Political Encounters Research Articles

Settling a State—Settling for a State: Reinterpreting One Hundred Years of Zionist–Arab Relations

Abstract In recent years, a more coherent, widespread critique of Zionism as a form of settler colonialism has developed in Western academia. Despite its critical assumptions regarding Zionism, this conversation has yet to influence one of the core images of the Zionist-Arab encounter, mainly that of Palestinian intransigence versus Zionist political flexibility. According to this stereotypical image, these contrasting political characteristics played a central role in allowing a Jewish state to be established in a large part of historical Palestine, while an Arab one did not materialize. By examining political encounters between Zionists and Palestinians over the course of more than a hundred years, this article shows that, in fact, Palestinian leadership and Palestinians generally were willing to settle for an internationally recognized Arab-Palestinian state at key points. By contrast, Zionists usually exhibited greater ambivalence toward the idea of a recognized state, preferring to settle for something else, mainly expansionism. By adopting a counterintuitive approach, this article seeks to contrast the colonial dimension of Zionism with the more flexible and ultimately more state-and norm-oriented quality of Palestinian nationalism.

Realizing multispecies justice: a (dog) walk in the park?

ABSTRACT A growing body of literature is concerned with the city as a site of human and nonhuman (henceforth “animal”) entanglement. These findings have contributed to a relational ethics that calls for multispecies justice and care based on “our” shared connectivity. However, the factors impacting how mundane animal encounters are experienced, conflicted, and negotiated remain underexplored. Examining leisurely dog walks in London’s urban spaces, moments of unstructured human–animal and animal–animal encounters, and the impact of these on the moral geographies of dog guardians are investigated. “Dog-walk-and-talk” interviews with experienced dog guardians highlight how animal encounters become moments of ethical contemplation. These ethical reflections are deepened and complicated by the intimate and reciprocal care relations that guardians often share with their companion dog(s). On the one hand, guardians experienced embodied, ethical, and political encounters with animal urban denizens. This is conflicted by practices of detachment that can also follow encounters with so-called pest species. Thus, the stories told by urban dog walkers hint that the human–canine relationship impacts the realization of one’s moral obligation towards other-than-canine animals. The research therefore revisits the topic of multispecies justice and animal ethics and how it might be realized.

The hidden alchemical images: an analysis of Chen Zi’ang’s Ganyu poems

ABSTRACT Chen Zi’ang 陳子昂 (661–702) was a court official and a preeminent poet in the early Tang Dynasty. His unsuccessful political career adds a layer of mystery to his poems that has been inviting people to interpret them in different ways. However, the majority of Chen’s poems have been treated in an allegorical way, particularly his most renowned poetic work, the Ganyu 感遇 series. This article focuses on three poems of the Ganyu series, and explores the associations of the hidden images adopted in Chen’s poems with the Daoist alchemical classic, Zhouyi Cantong qi 周易參同契 [The Seal of the Unity of the Three, in Accordance with the Book of Changes]. This connection suggests that these three poems are unrelated to the emotions inspired by political encounters, which is the typical interpretation of Ganyu poems in conventional scholarship. Instead, I argue that underlying the poems is the poet’s interest in alchemy and longing for longevity, instantiated in his intimate familiarity with the alchemical expertise discussed in Cantong qi.

A Lowdown on Gender-Lag in the Moroccan Society: The Road Ahead

Women’s social and political rights have invariably been a focal point of discussion and debate in academic and political encounters. Currently, the issue of women’s rights, far from being a third-rail issue, is an extremely contested, top-agenda matter both within and across countries. Focusing on Morocco, women continue to be marginalized in many facets of society despite the efforts that have been made so far. The slow-paced involvement of women in political life remains an issue that tarnishes the kingdom’s proclaimed ambition to be a haven for gender equity. In spite of the legal reforms, namely the ‘Mudawana’ or family code, gender inequality and sexism persist in stark disregard of the internationally acknowledged rights of women. Although it is clearly stated in the Moroccan constitution that “men and women are guaranteed equal rights”, Moroccan women continue to face obstacles and societal discrimination on a daily basis. Thus, an equity-oriented mobilization needs to be undertaken so that women would distance themselves from the absolute implications of traditional societal norms cloistering them to inferior social roles. Within this vein, this paper seeks to sift what follows: (1) how constitutional laws in Morocco are thwarted by deeply-rooted societal norms and practices that underestimate women’s potential, (2) how representation of women in politics can be an authentic indicator of overall development and modernization, and (3) how Moroccan women’s participation in political life can enhance the kingdom’s global image and boost its capacity to play a larger role on the regional and international scenes. Using a content-based approach, this investigation reveals that empowering Moroccan women is a strenuous endeavor that calls for the keen involvement of different social and political actors, namely the Ivy League ones, in order to allot women their stakes as real asset-holders in sustaining multi-layered national development.

Sips and Giggles: Alcohol, Tragedy and Ideo-Aesthetics in La sombra del Caudillo

This article examines the ideo-aesthetic function of alcohol in Martín Luis Guzmán literary magnum opus La sombra del caudillo. Specifically, I read alcohol as a broader process of consumption, inebriation and affective transformation that concurrently reflects and influences individual and collective power dynamics at play. Rather than a mere object of consumption, it behaves as an active agent that participates in, ignites and transforms other processes in the text. Within the ideological domain, I focus on what the individual and collective drinking practices reveal about those who drink and how questions of gender, class and race are negotiated through literary representation. I then consider the aesthetic and symbolic function of alcohol in relation to the broader sociopolitical practice of state-building. I analyze how alcohol consumption becomes a double-edged sword with the potential to foster comradery or conflict and how its excess transforms social relations from amicable political encounters to violent confrontations. Ultimately, I argue that the ideo-aesthetic role of alcohol in La sombra del caudillo contributes to the work’s overarching theme of tragedy.

Multivectorism politics in 2022 Qatar world cup: media relations analysis

World Cup is a mega sports event enjoyed and built in the name of sport. However, as the community grows, World Cup becomes a sporting event and a political encounter. Each country is trying to be the best, and in order to achieve this, many seek mutual profit or increase power value during the event. Multivector Analysis was used to analyse social media content related to the Qatar 2022 World Cup. With the help of social media and Political Correctness, it becomes visible that these countries are trying to obtain their goals and match victory. Vulnerabilities, powers, and many faces accompany the condiments of the Qatar World Cup 2022. With a historical ancestry in FIFA, Political Correctness is like their anthems. Having a non-Western host would be a struggle against a larger country, resulting in a player exchange that allows them to become immigrants embroiled in heated political tensions because any country by nature still has a strong bias towards its land and its race.

Turkey’s Relations with the Middle East. Political Encounters after the Arab Spring, eds. Hüseyin Işıksal, Oğuzhan Göksel, Springer International Publishing, Cham 2018, ss. 220

Recenzja publikacji: Turkey’s Relations with the Middle East. Political Encounters after the Arab Spring, eds. Hüseyin Işıksal, Oğuzhan Göksel, Springer International Publishing, Cham 2018, ss. 220

Truth-telling about a settler-colonial legacy: decolonizing possibilities?

ABSTRACT In 2017, the Uluru Statement calling for Voice, Treaty and Truth was released by Australia’s Referendum Council. The Uluru Statement calls for a Makarrata Commission to oversee a process of ‘agreement-making’ and ‘truth-telling’. I argue that it was in the regional dialogues held by the Referendum Council prior to the release of the Uluru Statement that this demand for truth-telling was substantively articulated by dialogue participants. This article explores this grassroots invocation of truth-telling within the context of the desire for political transformation, most recently expressed in the Uluru Statement. I argue that truth-telling is conceptualized by regional dialogue participants as an opportunity for First Nations and non-Indigenous Australians to participate as equals in a process of place-based dialogic engagement about the ‘truths’ of colonial history that may or may not lead to local reconciliation. This type of ‘agonistic’ political encounter, therefore, does not assume an outcome of national or even local reconciliation. I contend that these types of encounters may have the potential to create local decolonizing spaces in which more equal terms of association are negotiated. However, they could also be appropriated to pursue ideological forms of consensus that undermine this possibility, as occurred in previous periods of Australian history.

POLITICAL AESTHETICS OF URBAN ENCOUNTERS


 Aesthetics and politics are intertwined in our everyday encounters and even nonverbal encounters are negotiations of meanings, values, and means of representation. The aesthetic political negotiation of urban encounters is politics beyond consensus and dissensus: an open-ended process of altered perception. Perception of difference, a feeling of safety, and a form of distanciation are required for the political potential to be actualized. This article begins by discussing urban encounters and the notion of politics. Politics takes place in the public sphere and is actualized in political negotiations, which in ephemeral encounters take the form of pondering, or hermeneutic understanding and judgment. The second section discusses the prerequisites: safety, distance, and difference. Two points are made. Firstly, the political encounter contains a practical-ethical demand for effort in our everyday life. Secondly, training aesthetic sensibility assists in this pursuit. This article is an example of an approach of inquiry that can be called political aesthetics.

Importation for comparison as apparatus: Israeli prime ministers and their political strategies of memorialization

Politically grappling with history is a constructive act, one that relies on context, structure, and agency, and is also directed at the forging of cultural coherence. In light of the growing transnationalization of commemoration practices, political actors not only rely on national past but also appeal to historical foreign events in political domestic speech. This research focuses on Israel as a case study for theoretical expansion of the political encounter with history and the experience of alterity. Qualitative analysis of Israeli political rhetoric since the 2000s demonstrates how Israeli prime ministers primarily rely on domestic collective memories; when used, events of others are intended to create a sense of shared experience through comparison. ‘Importation for comparison’ is thus the apparatus reflecting how Israeli prime ministers comply with current needs put forth by internal and external challenges in a globalized world. Contributing to the ongoing discussion regarding the nature of identity, this research underlines how referencing to events from abroad is one of the prominent ways in which national self is evaluated, discussed, and negotiated, thus providing a better understanding of how Israeli society imagines itself in relation to others.

Imposing Worlds: Ontological Marginalization and Reclamation through Irrigation Infrastructure in Rajapur, Nepal

In this article, I examine the Rajapur Irrigation Project (RIP), a large-scale infrastructure project to “modernize” a farmer-managed irrigation system in Nepal, as a political encounter between two ontologies or what Blaser called “ways of worlding”: Tharu farmers’ fluid practices of living with the Karnali River and engineers’ methods of structurally training waterways. In tracing how the logic and world-making practices of the RIP overwrote the place-based ontologies of local farmers through the concrete structures it enacted and left behind, I introduce ontological marginalization as a political process that can occur when one situated understanding of what the world is and how it should be (re)made is imposed on another through structural interventions. I demonstrate infrastructure’s power to enforce certain ontologies while marginalizing others, and I also explore how people reassert agency and world-making practices through acts of ontological reclamation in the aftermath of interventions. Ultimately, this article contributes to emergent discussions on infrastructure and its ontological impacts within geography by developing the dual concepts of ontological marginalization and reclamation as ways for scholars to better account for the political implications of infrastructure on diverse ways of worlding.

The Impact of Citizenship Pressure on Organizational Citizenship Performance: A Three-Way Interactive Model.

Citizenship pressure has recently been a hot topic in organizational citizenship behavior research since it aids in understanding the driving mechanism of organizational citizenship behavior. However, previous research has revealed discrepancies in the connection. This article develops a theoretical model of the impact of citizenship pressure on organizational citizenship performance based on expectancy theory. A leader–employee paired questionnaire was used to evaluate the hypotheses. The results indicate that organizational citizenship performance is positively influenced by citizenship pressure. The connection between organizational citizenship performance and citizenship pressure is positively moderated by transformational leadership. The better the transformational leadership, the greater the influence of citizenship pressure on organizational citizenship performance. Furthermore, the impact of transformational leadership on the link between citizenship pressure and organizational citizenship performance is dependent on the political skill of employees. When individuals with strong political skill encounter transformational leadership, the relationship between citizenship pressure and organizational citizenship performance is minimal. On the contrary, this relationship is enhanced when personnel with limited political skill are confronted with transformational leadership.

Swiss Enchantment

A vast and hyper-centralized Asian empire built on the premise of an alleged cultural homogeneity. A small, federalist Alpine state sustained by the ideal of coexistence of different languages and religions. The differences between China and Switzerland could not be wider, and it is therefore understandable that the Swiss confederacy has been fascinating Chinese intellectuals in both the modern and contemporary era. In the late Qing and early Republican period, Switzerland was mentioned by prominent figures like Kang Youwei and Liang Qichao, who praised its democracy, and in the 1920s the Swiss political system became a source of inspiration for “provincial patriots” in Hunan or for Chinese federalists such as Chen Jiongming. The present paper intends to survey these political encounters and perceptions, focusing on the transformation of the Swiss institutional model and historical experience into a “political concept”, and on the reasons for its final rejection as an unrealistic utopia unsuited for China.

Appropriating the Concept of the Right to the City: Politics, Politicians, and Collective Actors in Mexico City☆

AbstractThis article takes into consideration the importance of the concept of right to the city in Mexico City politics and raises three main questions: How have center‐left governments adapted the concept according to their own interests, in a neoliberalizing context marked by mandatory repositioning of planning and capital? How has the right to the city been taken up and modified by diverse social organizations aimed at influencing the production of urban space? To what extent has the concept, despite manipulations and misunderstandings, proved to be politically useful in bridging differences between government agencies and social movements? I focus on the social life of the concept. I suggest that its widespread dissemination has not meant its trivialization. On the contrary, the concept has taken on greater sociological complexity. It was not turned into a fixed concept, rather it became both a field of contention and a tool enabling political encounters.

Being Present: Embodying Political Relations in Indigenous Encounters with the Crown

Political encounters between settler governments and indigenous communities are freighted with the unresolved issues of indigenous independence asserted under ongoing conditions of colonial domination. Within political science, these encounters have been primarily theorised and analysed as struggles of indigenous communities for political recognition from settler states. Further, the politics of recognition is widely understood as colonising by indigenous scholars, with some arguing for an alternative politics of (indigenous) resurgence and refusal, a ‘turning away’ from the state. In this article, we argue that in the case of Māori in Aotearoa ‘turning up’ is the ethical and correct practice of politics, a practice stemming from the relational ontology of the Māori world. Thus ‘turning up’ rather than ‘turning away’ can, for Māori, itself be a practice of refusal. We outline the centrality of the embodied, face-to-face encounter within Māori politics, and identify the ongoing presence of the sovereign’s body and embodiment more broadly within the Westminster tradition, as symbolised in the concept of the Crown. Building on these compatibilities within distinct political ontologies, we argue for the potential and productivity of face-to-face political encounters, and call on the New Zealand Crown to also prioritise ‘turning up’ in its engagement with indigenous communities.

Democratic Public or Populist Rabble: Repositioning the City amidst Social Fracture

AbstractThe current degree of social fracture that has attended the growing prevalence of populist movements calls into question the viability of democratic practices grounded in collective deliberation. Urban practitioners committed to democratic inclusion must confront the practical question of how to deal with a divided public. Any such effort must address longstanding and mutually reinforcing trends that have both aggravated social fragmentation and enabled the rise of populist regimes whose policies exacerbate divisiveness and inequity. These trends include economic restructuring and rising inequality, cultural division, and a post‐truth trap resulting from disagreement over epistemological and ontological assumptions. We argue that, while local governments can play a role in addressing these dynamics, a more fundamental renewal of a meaningfully democratic polity depends on a capacity to help cultivate solidarity across difference. We then recast the city as a site of political encounter and experimentation that might enable both a re‐examination of prevailing modes of public engagement and the emergence of solidarities and infrastructures through which populism might be challenged. Finally, we consider how a progressive urban politics of place might use populism as a point of departure for transforming urban futures.

Locating the ‘customary’ in post-colonial Tanzania’s politics: the shifting modus operandi of the rural state

ABSTRACTThis paper examines how both rhetoric about custom and practices drawing on elements of deep-rooted political culture remain relevant in post-colonial Tanzania. This is the case despite the Tanzanian government’s aggressively modernising stance and the erasure of colonial-era ‘traditional’ chiefs after independence. The paper identifies three patterns. Firstly, witchcraft cleansing remains a rare flashpoint over which rural people are willing to defy officials, amid legislation that has barely moved on from the colonial period. Secondly, for defenders of certain practices, describing them as customary is a way to try to place them beyond criticism, while for officials it becomes a way to wash their hands of the attendant problems. Lastly, a performative political practice can be discerned in the interactions between rural populations, officials and development experts that resonate with descriptions of pre-colonial political encounters. By looking for local legitimacy in interactions with so-called elders, development experts have become arbiters of (pseudo-)traditional authority despite their modernising identity. These observations show that discourses about and practices drawing on the customary have become deeply imbricated with the political practices of the rural state.

Poéticas dissidentes na arte urgente: um princípio indisciplinar na sociedade contrassexual

The world is inhabited by different bodies, which produce in their experiences instaurative urgencies of thoughts and actions, as well as modes of conduct and resistance. It is by betting on the power of these multiple bodies that we launch in this text a look at the dissident poetics that circulate and promote the creative and political encounter of abject voices (of the bodies, read as insignificant and monstrous), queer (strange bodies) and contrasexuals (of the society that rejects the sexual labels). Voices, bodies and existences that echo and rebel against this colonizing system of capitalist-neoliberal power, centered on patriarchy and whiteness. In view of the disruptive power of these dissenting poetics, we will analyze in this article some contemporary art productions, which we will call here of urgent art, since they are configured as artistic manifestations that affirm the body as a multitude and are positioned within a contrasexual society (PRECIADO, 2014). Using the Queer Theory and the contributions of the philosophy of difference of Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, we present here a cartography of dissident artists who claim a multiple body and affirm life in its infinite diversity. Feminist artists such as Valie Export and Marcia X, as well as other artists who express what we call urgent art, will be analyzed and presented here as a way of resisting and/or figuring ways of living and desiring that undermine the norms that tend to dock our subjectivities.

De casa para o meio-fio: pequenas histórias de uma residência terapêutica

Estes escritos versam sobre figuras do cotidiano de ex-internos de um hospital psiquiátrico em uma residência terapêutica na cidade de Vitória-ES. Após anos de isolamento manicomial, seus moradores e parceiros criam caminhos comuns de uma vida em liberdade, abrindo-se à imprevisibilidade das relações sociais, temporais, afetivas etc., que se dão no espaço comunitário, bem como às lutas e resistências diante dos mecanismos biopolíticos de normalização. Foram utilizados registros em caderno de campo como ferramenta metodológica, inspirando a produção de pequenas narrativas, fragmentos de histórias, que compõem e ativam o fluxo de experiências associadas à reforma psiquiátrica e à luta antimanicomial, com o objetivo de contribuir para uma manutenção das conquistas desse campo e também para o avanço desses processos. Os resultados apontam para a produção de um cuidado em saúde mental indissociável de uma dimensão ético-estético-política, afirmando práticas de potencialização de liberdades, buscando afetações e trocas com outras formas de sociabilidade.

The Political Encounter with Louis Althusser:

This special issue presents a collection of essays on the work of Louis Althusser. These essays commemorate Althusser’s centennial and the publication of For Marx and Reading Capital more than fift...