Political Defeat Research Articles

Public housing on ‘The Rocks’: brutalism, heritage and the defence of inhabitance

The affordability, availability and adequacy of housing is a problem which now affects almost every major city in the world, as processes of financialisation and commodification increasingly circumscribe the possibilities for the democratic inhabitance of urban space. In Sydney, there has been a long-running campaign against the eviction of public housing residents in the historically working class, inner city neighbourhoods of Millers Point and The Rocks. This article discusses the community opposition to the New South Wales State Government’s decision in March 2014 to sell off 293 public housing dwellings and relocate residents, and focuses on the resistance by tenants of the famous Sirius building in The Rocks against forced evictions and the sale of the building. Reflecting on the ‘brutalist’ design that characterises the Sirius building, it will be argued that it is important to resist simplistic characterisations of brutalism as a relic of an inhuman modernism. The Sirius building demonstrates the possibilities of designing inner city public housing with the concerns of the elderly, the frail and the marginalised in mind. The campaign to save the Sirius building may be understood as a political defence of the idea of ‘inhabitance’, understood in terms of bodily occupation, the creative appropriation of space and the possibility of utopia. The preservation of such a building can be seen as an egalitarian and utopian demand for what Henri Lefebvre describes as housing for ‘collective luxury’; an entitlement to inhabit the inner city in dignity, from which none should be excluded.

SCIENTISM, ONLINE SPIRITUALITY, AND (MIS)READING EVOLUTION

SCIENTISM, ONLINE SPIRITUALITY, AND (MIS)READING EVOLUTION

Beijing Subway and the Political and Economic Development of China

This research paper analyses the main purposes the Beijing subway system, which served from 1969 to now as a tool of political defense as well as a transportation system. The notion to construct the system arose in 1953, but the first section of today’s Line 1 did not open until September 1969.  Today, the Beijing subway system is the world’s busiest in terms of annual ridership and the world’s second longest subway system, ranking only behind Shanghai’s. (Xinhua News Agency, 2017, http://www.xinhuanet.com/politics/2017-12/30/c_1122188643.htm.) The political and economic development and trends in China in the second half of 20th century and the first decade of the 21st century, such as the Cultural Revolution and the 2008 Olympics, affected the subway system’s development greatly. This paper examines Chinese documents with the aim of providing a general understanding of the development and purpose of the Beijing system, through political, economic and technical analysis, among others, of its history.
 There exists almost no document, ¬¬either in English or Chinese, that analyzes the development of Beijing’s subway system. However, this topic should be considered important, as it provides an alternative way of viewing the development of China and its governing principles throughout its late-20th century and current-day history.

Marszałek Wielki Koronny Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski wobec Sejmu 1683 roku i problemu wojny z portą osmańską

In 1683 Stanisław Herakliusz Lubomirski was one of the most important politicians in Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth. He was part of anti-royal opposition, which was against alliance with Austria and war against Ottoman Empire. Lubomirski’s letters date before Warsaw Sejm indicates that he supported war against Muscovy. During Sejm he fulfilled his role as Grand Marshal, but at the same time he worked towards French interests. When the king and his supporters managed to defeat political opposition, Lubomirski switched sides and claimed that he never supported the king’s opponents. He then participated in signing a treaty with Austria and also enlisted few military units to take part in war against the Turks. After 1683, Sejm - for the time being - limited his political activities. Despite political defeat, he managed to achieve some personal successes – became owner of the town of Jazdów (Ujazdów), while his brother Hieronim was nominated for the office of Crown Court Marshal.

Attenuated Governance: How Policymakers Insulate Private School Choice from Legal Challenge

Indirect or delegated governance engages private organizations, tax expenditures, or service users to deliver programs that would otherwise be provided by the government directly. This paper explains the rise of indirect governance in terms of policymakers’ strategic use of “attenuation” to avoid political and legal challenge. Attenuation is the process by which a government obscures its role in promoting a particular policy goal, through communication strategies (attenuating rhetoric), or by utilizing private third parties and the tax system to deliver a benefit (attenuated design). Deploying policy‐maker interviews and an original historical database of private school choice programs and their legal and political defense, 1953–2017, I argue that pursuing both attenuated design and attenuating rhetoric at once helps policies pass and spread by publicly dissociating the government from legally contentious policy outputs.

The electronic accounting system of medical equipment in NATO member countries as an example of using the modern information logistics systems

At this moment,Ukraineis creating an overall effective system of logistics support for the Armed Forces of Ukraine, military and paramilitary formations, which can qualitatively cooperate with NATO member countries and European Union in peaceful and martial states. This system effectiveness determines by the information quality and reliability, which is used to manage stream processes. That’s why an integral part of the tasks came up constructing the system of effective and rational using the medical equipment in medical units and institutions of Armed Forces of Ukraine, is the formation and obtaining reliable information about the effectiveness providing level of using a medical equipment and technics. Aim. To study the order and the procedure of items’ supply codification (including medical equipment) which are providing the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Additional aim is a development of material and technical stuff searching algorithm which include medical equipment in NATO Master Catalogue of References for Logistics system. Results. Currently, Armed Forces of Ukraine carry out a new stage in formation of medical equipment accounting system according to NATO standards as a further way of Armed Forces development. In this article we observed an order and procedure of codification of supply items (including medical equipment), which are providing the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Reviewed the algorithm of equipment finding in NATO Master Catalogue of References for Logistics as an example of using modern information logistic systems. Conclusions. These tasks acquire a special relevance as a method of medical supply optimization in the Armed Forces of Ukraine. After all, implementation of modern information logistic systems will allow to raise the effectiveness of material streams management in Armed Forces medical supply system at principally new level., It will Also provide a possibility to integrate logistic providing system of Armed Forces with an another systems of Defense Forces and will enable to provide an active participation in realization of protective and defense politics of European Union and to achieve an operating and technical compatibility with the NATO county member’s Armed Forces.

Grinton-Fremington Dykes: Names, Places and Spaces

ABSTRACT In Landscapes 16 (1), a debate following a survey of the largest and best preserved of four cross-dale dykes in Swaledale (Yorkshire, northern England), known as the Grinton-Fremington Dykes, produced agreement that its main section belonged to the Late Bronze Age or Early Iron Age. Apart from chronology, many more questions about the dykes remain unanswered. This new contribution to the debate, by a non-archaeologist, draws on place-name interpretations, map studies and ground observations to explore new areas of interest that can expand our understanding of the dykes and their environment, and raise new challenges for future investigations. It includes the first full analysis of the place-names associated with the dykes, revealing new understandings and interpretations of the landscape in which they stand. It explores a previously published suggestion that the upper section of the surveyed dyke might be a later extension, and considers how this could reinvigorate the generally unpopular idea that the four dykes were built as land boundaries rather than as elements in a system of political defence.

Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History by Mona Hassan

Reviewed by: Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History by Mona Hassan John O. Voll Longing for the Lost Caliphate: A Transregional History. By mona hassan. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016. 408 pp. $45.00 (hardcover). The Caliphate is a set of historical Muslim institutions in specific times and places. The Caliphs were the leaders of the community of Muslim believers following the death of the Prophet Muhammad and the title continued to be used by various rulers in the following centuries. The Caliphate is also a symbol of the ideal Islamic society, especially for Sunni Muslims. Mona Hassan presents a broadly conceived discussion of the relationships between these two [End Page 325] dimensions as they are viewed in the historical memory of Muslims. The core of her analysis is an examination of how Muslims understood the caliphate in the contexts of its absence – in the thirteenth century, when the Mongols destroyed the Abbasid caliphate of Baghdad, and in the twentieth century, when the Ottoman caliphate was abolished in 1924 by the new Turkish Republic of Mustafa Kemal Pasa. Hassan argues that "the caliphate signifies a pivotal cultural symbol that Muslims have imbued with different meanings according to their particular social contexts" (p. 19). The continuing power of this symbol, even in the twenty-first century, is shown in the appeal of the "emotive rhetoric of a caliphate" used by militant extremists in the self-proclaimed caliphate of the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria (p. 254). Narratives of Muslim history commonly present a story of a great Golden Age of the early Caliphates followed by a long decline. Similarly, Ottoman history is commonly presented as a story of a dynamic early empire followed by a long decline. The ending of the caliphates, in this narrative, is seen as a culmination of the decline. However, Hassan argues that the military and political defeats of the Baghdad and Ottoman caliphates did not bring an end to the importance of the concept of the caliphate in Muslim historical memories. A major theme in Hassan's analysis is showing how Muslims understood the loss, so that they could "redefine the caliphate for their times" (p. 2). These efforts often represented significant intellectual dynamism rather than manifestations of a long civilizational decline. Hassan sets the foundations for her analysis in an introduction that provides historical and conceptual contexts for understanding the ways that Muslims have "striven to reconfigure their political and intellectual constructs as a part of a living and dynamic cultural memory" (p.16). The introduction provides summaries of the histories of the caliphates but this is primarily a study of historical memory rather than chronological history. The trauma of the destruction of the caliphate in 1258 inspired a broad spectrum of responses, which are analyzed in chapter one. Poets as well as scholars responded to the events and the cultural memories of those events. The comprehensive nature of Hassan's study is emphasized by her distinctive discussion of popular musical responses which created an "emotive soundscape" (p. 52) in the Muslim collective memory. Following the destruction of Baghdad, the Mamluk military rulers of Egypt established a member of the Abbasid family as caliph in Cairo. The Mamluks worked "to reinvent the Abbasid Caliphate for their times" (p. 67). The common historical narrative as developed by Orientalists such as Bernard Lewis is that these caliphs were "minor [End Page 326] Court pensioners with purely ceremonial duties to perform."1 Hassan, in chapter 2, presents a well-documented, contrasting view: "the Abbasid Caliphate was resurrected in the Mamluk State as a significant religio-political institution" (p. 95). The conceptualizations of the caliphate after the destruction of Baghdad presented in chapter 3 are the product of dynamic intellectual life of Muslim scholars in the Mamluk era like Ibn Taymiyya and Ibn Khaldun and others. Again, as with the Mamluk Caliphate, the picture presented by Hassan counters the old narrative of Muslim decline. The end of the Ottoman Empire following World War I is usually viewed through the lens of the creation of the Kemalist Turkish Republic and triumph of Turkish nationalism. However, Hassan shows in chapter 4 that even among nationalists there was eloquent...

Nation as a reflection of history, memory, language and culture

The article presents a systematic and detailed account of scholarly developments on the problem of studying the process of nation-building and the role of history, memory, language and culture in reflecting this process. The research reveals that according to the premordialist approach, nations are not formed instantaneously, by the relevant political will or by coincidence of circumstances; the process of creating and consolidating a nation is a long and meaningful one, full of historical events and national cultural tokens. The primordialist concepts are considered unanimous in their recognition of the exceptional significance of psychological factors in the creation of a nation. The creation of a nation involves a sophisticated set of linguistic, religious, ethnic, territorial and myth-household factors that determine the formation of a corresponding type of sociality. The framework of the analytics of the phenomenon of a nation includes not only psychological, but also social, cultural, political, ethical, moral and axiological aspects. The new system-building concepts such as solidarity, habitus, plebiscite were added to the discussion of nation. In view of that, it is impossible to carry out the reduction of the phenomenon of a nation to a particular problem field and to localize it to invariant indicators. The formation and optimization of the capitalistic type of social system generates new factors in the interpretation and consolidation of a nation. The reasons for a political defeat in the development of a nation can be referedr to either conscious manipulative techniques, or spontaneous miscalculations. Elaborating the alternative versions of history is nothing but unjustified politicization, implementation of imperial and colonial ambitions, overcoming which is a necessary prerequisite for successful nation-building. The establishment and offsetting of such manipulative influence facilitate the stabilization of the social situation and the resolution of conflicts, and, consequently, contribute to national development. The key point is to establish a nation within the framework of the international and state policy, especially by distinguishing the consolidating and disintegrating influences of state and international politicies on nation-building. The policy of uniting the nation can become effective when the important reforms do not deepen the fragmentation of the nation, but rather neutralize it

Beyond Islamophobia? The role of Englishness and English national identity within English Defence League discourse and politics

ABSTRACTUnsurprisingly, most scholarship on the English Defence League (EDL) focuses on the Islamophobic nature of the group's politics. This has found that, whilst the group presents a more moderate, public-facing image, the EDL's backstage discourse is a far less nuanced brand of Islamophobia and cultural racism (Allen, C. (2011). Opposing Islamification or promoting Islamophobia? Understanding the English Defence League. Patterns of Prejudice, 45(4), 279–294; Kassimeris, G., & Jackson, L. (2015). The ideology and discourse of the English Defence League: ‘Not racist, not violent, just no longer silent’. British Journal of Politics and International Relations, 17, 171–188). A more fundamental area of EDL ideology has been left unexamined, however: what notion of ‘England’ is the EDL trying to ‘defend’? Using content analysis of EDL online discourse, this article examines how the EDL articulates, represents, and uses English national identity within its discourse and politics.

Poetry and Secrecy in Luke Roberts’ <i>To My Contemporaries</i>

This article will address the relations between poetry and secrecy in two recent poems by Luke Roberts: ‘Agitprop: An Ode’ (2014), and To My Contemporaries (2015). Secrecy is shown to be not only a thematic concern, but part of the operations of their language. To My Contemporaries questions the tendency towards modes of ‘secretive’ sonic patterning found in ‘Agitprop’, as part of its resolve “to turn/my self-defences/inside out”. The poem ends with a chastened mode of beginning again, “flinching in compression”, after a grand gathering together of the titular contemporaries, which has seemed both to be invocation and farewell. The poet examines their own method and its relation to the pleasures of concealment and the near-paranoia born of conditions of political defeat and personal loss. They question the adequacy of certain models of “literary allusion and disclosure”, of a poetry overly allusive, elusive and self-reflexive. The poem does not seek to obscure or conceal defeat through imagining it never happened, nor to valorise it in a condition of melancholy – one which preserves the lost, or secret object, in the structure of the language itself, in order to deny its loss. Rather, in reckoning with loss – and with the poet’s own strategies of “self-defence”, strategies of internalisation which must be “turned inside out” – the poem seeks to find a way to continue, a dialectical relation between concealing and revealing, defeat and continuance, noun and verb, object and quality.

A alegria paradoxal: o riso carnavalesco como filosofia trágica

A alegria paradoxal é tema deste artigo. Uma ligação é feita entre os movimentos populares e protestos ocorridos desde 2013 no Brasil com o conceito de carnavalização, alegria paradoxal e a filosofia trágica. O corpus se compõe de um exemplo de manifestação popular; de uma análise de um discurso humorístico (stand up) e de análise de um programa de humor televisivo. A metodologia adotada é a dialógica de cotejamento, na qual tudo dialoga com tudo. O entendimento da ligação entre política inorgânica e carnavalização terá sua fundamentação na filosofia trágica e na alegria paradoxal. A carnavalização e ambivalência do riso carnavalesco são defesa de uma política inorgânica nas entranhas das manifestações populares.

Unequally egalitarian? Defending the credentials of social egalitarianism

In his new book, Luck Egalitarianism, Kasper Lippert-Rasmussen responds to challenges raised by social egalitarians against luck egalitarianism. Social egalitarianism is the view according to which a just society is one where people relate to each other as equals, while the basic premise of luck egalitarianism is that it is unfair if people are worse-off than others through no fault or choice of their own. Lippert-Rasmussen argues that the most important objections to luck egalitarianism made by social egalitarians can either be largely accommodated by luck egalitarians or lack the argumentative force that its proponents believe them to have. While Lippert-Rasmussen does offer a version of luck egalitarianism that seems to avoid some of the main lines of criticism, he mischaracterizes parts of both the form and the content of the disagreement, and thus ultimately misses the mark. In this paper, we provide a substantive, a methodological and a political defense of social egalitarianism by elaborating on this mischaracterization. More work must be done, we argue, if social egalitarianism is to be dismissed and its concerns genuinely incorporated in the luck egalitarian framework. Until this is done, the supposed theoretical superiority of luck egalitarianism remains contested.

Poder Constituyente, Reforma De La Constitución Y Control Jurisdiccional De Constitucionalidad

This article sets out the basic differences between constituent power and constitutional reform power, determining its characteristic features and its limits, considering based on the latter Charter can establish institutions for legal and political defense, being part of it the judicial review constitutionality of the constitutional reforms

The Fight for $15: The Right Wage for a Working America by David Rolf

Reviewed by: The Fight for $15: The Right Wage for a Working America by David Rolf Dave Bush David Rolf, The Fight for $15: The Right Wage for a Working America ( New York: The New Press 2016) How did the American Dream, where hard-working Americans could attain good jobs and a pathway to middle-class stability, turn into a nightmare of perverse inequality and precarious work? And what are workers and unions going to do to put workers on the road from poverty to prosperity? These are the two questions David Rolf sets out to answer in his book on the Fight for $15. Rolf, the president of the powerful Service Employees International Union (SEIU) Local 775 in Seattle, makes the case that raising the minimum wage to $15 is one of the defining working-class issues of our time. The book is structured into three parts: explaining the rise of low-wage work and inequality, telling the story of how workers and unions are organizing the Fight for $15 campaign, and debunking common myths the campaign is bumping up against. Rolf's examination of the rise of inequality and precarious jobs in the United States treads familiar territory. Hewing closely to the analysis of Joseph Stiglitz and Robert Reich, Rolf dates "the war on the middle class" to the mid-1970s. He argues that right-wing ideas, like tax cuts and deregulation, began to take hold amongst segments of the working class spurned by rising unemployment and inflation. The right wing through the 1980s and 1990s was thus able to further their longstanding dream of eroding the power of unions and working standards. The decline of the middle class was followed by the rise of "new work" which is [End Page 279] fissured, flexible, and insecure. Workers are atomized in the workplace and their collective power and solidarity have been eroded. Rolf paints a damning picture of work today, with its proliferation of subcontracting, part-time, temporary, and freelance work. Rolf also notes there are now more workers in the United States who have no legal right to form a union than workers who do. Rolf's analysis of the changing workplace is useful, though it underplays the role the attack on the welfare state has played in undermining workers' confidence and security. For instance, the rise in post-secondary education fees for students has been a major reason why part-time work has proliferated. Likewise, the gutting of welfare entitlements in the 1980s and 1990s fed a sense of insecurity amongst low-wage workers. This erosion of social programs and public infrastructure contributed to a sense of isolation and economic fear amongst the working class. The political defeats suffered by the working class are not only as important as the setbacks endured by workers in the workplace, they are interlinked. Understanding that the ideological shift in workers' confidence and sense of collective power is the result of both the restructuring of employment relations and political defeat is important to grasp the true measure and impact of new work. Workplaces and work are changing in the 21st century, but as Kim Moody and Kevin Doogan have written it is important not to overstate this claim or assume the working class is either a moribund concept or a powerless political force. In his most recent book, On New Terrain (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017), Moody argues that precarious work did grow as lean production methods were ramped up in the early 1980s, but precarious work has not expanded further over the last 30 years. Workers feel more insecure and wages have stagnated, but the nature of work has not been dramatically upended over the last several decades. The most interesting aspect of Rolf's book is when he shifts gears from a broader analysis of the American economy to a narrative about how a $15 minimum wage was won in Sea-Tac and Seattle. Sea-Tac, a small suburb outside of Seattle that includes the city's airport, was the first jurisdiction to enact a $15 minimum wage in the United States. The airport, which once provided many middle-class jobs, is now the site of many outsourced low...

In Defense of Identity Politics

AbstractCritics, on the Right, Left, and the supposedly apolitical center have been quick to blame identity politics for the election of Donald Trump. But this is a straw woman, a phantom, and a da...

Arendt’s Apology

In 1967, Hannah Arendt published an essay with the deceptively simple title “Truth and Politics” (1967). Most scholarly discussions of her essay consider her distinction between a traditional political art of limited, deliberate, strategic lying and modern, organised, global lying and self-deception and then evaluate her qualified defence of the virtues of mendacity. This article suggests, however, that her essay has a much broader ambit: viz., to defend the political value of truth-telling. The main purpose of this article is to demonstrate that she formulates her essay as an apology of the truth-teller in politics and of her own truth-telling in her controversial report of the Eichmann trial. It first surveys the personal motives of Arendt’s political defence of frank speech. It shows that in developing this defence she significantly revises her scepticism about the value of truth-telling in politics. She does so by identifying three different types of truth-teller with distinctive political roles: philosophers who exemplify the truth in their own lives, citizens who see the world from other people’s perspectives, and poets and historians whose stories reconcile citizens to the past. Finally, it argues that the tragic political perspective Arendt sought to revive requires acknowledging value of the emotions in making political judgments.

‘Reading the New Ruins: Loss, Mourning, and Melancholy in <i>Dissident Gardens'</i>

This article argues Jonathan Lethem’s Dissident Gardens (2013) possesses the workings of a critical apprehension set against the more violent ends and commemorative strictures of mourning, loss, and despair. Typically, twentieth-century literary works which actively intervene in the past risk either commemorating political failure and defeat or mourning the trauma of a collective agony that is repeatedly experienced. Instead, I propose twenty-first century fiction produced at a certain historical, cultural, and geographical remove from the centres of state-socialism and communist atrocity articulates an ability to properly trace the political, psychological, and aesthetic contours of left loss in more reparative ways. Specifically, this article is concerned with the ways in which Lethem’s text stages a series of cultural practices through which it can express and work through left loss, disappointment, injury and despair. It sets out to juxtapose, and place into dialogue, key thematic strands from Lethem’s novel with critical accounts of mourning, memory, and loss by Freud and other psychoanalytic theorists.

The Remaining, Unconvinced Few: Using Twitter to Examine Non-CORFing Behaviors Following a Political Defeat

Twitter and other social media technologies offer social scientists new and innovative ways of investigating individual-level processes on a mass scale. The current study examined communicative behaviors associated with Cutting off Reflected Failure (CORF) in the aftermath of the 2014 Scottish Independence Referendum. The results support past research suggesting that following defeat, small numbers of highly involved individuals may not experience CORF but may instead turn to other rationalizations to make sense of the event in question. Findings are discussed in terms of our understanding of Basking in Reflected Glory (BIRG) and CORF, and in terms of the utility of Twitter in examining similar phenomena in the future.

Involvement of a Capitalist Crisis in the 1900-30 Inequality Trend Reversal

This paper proposes a supplemental secular cycle formulation for a modern capitalist society that employs financial, economic, and political metrics in place of population and sociopolitical violence. It makes use of Thomas Piketty’s (2014) hypothesis that excess investment return relative to economic growth causes inequality. In a capitalist society, the investing class can be considered as a proxy for elites. Inequality as measured by the ratio of financial to wage gains over time agrees with other economic measures. Rising inequality led to a reduction in capital productivity (output per person per unit of capital). This created instability in financial markets that generated the 1929 stock market crash. Application of a simplified version of the demographic structural theory to inequality trends shows political stress peaking in 1929. The depression that began with the stock market crash in that year resulted in a devastating political defeat for the ruling party in 1932 which brought in the political coalition that engineered the inequality trend reversal. This series of events can be considered as a modern version of the state collapse and reconstitution that was typically a key feature of premodern secular cycles.