialized reform through the very act of city-building. The trajectory of OCT marks a structural shift in China’s reform: from state-led experimentation under uncertainty to a more state-market alignment through urbanism, from fragmented governance to negotiated consolidation, from industrial logic to real estate and value capture, and from symbolic urbanism to commodified and financialized form. By foregrounding the material and spatial dimensions of reform, the paper offers a new lens for understanding how China’s ‘socialist market economy’ was not only regulated, but built.

Politeness is a communication strategy that involves both positive and negative face, aiming to prevent face-threatening acts and help individuals maintain each other’s social image. Communication that takes place in cyberspace has now become common and accepted by various groups of people, regardless of age, background, or social status. Through social media, individuals can not only communicate and exchange information, but also establish connections, interact with old friends, and find new friends from different across the globe. This study aims to identify types of politeness strategies and the most dominant types of politeness strategies used in the @nikizefanya account Twitter (X) platform. The study uses qualitative descriptive method. The findings reveal that there are six positive politeness strategy and two negative politeness strategies used in the @nikizefanya account Twitter (X) platform. The most dominant strategy is the fourth positive politeness strategy (Use in-group identity markers) with the percentage of usage reached 45,5%. This shows the strong tendency of users to build and emphasize group identity in their interactions. Meanwhile, from the category of negative politeness strategies, the first strategy (Be conventionally indirect) dominates with a much higher percentage of 89,4%. These findings show that the users’ comments in NIKIZEFANYA account use language or references that identify them as part of the same group as their audience, creating a sense of closeness and community. This research contributes to understanding how politeness functions as a tool to maintain harmonious communication and avoid conflict in social media context.

The political elites involvement within general election in Indonesia seems as a dynamic phenomena. Their struggle for power is generally driven by the candidate’s desire for power, where affect to rise the political atmosphere which has implications for people's lives including their decision to vote. The involvement of political elites and the power of capital in political contestation believed able to switch the political configuration significantly. Article aims to show how political elite utilizes their modalities and power in effort to sreach the power through general elections. It based on the research results related to the 2024 Indonesian elections by use qualitative methods in form of the literature study. Based on that, it shows the involvement of political elites in the contestation usually related to the interest in perpetuating their influence and existence by utilizing and converting their ecoonomics power, social, cultural, symbolic and political capital through various political strategies. Thru that strategies they believe will win the election angd fibnally will hands the power. Presence of elites in Indonesia in their involvement in elections is something that often occurs and is seen actively playing a role as supporters or as competitors. Elite involvement in the 2024 elections in Indonesia often utilizes political capital as access to power to win the election. The strategic role in the involvement carried out by elites to utilize their political modalities in the 2024 general election contestation in Indonesia is of course to mobilize and consolidate voters so that the candidates they support can win the battle in the election.

The shift in political campaigning style ahead of the 2024 election has been largely driven by technological advancements. Candidates increasingly utilised social media, particularly TikTok, to attract the attention of Gen Z and Millennial voters. This study aims to examine how the TikTok algorithm functioned as a political marketing strategy for the Prabowo–Gibran pair and to analyse the power relations embedded within their digital campaign. Employing a qualitative methodology the research uses content analysis techniques underpinned by Michel Foucault’s perspective on discourse theory. Were gathered through a literature review and observation of TikTok content. While content analysis identifies specific campaign patterns and strategies, the Foucauldian lens reveals the power relations operating within algorithmic mechanisms. The findings demonstrate that the Prabowo–Gibran campaign used the ‘gemoy’ dance, viral jingles, and AI-generated cartoons to engage young voters. Through discourse practices that shape a new ‘regime of truth’, the ‘reversal to real’ strategy successfully transformed Prabowo’s public persona from a stern military figure into a populist one. Furthermore, the power relations within Jokowi’s political network were widely disseminated via TikTok, with algorithms serving as a ‘technology of power’ that governed voter preferences and contributes to the pair’s victory.

ABSTRACT This article identifies forms of creative visual resistance to a prevailing logic of border enforcement around the world – a logic aimed at curbing undocumented human movement, often with deadly consequences. These forms of resistance serve to highlight the porosity and triviality of borders, as well as the violence that increasingly defines their global management. This phenomenon is perpetuated through policies, rhetorical strategies, speech acts and media narratives that together sustain a toxic discourse of exclusion. Following a discussion of the theoretical framework of border abolitionism and a critical reading of performative and ritualistic state power, the article undertakes an analysis of two instances of artistic digital practices that mock the state border performance while subverting it. Both were prompted by the spectre of the ‘Trump Wall’ in the US-Mexico border during the 2016 election campaign. From the perspective of this article, visual forms of resistance transgress the border, exposing its violence and absurdity while reimagining it as a space for creative and alternative political strategies. The analysis engages with the concept of the carnivalesque, foregrounding its ambivalent character as a mode of transgression that can both reinforce sovereign power and, when reclaimed from below, enable forms of visual resistance that unsettle bordering practices.

ABSTRACT This study examines the predictors of variation in militarisation across nation states’ coercive apparatuses from 2011 to 2021. It tests two competing explanations of militarisation: as a functional response to changing crime threats, or as a politically driven strategy emerging from economic, political, and social crises. Drawing on cross-national longitudinal data covering 161 countries, we estimate six linear panel regressions with country fixed effects and robust standard errors clustered by country, using a multiply imputed dataset that ensures the inclusion of developing countries. We employ three distinct measures of militarisation and find that, contrary to prevailing assumptions, none is associated with the level of crime threat. Instead, political stability emerges as the strongest predictor of militarisation levels. These results challenge functionalist, or crime-control, accounts of militarisation. Rather, they suggest that militarisation operates primarily as a political strategy: it provides a veneer of stability, restores public confidence in ruling parties’ ability to maintain control during crises, and reflects a logic of control in which elites expand coercive capacity to deter dissent and project authority. In this light, the militarisation of the coercive apparatus may serve as a mechanism of power projection.

African theatre scholarship has largely privileged playwright-centred criticism, foregrounding dramatic texts while giving comparatively limited attention to directing practice, rehearsal methodology, actor training, and production architecture. Across diverse regional contexts, critical discourse has prioritized literary interpretation over the processes through which directors organise performers, space, technology, and production cultures. Directing therefore warrants sustained conceptual attention as a creative, pedagogical, and organizational formation within African theatre. This article proposes Afroterradelogy (ATD) as a decolonial framework for analysing directing practice through comparative African case studies. ATD reorients the analytic grammar through which directing is conceptualized in contemporary African theatre, positioning it as an integrated field in which indigenous epistemologies intersect with rehearsal systems, technological mediation, institutional infrastructures, and material negotiation. It offers an inductively derived analytic model grounded in situated practice. Drawing on comparative performance analysis and practice-based production study across West, Southern, East, and North Africa, the article identifies recurring structural tendencies in rehearsal organization, political staging strategies, disciplined improvisation, and hybrid aesthetic mediation. Across these contexts, the director emerges as pedagogical architect and institutional mediator, structuring creative agency across spatial, technological, and material conditions. Afroterradelogy offers a disciplined analytic vocabulary for examining directing praxis as pedagogical, aesthetic, and institutional architecture across contemporary African theatre.

Since the mid-1990s, many countries have introduced Public-Private Partnerships (PPPs) to build hospitals and deliver health services. While numerous studies have been conducted on the policies surrounding PPPs and their social and financial impacts, limited research has focused on the attitudes and perspectives of stakeholders who have experienced the reform- specifically their subject position-takings towards hospital PPPs. Even fewer studies have explored the situation in China, and the theoretical explanations underpinning this policy process remain underdeveloped. This paper aims to fill this gap by examining how healthcare stakeholders in China, particularly public and PPP/private hospital managers and administrators, experience hospital PPPs and investigating the social mechanisms that underpin these experiences. Based on Bourdieu's concepts of field, capital, habitus, and the state, and a case-centred qualitative study, 33 key informant interviews were thematically analysed. The study reveals a field of struggle between the dominant public hospitals and the subordinate PPP hospital for state recognition. Rather than passively accept neoliberal changes in the healthcare field, our participants respond innovatively to hospital PPPs, where there are antagonistic understandings of the role of the state and its relations with the market regarding the financing, provision, and delivery of healthcare. These conflicting position-takings and dispositions reflect how differential power relations - manifested in the disparity in accumulated capital - between public and PPP hospitals materially and symbolically shape the struggling experiences of those working in the system. The study concludes that understanding hospital PPPs as existing in the healthcare field compensates the existing interpretation as a "political strategy" from the pluralist perspective or a "powerful discourse" in a Marxist tradition, and in doing so, the field struggles between public and private/PPP hospitals over state recognition and power differentials in resource allocation can be revealed. The findings also emphasise the importance of defining the boundaries between public and private hospitals, as well as determining the level of private capital involvement in health service delivery and funding.

This study investigates politeness strategies represented in the German textbook Netzwerk A1 and contrasts them with documented Indonesian politeness norms to explore their pedagogical implications for German language teaching in Indonesia. Grounded in contemporary politeness theory and contrastive pragmatics, the research employs a qualitative descriptive design based on systematic document analysis. Dialogic interactions in the textbook were examined to identify patterns of directness, grammatical mitigation, hierarchical encoding, lexical politeness markers, and the use of Konjunktiv II. A micro-contrastive analysis of representative request forms further illustrates divergences between German structurally direct but grammatically mitigated formulations and Indonesian relationally oriented, lexically mediated politeness strategies. Interpreted through the distinction between pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic dimensions, the findings reveal that differences extend beyond linguistic structure to culturally grounded evaluations of appropriateness and hierarchy. These divergences highlight potential areas of pragmatic transfer among Indonesian learners of German. This study contributes to the field of pragmatics by expanding contrastive analysis beyond English-centered paradigms and by providing a multi-layered account of politeness that integrates structural, lexical, and grammatical dimensions. The findings also offer pedagogical insights for developing intercultural pragmatic competence in German language teaching.

In India, a communitarian society, concerns over public-truth disputes are widespread. The Indian National Congress (INC) and allies promoted secular-liberal nationalism but, eventually, they failed, as they lacked grassroots connections. The right-wing Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) capitalised on Hindu-majoritarian religious sentiments, politicised the grassroots and mobilised them, and formed the government – first in the mid-1990s, for a relatively short period, and then again since 2014. In power, the BJP seeks to divert the political focus away from neoliberal accumulation and increasing inequality by polarising Hindus against religious and ethnic minorities and consolidating their vote. Through sociopolitical strategies and modalities, polarisation has shaped a majoritarian ‘religious nationalist’ identity among Hindus in India – in three phases (1992–2010, 2011–2022 and 2023 onwards) – and it has helped the BJP consolidate their political power, charisma and influence. Social media has amplified the effect of religious polarisation as a political strategy. Since 2023, the BJP has contextualised their strategy to ethno-religious segregation and polarisation among the Christian ethnic minority Kuki and Hindu Meiteis in Manipur, North-East India, that is also affective in deployment, and that suits the already fractionalised ethnoscape. The result is electoral-political shifts in voting behaviour and ethno-religious identity differentiation.

This study examines the political motivations underlying the National Awakening Party’s (PKB) decision to join the Indonesia Maju Coalition following the 2024 presidential election by integrating insights from coalition theory, particularly office-seeking and policy-seeking frameworks, as well as party institutionalization theory. This research adopts a qualitative case study approach to uncover micro-level motivations through the analysis of multi-source data, including credible online news reports, official party documents, and elite public statements.The findings demonstrate that PKB’s realignment is not merely a general pragmatic shift but reflects a calculated balance between office-seeking and policy-seeking behavior. Empirically, PKB’s maneuver is evidenced by its targeted pursuit of strategic cabinet positions, indicating a structured effort to secure institutional access to executive power. At the same time, the study finds that PKB actively negotiates policy influence, particularly in socio-economic and religious-based welfare programs, to maintain alignment with its traditional voter base. Furthermore, the role of Muhaimin Iskandar is identified as a decisive factor, where leadership consolidation and personal political survival shape party strategy. The research also reveals that long-standing relational ties with Prabowo Subianto function as informal political capital, facilitating smoother coalition entry and reducing transactional costs. This study contributes to the literature by providing a micro-level empirical explanation of post-election coalition realignment in Indonesia, highlighting how ideological narratives are strategically embedded within pragmatic power calculations. Unlike previous studies that treat coalition shifts as purely opportunistic or structurally determined, this research demonstrates that PKB’s decision reflects a hybrid model of political behavior, where institutional interests, leadership agency, and policy aspirations interact simultaneously.