Political Subjects Research Articles

From London Bridge to the Finsbury Park Mosque

The former Twitter (now called ‘X’) is a social media platform characterized by an intense exchange of posts by users on political themes. These posts can indicate the evolution of a social phenomenon around a pivotal event. The overarching theme of this paper is to observe and examine the posts of Twitter users following the London Bridge terror attack on June 3rd, 2017, and following another attack against the Finsbury Park Mosque on June 19th of the same month. By means of a content analysis of a robust database of posts collected from the Twitter platform I was able to observe the reactions of radical right users during the attacks and reflect upon how hate was played out in terms of language and emotions. Despite the inevitable violence of these attacks, I detected the presence of humour in tweets as well as remarks that were predictably characterized by both physical and moral disgust. All tweets examined displayed at least one of Haidt’s Moral Foundations. My hypothesis is that humour too is a moral phenomenon which can exaggerate human behaviour.

Violent demonstrations in marginal territories and their place in politics: A case study in Lo Hermida, Santiago de Chile

This article aims to investigate violent demonstrations in marginal territories of Santiago de Chile and their political dimension, studying the territorial deployment of structural violence, transgressive protest actions, and subjectivation processes. These three dimensions tell us about the political, social, and territorial intertwining of violent demonstrations, based on Jacques Rancière's framework. We conducted a case study in Lo Hermida, a highly politicized self-constructed neighborhood born in the 1970s that is currently surrounded by transportation infrastructure and upscale urban developments. Using secondary sources, semi-structured interviews, and photo-elicitation with 14 residents of Lo Hermida, we show the way in which structural violence is experienced across the territory, how transgressive protest actions are carried out in violent demonstrations throughout it, and how processes of political subjectivation unfold from this. The conclusions emphasize the incorporation of the political-subjective dimension in the understanding of violence in marginal territories, highlighting its emergent characteristics in space.

A materialist reconsideration of international peace practice and its human and non-human constituents

Abstract The international community's sobering track record of sustainably reducing the number of armed conflicts worldwide, as well as the increasing involvement of non-human complexities in times of climate crisis suggest that current approaches to foster peace are too narrow and inflexible. So far, demands and calls for more flexible and adaptive peace practice made by policy-makers and researchers have not led to a related paradigm shift. In order to contribute to such a change of practice, this article advances a speculative analytical attempt that seeks to conceptually uncover new modes of engaging with the world for the purpose of peace. It builds on Baruch Spinoza's materialism and describes peace as intimately interrelated with the issue of political community. Following Spinoza, the article reconsiders the imaginary of political community as something that is constantly being rearticulated by a contingent complexity of human and non-human actors, and thus transcends the geographic scope of its formal borders as well as its epistemic scope across power hierarchies. Finally, the article introduces the human-non-human multitude as political subject that is able to detect and interpret the constituents of a political community, and therefore to maintain and sustain peace.

History of Resistance and Intertwinings: A Post-Colonial Sample Present in 'Orphans of the Eldorado,' by Milton Hatoum

The present study has the scope to carry out an interdisciplinary approach that combines literature and history, in order to explore themes regarding identity resistance, family conflicts and social and political changes in the Amazon region, present in the work Órfãos do Eldorado by the novelist manauara Milton Hatoum. The general objective is to present how the configuration of resistance marks intertwined with the postcolonial bias occurs throughout the work Órfãos do Eldorado. Specific objectives are based on investigating how identity issues are addressed in the context of family history in the Amazon. To describe the sociocultural and historical context of the Amazon portrayed in the work, demonstrating that the relationship between the place and the characters portray marks of the fight against colonial dominance, and to analyze the political themes present in "Órfãos do Eldorado", pointing out that they are related to historical events and social aspects of the Amazon. The methodology will be through the application of the presuppositions of the bibliographical research, and the analytical method will be the north of the interpretation of the plot and the story. Bhabha (1998) in the Local of culture, Said (2011) with the work Cultura e imperialismo, in addition to Nenevé and Sampaio (2016) are the main theoretical guidelines. The result of the research showed that "Orfãos do Eldorado", by Milton Hatoum, stands out with a literature of relevance to the understanding of the social and historical reality of the Amazon, and that presents intertwined marks to the resistance and dynamics of a postcolonial protagonism.

The construction of citizenship identity: beyond the social, moral and political subjects

The construction of citizenship identity: beyond the social, moral and political subjects

Counter-hegemonic resistance on the extractive frontier in Peru: exploring the legal-political nexus

ABSTRACT This article examines how power is permanently contested in the extractive frontier, forcing extractive investments to re-accommodate or to retreat. Using the Chuschi mining conflict as a case study, it argues that the anti-mining mobilization appropriated different rights discourses that span different historical blocs to carve out counter-hegemonic spaces of resistance that reproduce a political subjectivity, which is not subsumed by extractivism, to contest power on the extractive frontier. Moreover, it shows that the strategic use of law does not have to ultimately sustain the status quo of neoliberal power but is part of re-imagining a different state and society.

Unpredictable digital intimacies and virtual backstabbing: the feminist coalition’s political effect in Nigeria

Abstract This article explores digital intimacies within Nigeria’s networked political discourse, focusing on the resurgence of the Feminist Coalition (FemCo), known for their involvement in Nigeria’s 2020 #EndSARS (Special Anti-Robbery Squad) movement against police brutality, as feminist political subjects during the 2023 election campaigns. It analyzes Twitter-networked interactions as FemCo was unexpectedly thrust into hypervisibility when asked to endorse Peter Obi, the Labor Party’s presidential candidate, despite prior criticism of their #EndSARS activism. Employing close feminist reading and social network analysis of Twitter data, informed by a contextual feminist/computational approach, this article explores how processes of unpredictable digital intimacies and virtual backstabbing unfold when feminist political subjects are exploited by opposing clusters online. Investigating how affects circulate and transform feminist political subjects into bodies of hate/value, this article sheds light on the affective contexts of political communication in Nigeria, beset by a range of actors, including, activists, influencers, and citizen-users, wielding central power.

Current state of the political culture of Afghanistan

The article is devoted to one of the important issues of the development of the political space, political system, political life, and ideological and cultural structure of modern Afghan society. The article attempts to analyze and discuss various aspects of the current state of the political culture of Afghanistan. The main attention is paid to the attitude of citizens to politics and the political regime of the Taliban (organization banned in Russia). Afghanistan’s current political culture is based on the models and values of the Taliban government. They rely on traditionalist political models. The implementation of modern political processes, such as elections, is not far from being able to question the power of representatives. It can be argued that political culture is the link between people and political power. The main task of political culture is to include people in the political system of society and political activities. Political culture is a system of political knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and values, as well as political activities of political subjects. For example, political culture manifests itself differently in different social groups and communities, political movements, and individuals. The study of the current state of the political culture of Afghanistan allows us to conclude that today the level of conflict is quite high, the mood of the Afghan society is at a disorganized level. A controversial political culture prevails in Afghan society. This conflict can be seen in social differences, institutional weakness, society’s distrust of functioning authority, and cultural differences.

Rethinking the concept of “Public” in colonial South Malabar, Kerala, India

This article looks at the structure of “public” and its meanings in colonial South Malabar. What factors influence various social groups to engage with colonial public and unfold as key political players? How did upper caste-dominated colonial publics affect local political contexts? Why were certain social groups silenced as other groups were overwhelmingly favored in colonial publics? By analyzing the case of Kalpathy struggles in Palakkad, this paper brings the nuances of how claims for public were articulated, the responses of the state and nationalist movement, regional politics, and contestations. This essay demonstrates how the modern political process facilitates the formation of groups into political subjectivities, as well as how they influence exclusionary community power structures.

Black African Neo/Pentecostal Political Subjectivity and/as Black Consciousness

ABSTRACT This article explores the political implications of the intersection of African Political Theology and critical race discourse. Its main argument is that, African Neo/Pentecostal Political Theology highlights that moral and political subjectivity in the context of a necropolitical postcolonial Africa is a result of the intersection of a complex set of practices linked to oneself, others, the state, and G/god. Moreover, in its concern with political well-being, African Neo/Pentecostal Political Theology further highlights the black racial identity of its adherents as part of its ideological participation in the broader project of black emancipation. Such a centering of race not only de-abstracts African Political Theology and its Neo/Pentecostal subjects from their specific socio-political location of Africa, including all the implications of such a location. This centering is important to foreground also because it provides a different dimension through which to apprehend and comprehend the rise of Neo/Pentecostalism on the continent.

Joining the ideational and the material: transforming food systems toward radical food democracy

This paper presents a conceptualization of radical food democracy (RFD) which links the diverse economies approach of Gibson-Graham with Tully’s notion of diverse citizenship. Despite its invaluable contribution to theorizing the role of alternative food networks (AFNs) in transforming unsustainable industrial food systems, the diverse economies scholarship has been criticized for essentializing the autonomy of alternative economic practices—hence risking to confound emancipatory social change with punctuated forms of “local,” “quality,” “organic certified” products, which nevertheless remain embedded in market-mediated capitalist relations, and displacement and/or deferral of negative impacts. This paper aims to address such critiques, contending that the realization of RFD requires both (1) the experimentation with new economic practices that carve out food economies alternative to the working logic of capital accumulation, and (2) the cultivation of new political subjects capable of universalizing these particular struggles. After situating various existing practices associated with food democracy in a framework of various modes of democratic citizenship, we underpin our understanding of RFD with a theory of change informed by Bob Jessop’s strategic-relational approach to social structures, agents’ reflexive actions, and their contingency. Following a critical scientific approach to the social role of academics, this theoretical framework is illustrated using a case study from Germany. The empirical work draws on participant observation and semi-structured interviews with leaders of Community Supported Agriculture (CSA) cooperatives and Food Policy Council (FPC) networks conducted in Cologne, Berlin, and Frankfurt in 2018–2020. To conclude, this paper argues that the emancipatory potential of food democracy should cultivate both lighthouse alternative economic practices that are connected with people’s everyday lives, and political imagination that dares to critically engage with existing institutions. Likewise, RFD praxis requires a constant back and forth between the ideational and the practical, the abstract and the concrete, the actionable and the analytical, to challenge both the symbolic-discursive and the material dimensions of capitalist agri-food systems.

The battle for Central: ethnicity, urbanization and citizenship in Kenya’s 2022 general elections

ABSTRACT In Kenya’s 2022 general elections, presidential candidate William Ruto did something unusual – he dominated the vote in the heartlands of one of his main political rivals, President Uhuru Kenyatta. In turn, Ruto’s ability to win power by mobilizing support outside of his own Kalenjin community has led to speculation that the political power of ethnicity is waning. Drawing on surveys, economic and demographic analysis and interviews during the campaign in Central Kenya – a predominantly Kikuyu area and Kenyatta’s supposed political homeland – we cast doubt on this argument. Evidence from the campaign trail suggests that while structural changes within Kenyan society, including the emergence of a more urban, educated and critical electorate, played an important role in Ruto’s electoral success, it was also underpinned by historic ethnic allegiances, inter-group prejudice, and the use of ethnically-rooted clientelist strategies to build political networks. In particular, past campaigns saw Odinga depicted as an unsuitable leader based on his history, personality, and Luo ethnicity, generating formidable barriers to winning support. The implications of this argument extend beyond our understanding of Kenya to recent debates about the impact of urbanization and political socialization on political subjectivities and behaviour in Africa.

Folklore Elements in the Poetry of Ekaterina Kletnovaya

The article is devoted to one of the characteristic features of the poetic works of E.N. Kletnova (1869–1938), whose literary work is still not known to the general public and has not previously become the subject of a comprehensive philological study. Poems by E.N. Kletnova are filled with various folklore elements − syntactic constructions and language formulas, lexical means of expression, compositional elements (introduction to a song and song), epic images. The author especially actively resorts to folklore stylization when creating poems on general cultural and political topics, trying to give them a folk-epic sound. In the course of the study, the following methods were used: a comparative-stylistic method to establish the similarities and
 differences in the language design of E.N. Kletnova and folklore genres; a structural method for analyzing the specific structure of the text; a conceptual analysis to reveal the picture of the world of the author's linguistic personality; a descriptive method.
 It was concluded that folklore elements in the poetry of E.N. Kletnova, firstly, are a reflection of her scientific, primarily ethnographic studies; secondly, they are used to create a special native Russian flavor in the poetic disclosure of vital social topics;
 thirdly, they express the interest in mythological antiquities and folklore tradition characteristic of the Silver Age.

Rejecting Defeat and Approaching Liberation: Palestinian Prisoners’ Hunger Strikes

Hunger strikes have been central to the ways in which Palestinian prisoners confront the Israeli carceral regime; demand changes in the ways prisons are run; and demand their most basic rights. Indeed, the earliest documented hunger strike dates to as early as 1968, with demands that included refusals to address Israeli jailers with ‘sir', and having access to pens and notebooks. The recent martyrdom of Khader Adnan on his eighty-seventh day of a hunger strike against his detention highlighted both Palestinian prisoners' continuous resort to hunger strikes, and Israeli violent responses to this act of confrontation whenever it is used by prisoners. Hunger strikes have been analysed and discussed by multiple scholars to shed light on this practice both in Palestine and other global sites of carcerality. The literature on hunger strikes, however, is abundant with analysis that draws on the concepts of biopolitics and necropolitics. Applying these concepts involves conceptualising prisons as sites intended for the civil and social death of prisoners, or depicts prisoners as bare life and objects of modes of management over their life and death. Yet, an approach that centres the power over life and death, and that presents freedom or its negation as that of the moment of approaching death, falls into a trap that Palestinian political prisoner Walid Daka (2021) warns of in his brief discussion of hunger strikes [from a text read as part of a conference on carcerality, entitled ‘Control Through Time']. Such an analysis, for instance, views death as the sole space over which the captive body has power, as Achille Mbmebe argues in ‘Necropolitics'. My article, however, seeks to investigate and discuss Palestinian prisoners' recourse to hunger strikes in a different vein. To conceptualise hunger strikes and their history in Palestine, the article argues that one has to situate the practice as part of an ever-evolving repertoire of prisoners' responses aiming to constitute political subjectivities that reject defeat, that dream and work for liberation, and that constantly counter attempts at moulding consciousness. Hunger strikes offer yet another example of prisoners' attempts to smuggle freedom from the confines of their cells. The article will engage with the long history of Palestinian prisoners' hunger strikes (collective and individual), with prisoners' own descriptions of hunger strikes, and with several theoretical and conceptual understandings of hunger strikes to shed light on this practice’s political meanings. In doing so, the article hopes to situate hunger strikes within the broader sets of confrontation practices used by Palestinian prisoners, and which constantly dream, and work for, a liberated geography.

Interview with Sally R. Munt

ABSTRACT Sally R. Munt is best known for her work on shame, especially her book Queer Attachments: The Cultural Politics of Shame, published in 2007. Noticing that shame is a particularly relational affect Munt’s work focuses in on and explores the politics of shame. What happens when we refuse to acknowledge shame’s role in the production and creation of political subjects? Can bypassed shame be found at the root of fascist political movements? Might shame be used as a tool to further emancipatory political projects? Given our historical moment, these questions feel especially timely and their exploration existentially essential. That is what is why we are delighted that Sally Munt agreed to a dialogue in the form of an interview with the editors of this issue, Daniel Goldin and Allison Merrick. What follows is their e-mail exchanges.

The discursive formation of British national identity: the lexical aspect

British national identity has been in the zone of constant study by scientists for a long period of time, but after Brexit, interest in this topic has increased significantly. The British nation, especially the part of it that was on the side of the Eurosceptics, after Brexit was aimed at strengthening the British identity and completely destroying any influence of globalization on the British nation. But despite the expectations of the British, many scientists agree that the national British identity is still in crisis. Thus, the object of this research is the culture-bound lexical elements of the English-language political discourse of online mass media, and the purpose is to identify the current state of British national identity through the analysis of the words-realities of the British political discourse. Current works (not older than five years) by Russian and foreign scientists in the fields of political discourse and national British identity form the methodological basis of the research. The analysis of the culture-bound lexical elements of English-language political discourse is carried out on the basis of online media texts for the period January–April 2024, which makes the study innovative and reflects the trends of modern linguistic science. As a result of the study, it was revealed that the national British identity is in a state of crisis. Brexit and subsequent events gave the British nation hope for the ascent of national identity and the return of its former imperial greatness, but analyzing the current articles of British online publications on political topics, it becomes evident that international processes still prevail over the British identity. The further perspective of the research lies in the field of studying the discursive formation of British identity from the point of view of syntactic, grammatical, and social aspects.

Rethinking Utopia as Form: Failure, Time, and the Political Subject of Anti-Capitalism

Abstract: This essay theorizes utopianism as distinct from radical or revolutionary action and so capable of instantiating a desire for a world so different it cannot be represented. Asking whether "failure" is in fact a productive condition of possibility for utopianism, the essay considers a number of theoretical interventions including those of Fredric Jameson and Kathi Weeks. Drawing out the benefits and limits of these perspectives, the essay articulates utopianism's features and offers the demand for prison abolition as an example. Not only does this demand confront the impossibility of a different world, but it draws on the potentiality of past political agency and so posits what occupying the "no place" of utopia can be for those who have historically been denied the very temporalities upon which utopia has traditionally relied.

Beyond refugeeness: complex subjectivities in Palestinian refugee camps

ABSTRACT This article explores Palestinian refugeeness to argue for a more complex understanding of refugee subjectivity. The subjectivities of Palestinian refugees – and especially of those from the refugee camps – have been informed by their participation in national politics. Therefore, Palestinian refugees, while embodying experiences of violence, displacement and exclusion much like other refugee communities, have also been emphatically seen through their political agencies. In this article, I aim to complicate the emphasis on political subjectivity and explore Palestinian refugee subjectivity as complex, multidimensional, and contradictory. By narrating ethnographic encounters with two of my interlocutors, I demonstrate that subjectivities emerge not only from their politicized position as Palestinian refugees nor from the camp spaces they dwell in but from their complex and mundane relationalities that are neither static nor coherent. By emphasizing this fluid complexity, the aim is to acknowledge refugee subjectivities as multidimensional and fragile formations imbued with internal tensions that emerge from multiple and contradictory desires and from a sense of self that is not reducible to refugeeness.

Subjetividad política y expresión pública digital entre actores de la sociedad civil en Guanajuato

In this article we approach the link between political subjectivity and digital public expression among civil society actors in Guanajuato, Mexico. We understand political subjectivity as the ways of assuming oneself as a political subject. We consider three dimensions: action, relationship with others and communication. The discussion on digital public expression is framed there. Methodologically, we worked on a qualitative study, with a biographical-narrative orientation, through 12 semi-structured interviews with civil society actors. We identified key elements of their trajectories, allowing us to observe the ways in which they have been constructed themselves as political subjects, based on some event that motivated them to seek social change and that articulates the individual with the collective, as well as the ways in which this translates into actions, relationships, and practices of public expression. Finally, we identified a disenchantment with the phenomena of disinformation and polarization that have impoverished public debate. The study contributes to the analysis of the relationship between the individual and the collective, and details the tension between these two dimensions and its implications in the public space.

Mathematical Models of Migration Balance and Migration Attitudes in Armenia

The purpose of the study is to provide a quantitative explanation of the migration balance and migration attitudes in Armenian society. A linear regression model has been constructed to explain the dependence of the migration balance on variables at the macro level, including annual GDP growth, the internal and external political state of Armenia. Data from the Armenian Statistical Service on statistics of border movements and annual GDP growth were used. The foreign policy state is represented by a variable taking the values “Truce”, “War”, and “Intense War”. The internal political state is represented by a variable taking the values “Open conflict”, “Latent conflict”, “Balanced”, “Positive expectations”, and “High expectations”. Based on the model, an estimate of the migration balance for 2023 was calculated. According to a sociological survey conducted in November 2022 using the structural modeling method (Structural Equation Modeling), two models were built that explain migration attitudes in society through the socio-economic characteristics of the respondent and characteristics of his political culture, including: the presence of a labor migrant in the family, the age of the respondent, approval of the 2018 revolution in Armenia, the realization of expectations from the revolution, a sense of political competence, political subjectivity and patriotism. The results of the study can be used to forecast the migration balance and migration attitudes in the society, as well as strategic planning and management of migration processes in Armenia.