Political Terrain Research Articles

The management of visibility in digital diplomacy: Infrastructures and techniques

The proliferation of new media has been hailed by academics and practitioners worldwide as a revolution in the conduct of international relations, with dialogical, reconciliatory, and democratizing potentials. Several years later, however, the evidence for such progressive potentialities is scarce. To better understand the actualized role of social media in international politics and deepen our understanding of the potentialities for progressive politics online, this article examines several examples of digital diplomacy initiatives by state and non-state actors. These examples highlight the growing political significance of online visibility management techniques — i.e., the various techno-political interventions by which actors attempt to make their messages accessible on online platforms. While early citizen-driven initiatives, such as the ‘Israel-Loves-Iran’ Facebook campaign, focused on strategic content production as a means to enhance their online visibility, later initiatives, such as the public-private partnership ‘4IL’, directed their efforts towards connectivity manipulation using medium-specific techniques which contest the visibility of others. This article concludes by arguing that fulfilling the progressive potentialities of digital diplomacy in this political terrain would not only require complementing content production with an effective engagement with the visibility arrangements of the platforms, but also a critical analytics of techno-social inclusions and exclusions, which this dual task generates.

Beyond the green panopticon: New directions in research exploring environmental governmentality

This introduction to the special collection explores how a revised or expanded understanding of ‘environmentality’ can further our analysis of the evermore complex terrain of environmental politics today. We offer an outline of the literature from which the discussion emerges and how the subsequent articles both engage with and depart from it. We describe the origin of the ‘green governmentality’ discussion following the rise of global sustainable development discourse. We then explain how this initial exploration was subsequently complicated by introduction of two further lines of investigation: (1) attention to the micropolitics of community-based natural resource management; and (2) extrapolation from this to describe the different forms of green governmentality within which such local practices are situated as well as the multiple scales at which environmental governance is exercised. Following this, we outline a range of critiques to which this burgeoning research has also been subject and the fruitful lines of future research to which they point. We finish by describing how the various contributions to this collection engage with different aspects of this multifaceted discussion as the basis for further engagement by other researchers in the years ahead.

The South African labour movement

This paper reviews the state of the South African labour movement. It discusses trade unions within the context of national political dynamics, including the Tripartite Alliance and neoliberalism, as well as growing precarianization of work within South Africa. It examines splits within the major federation and explores debates around union renewal and new worker organizations. It argues that the political terrain is fragmented and shifting, but workers’ collective labour politics abides.

The Use of Social Media and Participation in Political Communication in the 2019 General Election in Nigeria

Research findings have shown that the social media are very active in promotion of citizens’ participation in political and electoral procession in many countries. However, the Nigerian voters before the advent of the social media have been mainly receivers of information on election without being active participants in the electoral information flow. The voters did not have access to the mainstream media which had hitherto been the main conveyors of electoral information. Therefore, the purpose of the study is to examine how the electorate in Delta State, Nigeria used the social media for participation in political communication during the 2019 Nigerian general elections. The study is guided by the Technological Acceptance Model which explains how users come to accept and use a technology. The study used survey and questionnaire as method and instrument respectively to gather the data. We used both simple random sampling technique and purposive sampling technique. The data were analyzed using descriptive statistics. The results show that the voters are highly exposed to political communication in the social media; they have favourable perception of the social media usage for political communication; they prefer the social media to the mainstream media in participation in political communication; and they participate more actively in political communication during the said election through the social media more than they did previous elections through the mainstream media. We recommend that that the voters should sustain their exposure to the use of the social media for political participation so that can also be kept abreast of the happenings in the political terrain and they should continue to use the social media to interrogate political leaders, election candidates during elections and after the election period. Keywords: Silenced electorate; Nigerian general elections; social media and elections; political participation; participation in political communication, participation in political discourse. DOI: 10.7176/IKM/10-3-03 Publication date: April 30 th 2020

Fifty Shades of Blackness: Recovering an Aesthetics of the Afrifuge

Black lives and histories are to the fore at the moment: from #BlackLivesMatter in the United States to the movement to decolonize syllabi and pedagogy in South African universities. The filmBlack Pantheris watched within a visual and political terrain in which the black body is presented no longer only within histories of previous abjection—slavery and apartheid—but in visions of future reconstitution. This article will put together the changing representation of T’Challa from 1966 to the present in Marvel Comics and the film and argue that blackness has meant different things at different times to the creators as much as within the historical circumstance within which the black superhero has been seen and understood. Central to this has been the dilemma of bringing together the histories of “Africa” and the tenements of the United States—Wakanda and Oakland, California, in the film, and Harlem, New York, in the comic books.

Development of Freedom (Uhuru) Ideology and the Inspirations of the Nationalist Ideological Movements in Kenya and South Korea

This article traces the origin of nationalistic movements in Kenyan and South Korean history and examined factors which inspired nationalism movements in both countries. For example, it established that in Kenya, the desire and thirst for freedom/independence and the development of freedom (Uhuru) ideology were some of the factors that inspired nationalism movements. In South Korea, various theories (defend orthodoxy, eastern learning movement, and ban heterodoxy) which emancipated from 19th century by some individuals played major roles in inspiring and motivating Koreans people not only to join nationalistic movements, but, to strengthen such movements. In both countries, the political terrains were coated with several ideological colors which manifested themselves in different phases even as the two countries were going through different transitional experiences. As opposed to Park Chung-hee's radical revolutionist ideologist reflected on his foreign policy which also were highly tied towards the US and were subject to Washington's demand, Kenya's ideological movements were cautious, a fact that was reflected on how the country formulated its foreign policy. For instance, Kenya opted for the moderate view and shun out extreme rhetoric which many other newly independent African countries chose. This article traces the root of the freedom ideologies (uhuru) and their inspirations in both countries.

RESEARCH ON THEMATIC MAPS IN THE NEW CENTURY EDITION OF THE NATIONAL GEOMATICS ATLAS OF THE PEOPLE’S REPUBLIC OF CHINA

Abstract. The National Geomatics Atlas is the first volume of the new century edition of the National Huge Atlas of the People's Republic of China, and is one of the important achievements of this research and development project. The National Geomatics Atlas consists of four thematic map groups and one place name index, such as the sequence map group, the political terrain map group, the land cover map group and the city map group. The research object of this paper is the thematic maps, which are mainly distributed in the sequence map group, the land cover map group and the city map group. This paper is aimed at the design and compilation of thematic maps, including a brief introduction of thematic maps selection, layout design, thematic map technical process, and thematic symbol design.

Unequal benefits – diverging attitudes? Analysing the effects of an unequal expansion of childcare provision on attitudes towards maternal employment across 18 European countries

AbstractChildcare policies have become an important element of social investment reforms, but in most countries access to childcare has remained socially unequal. Some studies have suggested that a trend towards more gender egalitarian work–family attitudes has facilitated the expansion of childcare provision. Yet, we know little about the repercussions of an unequal expansion of childcare provision on public attitudes towards the work–family nexus. Building on multilevel models of 18 European countries and two waves of the International Social Survey Programme, this analysis examines the effects of an unequal childcare expansion on attitudes towards maternal employment. The results reveal that individuals with lower income remain more skeptical of maternal employment when childcare provision is highly unequal. The unequally distributed benefits of an expansion of childcare provision contribute to a divergence of attitudes across socio-economic groups, which might create a more difficult political terrain for the implementation of expansive social investment reforms.

The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women’s Circuit, 1876–1910 by Ronald Briggs

Reviewed by: The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women’s Circuit, 1876–1910 by Ronald Briggs Ana Peluffo KEYWORDS Transatlantic Networks, Sentimentality, Affect, Literary Salons, Ronald Briggs, Matto de Turner, Gorriti, Pedagogy, Sisterhood, Hemispheric Americanism ronald briggs. The Moral Electricity of Print: Transatlantic Education and the Lima Women’s Circuit, 1876–1910. Vanderbilt UP, 2017, 254 pp. Ronald’s Briggs The Moral Electricity of Print could not be timelier in its publication. It comes at a time when debates on transnational networks, feminism and cross-border politics have achieved renewed urgency in the academy, motorized in part by the Ni Una Menos movement in Latin America, and the rampant xenophobia and misogyny of the Trump administration. Briggs’s compelling and historically grounded reading of the Veladas Literarias, a feminist salon hosted in Lima by Juana Manuela Gorriti in 1876–1877 and revived by Clorinda Matto de Turner after the War of the Pacific blurs national borders by showing that many of the cultural conversations that took place there were hemispheric and international in scope. His engaging take on Gorriti’s salons as the epicenter of a trans-national gendered network that stretches its elastic borders across nations calls attention to the ways in which Peruvian debates on nation-building and women’s education intersected with global conversations in the US and Europe on the same topics. The main argument of the book is that for writers of Gorriti’s generation literature was not a formal endeavor based on fixed notions of aesthetic purity but rather a messy political terrain in which boundaries between pedagogy and art, reason and sentiment, politics and aesthetics were often blurred. Briggs weaves into his archive an impressive range of transnational sources that he is careful to contextualize and situate at the local level. In the book, he combines close readings of works by Gorriti, Matto de Turner, González de Fanning, Beecher Stowe, Serrano de Wilson, and Acosta de Samper, among others, with theoretical discussions on the circulation, translation, and appropriation of books and ideas across national borders. Drawing upon a variety of theoretical sources—including cosmopolitanism, feminism, transnational theory, and post-colonial studies—he proposes new readings of nineteenth-century canonic and non-canonic texts “in which the burning literary question is pedagogical” (5). Awarded a prestigious award by the nineteenth-century LASA section for the best book of 2017 in the area of nineteenth-century cultural studies, the monograph is a welcome addition to cultural historians working in several interrelated and multidisciplinary fields of study. One of the strengths of the monograph is the idea that the transnational circulation of books resulted in the construction of diasporic cultural communities that became an alternative to the masculine lettered city. When discussing the pedagogical implications of salon culture, Briggs points out that in a society that was extremely hostile to women intellectuals, the feminized space of the tertulia became an oasis in which women could provide for themselves the mentorship [End Page 239] and support that society at large denied them at the institutional level. “As a marginalized minority within the field of literature,” he claims in the introduction, “women writers often linked group and individual success” (4). In order to trace the genealogy of the salonnière as a self-taught cultural hostess, Briggs studies the autobiographical writings of colonial and early nineteenth-century authors who relied on autodidacticism to build their intellectual personas. According to Briggs, women writers from the Lima cultural circle shared with their intellectual predecessors a utopian vision of the “teaching book” and the social novel that mimics the complex dynamics of the mentor-mentee relationship while acting as an extension of the classroom space. Rather than fetishizing the book as a diasporic material artefact, or the novel as a form, Briggs shows that nineteenth-century novels had much in common with textbooks, anthologies, and the journals in which they were often serialized. Whereas previous scholars have used the veladas to trace the genealogy of Peruvian feminism and to study conversations that took place there on women’s education, the feminization of civility, gender discrimination in the workforce, and suffragism, among other pressing topics, Briggs opts...

When Curtains Fall: A Shape-Shifting Silk of the Late Abbasid Period

A silk intended for administrative use under the Buyids—the dynasty which ruled on behalf of the Abbasid caliphs from roughly 934 to 1062—was deconstructed under their successors, the Seljuks of Iran (1038–1194), so as to efface its associations with the defunct dynasty. When twentieth-century scholars re-established the piece's connection to the Buyids, linking the piece directly to the emir Bahāʼ al-Dawlah, they ironically overlooked the Seljuk alterations and their implications. Following the silk through its several iterations, this article argues that, for late Abbasid-era elites navigating a changing political terrain, re-use became a means of maintaining their standing in society, as well as an act of preservation for the silk itself.

America first: paleoconservatism and the ideological struggle for the American right

ABSTRACTThis article provides an engagement with American paleoconservatism at the level of its intellectual foundations. Although relatively unknown in the mainstream media, this anti-establishment strain of radical conservatism has provided intellectual ammunition to a wide range of agents and ideological forces challenging the prevailing liberal order nationally and internationally, positions that have at different times resonated with political movements including the Tea Party, the Alt-Right and Trumpism. The analysis begins with an exposition of the paleoconservative critique of contemporary liberal democracy and global liberal governance, in the context of the transformation of the American right and the ideological contest with neoconservatism since the early 1980s. We then move on to examine the neo-nationalist agenda championed by paleoconservative intellectuals in response to the perceived consequences of multiculturalism, neoliberal globalization and internationalist foreign policies, revealing an intellectual project far more substantive, complex and encompassing than its frequent reduction to ‘populism’ allows. For what is at stake in this politics is not only the democratic gains of the twentieth century, but also the political terrain upon which our dominant conceptions of the political are being re-amalgamated and represented into new struggles over the meaning and future of human co-existence under conditions of globalization.

West Papua and the International History of Decolonization, 1961-69

Scholars of international history have argued for the separation of decolonization struggles in Africa and Asia between 1945 and 1965 from Pacific struggles that occurred after 1960. Yet the West Papuan campaign for independence demonstrates how deeply connected decolonization in the Pacific was to anti-colonial movements in Africa and Asia. In their petitions to the United Nations, West Papuan activists drew on race and rights discourse – evoking the principles of Pan-Africanism and self-determination – to appeal to African leaders and the UN General Assembly.Ultimately West Papuan claims to independence were foreclosed due to the shifting terrain of international politics and global governance of the 1960s. Papuan activists found it hard to gain support amidst the rise of Third World power, shifting politics of human rights and self-determination, and the dynamics of the Cold War. The very conditions that had created opportunities for African and Asian nations to achieve independence worked against the claims of the West Papuans. In this article I argue that expanding the geographies and temporalities of decolonization creates a more international history of decolonization and demonstrates the transformation of anticolonial politics and global governance in the 1960s.

Historical Consciousness and Nigerian Political Stability

This paper examined the contributions of historical consciousness to the development of the Nigerian political terrain. Using the Nigerian example, it posits that a distinguishing feature of historical consciousness is in its quest to promote a sense of history among members of a given group or society. This enables it to play a significant role in the task of national development. It proceeded to demonstrate that promoting historical awareness could lead to greater political stability. Having demonstrated the role of historical consciousness to national development, the paper concluded that since development is a product of change, and the subject matter of history focuses on continuity and change, it follows that development can only be understood and appreciated within the context of history. It is this strategic role of history in facilitating development that makes historical societies incubators of development.

Problems of Stasis in My Country

This essay explores the discursive invocation of ‘civil war’ to describe the polarization of the political terrain in post-Referendum Britain in order to contextualize the National Theatre’s production of Carol Ann Duffy and Rufus Norris’s ‘verbatim’ play My Country and its representation of Brexit. It shows how the political reality of Brexit, understood as a crisis of ‘general enculturation’, undermined the NT’s attempt to transcend the impasse of the political context. It argues that in identifying the NT with the play’s central figure of Britannia, an image of reconciliation, the theatre failed to account for its own implication in the wider crisis of enculturation.

Female Political Youth Activism. A Study of the Motivation in Seke

The study seeking to understand the participation of female youth in active politics in Zimbabwe was influenced by the desire in some of the female youth to participate actively only to face unending challenges socially, politically and economically. The study was conducted in the form of a survey using questionnaires administered to 200 participants purposively sampled in Chitungwiza's four residential Units with each contributing 50 female participants. Analysis of data was conducted using 'Framework', a qualitative analytic method which assisted to comprehend internal meanings of the participants' responses and presenting them qualitatively. The study established that while Zimbabwe has various instruments for the promotion of women involvement in politics, the political terrain is defined by several social, economic and cultural barriers. The study identified some of the factors driving female youth into politics and some hindering their participation. It was established that areas with higher levels of election-related persecution are more exposed to politics and higher levels of wanting to participate in political developments. It was noted that female youth who had experienced violence are more probable than non-affected youth to turn out to be effective politicians and to realise the importance of elections.

Messy feminist knowledge politics: a double reading of post-conflict gender mainstreaming in Liberia

ABSTRACTThe debate around the production and circulation of feminist knowledge has been rekindled since the emergence of the Women, Peace and Security (WPS) agenda. While much attention focuses on the diffusion of WPS norms, less is paid to the sociocultural context within which feminist ideas circulate through WPS gender-mainstreaming (GM) interventions, its broader implications, and what happens beyond. I propose a double reading of GM as a site of feminist knowledge production and circulation: I combine anthropological and feminist governmentality insights to analyze GM as a form of (disciplinary) governing with insights from post/decolonial scholars that call for an engagement with the “exteriority” of interventions, with what lies outside our grid of intelligibility of the narrow political terrain of GM. Through a case study of the post-conflict GM intervention in Liberia, I illustrate how this double reading reveals the ways in which GM works as a gendered form of governing to prescribe dualistic social roles and (re)produce social differentiation mechanisms linked to “civilization.” An engagement with the exteriority of the GM intervention reveals critiques and alternative forms of feminist knowledge production and circulation that emphasize non-dualistic and non-judgmental attitudes and propose invited partnership and dialogue.

Collateral Subjects: The Normalization of Surveillance for Mexican Americans on the Border

The U.S.-Mexico border has been of particular interest to the Trump administration in its ongoing efforts to restrict immigration. Though unauthorized immigrants are the purported targets of measures to increase border enforcement, U.S.-born individuals of Mexican descent also bear the consequences of nativist policies. Based on 42 in-depth interviews, I focus on late-generation (third-plus) Mexican Americans to analyze individuals’ experiences with surveillance by U.S. Customs and Border Protection in Nogales and Tucson, Arizona. In this study, I explore the effects of anti-immigrant policies on Mexican Americans by examining how surveillance operates in people’s everyday lives as well as how people respond to the presence of surveillance. I find that the pervasiveness of surveillance elicits a mixture of fear and desensitization from residents, as they simultaneously grow accustomed to surveillance while navigating an ever-changing political terrain. Finally, I explore responses to the authority of immigration officers, which vary from strategies of compliance to strategies of resistance. These varied approaches are complicated by the liminal status of Mexican Americans in the United States as both a racialized group and a community that benefits from some of the privileges of holding U.S. citizenship.

From silence into song: Affective horizons and nostalgic dwelling among Syrian musicians in Istanbul

What roles might music play in how Syrian migrants in Turkey navigate new socio-economic,political, moral and affective terrains? How might music serve as a source of comfort andnostalgic remembrance in conditions of displacement, or even as a touchstone for contestationover collective memory and the meanings of belonging? This article explores the contradictionsof lived experience among Syrian migrant musicians in Istanbul. Based on ethnographicresearch Istanbul since 2015, this article analyzes the growing Syrian musical culture inIstanbul, focusing on shifts in the relationship of Syrians to their urban environment, changesin their understanding of future horizons (afaq), and how this produces new forms of affectiveengagement both with their homeland and with their new home. Focus on a single artist revealsthe contours of more significant shifts occurring among Syrians in Turkey more generally.

Contesting austerity, de-centring the state: Anti-politics and the political horizon of the urban

This article draws novel links between ‘anti-politics’, austerity and a political horizon centred on the urban. Research on anti-politics often invokes a binary understanding of a politics of and within the state and an anti-politics at a distance from or hostile towards the state. This article argues that in the context of austerity, this binary loses traction. Austerity has intensified the transformation towards networked forms of governance within which the state becomes a more hybrid entity of contradictory ideals and practices. Austerity not only calls into question the legitimacy of formal politics because of its devastating social outcomes, it also disaggregates the political authority of the state and opens up a particularly urban terrain of politics. We capture this development by examining the intersections between the local state and the urban field of politics. Looking across the struggles against austerity in Europe, and focusing in more detail on housing politics in Berlin, we assert that the urban is important not only as a setting (as typically argued) but also as the basis for a different rationality of political action in and against austerity. In the context of austerity struggles, state authority becomes ever more contingent and other, more urban, forms of politics advance. In sum, the article contributes to a spatial reading of (anti-)politics against austerity, points to the de-centring of the state in transformative political projects and emphasizes the analytical purchase of a distinctly urban perspective on contemporary politics in Europe.

The celebritization of indigenous activism: Tame Iti as media figure

In recent years, a number of indigenous activists have gained celebrity status in ways that carry interesting implications for contemporary cultural politics. This article focuses on the celebrification of Tame Iti, arguably Aotearoa/New Zealand’s best-known Māori activist, within a wider cultural context characterized by intensifying media convergence, an expanding politics of decolonization, and the continuing elaboration of global indigenous mediascapes, including the Māori Television Service. We draw on forms of conjunctural analysis to explore how wider historical forces and social dynamics come to be embodied in particular flesh and blood individuals, who are thereby constituted as resonant media figures, who operate as both objects and agents of struggle, and who at once intervene in and shape, while also being shaped by, key terrains of contemporary discourse and cultural politics.