Post-liberation Politics Research Articles

Postliberal Politics

The present article consists of key extracts from the recently published Adrian Pabst’s book “Postliberal Politics. The Coming Era of Renewal” (2021). According to the author, stability in the West faces the challenges of left and right populism. And if left populism hasn’t survived the trial by real elections, the right populism is quite successful in removing liberal elites from power. At the same time the strong point of the right populism is the provision of a political program, but its weakness is in the absence of any concepts or political instruments for transitions implementation. But forces, - the ultraliberal left and anti-liberal right, - develop various types of identity politics thus undermining the cultural and civilizational fundamental aspects of the West and the feelings of common goal and common destiny. The author opposes those extremes with postliberalism – non-uniform ideological movement directed at overcoming the contradictions of the deadlocked liberal ideology that is characterized by the rise of both left and right populism. According to Adrian Pabst, postliberalism acknowledges the failure of liberal projects and at the same time the necessity to preserve the most valuable liberal aspects in new form. Liberalism with its multiple trends is not beyond hope and some institutions it created are worth preserving. Still liberal ideology lead to the situation when freedom once alienated from self-restraint and mutual obligations turned into unfreedom. Self-destruction of liberal values such as freedom, equality, tolerance and pluralism demonstrates abnormalities that at once distort liberal principles and show liberal ideology logic. Postliberalism is intended to cut short those defects. In particular, postliberal ideology proceeds from acknowledging that the society is based not on some non-personal social contract between individuals as claimed by the liberals from the times of Hobbes and Locke, but appeared as the result of mutual arrangement between generations. Civil liberty does not man freedom from obligations or freedom for the sake of egoistical interests, but liberty to take care of oneself and others. Personality development based on personal independence should be balanced by common well-being. Equality does not mean uniformity but respect for integral virtue. Individual rights should not be downgraded but should be specific and relative due to their connection with obligations towards other people. Postliberalism in this interpretation endeavors to preserve the best gains of liberal ideology while eliminating the threat of blunt authoritarianism that is always concealed in liberal logic.

‘In this house we believe in fairness and kindness’: Post-liberation politics in Australia's same-sex marriage postal survey

In December 2017, Australia legalized same-sex marriage (SSM), following a 13-year ban and a drawn-out postal survey on marriage equality that saw campaigners mobilize for a ‘Yes’ vote on a non-binding poll. Through a discourse analysis of the Yes and No campaigns’ television and online video advertisements, we demonstrate how the Yes campaign was symptomatic of what we call a ‘post-liberation’ approach that saw SSM as the last major hurdle for Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex and Queer (LGBTIQ) politics. While the No campaign linked SSM to gender fluidity, transgender identity, and sex education programmes, in contrast the Yes campaign limited itself to narratives around love and marriage. In not attending to the link between sex, gender and sexuality, the Yes campaign narrowed the possibilities of the debate, preserving existing White heteronormative expectations of gender and sexuality. We contrast the debate that unfolded during the postal survey to the Australian Gay Liberation movement of the 1970s, the latter of which was able to successfully and radically challenge similarly homophobic campaigns. Rather than relying on ‘palatable’ or mainstream ideas of equality, love and fairness, Gay Liberation in Australia embraced the radical potential of LGBTIQ activism and presented a utopian, optimistic vision of a transformed future. Here we suggest that we can learn from the history of campaigns around sexuality, to understand what was ‘won’ in the SSM debate, and to better develop strategies for change in the future.

ASFS presidential address 2018: Towards an epistemology of pleasure and a post-liberal politics of joy

ABSTRACTAt this moment of great peril for democracies across the world, scholars must not only be critical but develop affective investment in common people’s lives so as to be able to engage in the democratic process more successfully. That entails paying attention to common joys and pleasures as much as to suffering.

Post-Liberation Politics and Political Space in Eritrea: Interrogating Aspirations among Educated Youth

This article discusses post-liberation politics in Eritrea through the lens of political space, making use of empirical data collected between 1996 and 2006 among youth in higher education. Political space is defined as a relational space whose boundaries are being created in constant balancing acts between enforced citizenship obligations and personal aspirations. This definition allows for an analysis of the contradictions between national development objectives and personal aspirations in the lives of research-protagonists, and through this provides important insights into the nature of the Eritrean state. Main findings demonstrate how closures of political space ultimately undermine important state objectives.

Post-liberal peacebuilding and the pacifist state

In this article, I make a case for bringing pacifist political theory back into IR. I attempt this through a critical engagement with post-liberal peacebuilding models, contending that current efforts to go beyond the liberal peace do not extend far enough, particularly to the extent that they implicitly adopt a version of state-building which includes the military as a key actor, the doctrine of the legitimate monopoly on violence and the permanent prospective resort to violence as the final arbiter of radical disagreement and political conflict. This, I suggest, reproduces the epistemic, discursive and institutional structures in which violent political conflict first emerges; in particular, the acceptance of the instrumental rationality and legitimacy of violence is an essential cause of war and political violence. What I propose instead is a radical post-liberal politics in which both the legitimation of, and the means of, violence have been effectively removed from the political sphere. As such, I argue that pacifism offers important theoretical and empirical resources for the future development of peacebuilding theory and practice.

Liberal internationalism and the law vs liberty paradox

This article examines and critiques the engagement of liberal international law with liberal internationalism in international relations (IR), demonstrating that the results are not to the credit of either discipline. In particular, two key assumptions of the legal liberal international order are flawed. First, the attempt to establish a two-tiered international liberal order based on law and democracy results in intervention (both forceful and performative) that counterproductively embroils liberal states, generating resentment and counter-democratic movements. Second, the assumption that security in a globalising world can only be created by the total globalisation of the liberal order and the removal of ‘outlaw’ states creates a new version of the security dilemma in which the actions taken to secure the liberal world order create the very conditions of its insecurity. The article concludes with recommendations for a critical post-structuralist engagement with a post-liberal politics of virtu that paradoxically allows for the liberal identity to be better secured in its international relations with the other.

LATIN AMERICA AND THE CHALLENGE TO IMPERIAL REASON

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. Fanon (1967 Fanon, F. 1967. Black skin, white masks, London: Pluto Press. [Google Scholar], p. 188) for instance defined the ‘collective unconscious’ as the ‘sum of prejudices, myths, collective attitudes of a given group’. The term can be used in relation to all kinds of society, and in Western societies the history of Empire leaves in its wake a whole series of attitudes and values that act as a barrier to the working through of the varied meanings of the imperial experience so that new identities can be formed and fought for. Instead there is frequently a blockage preventing the processing of the imperial mentality and opposition to multiculturalism, or better expressed, interculturalism as well as new forms of racism result. For a stimulating analysis see Gilroy (2005 Gilroy, P. 2005. Postcolonial Melancholia, New York: Columbia University Press. [Google Scholar]). 2. For an insightful analysis of the role of the United States in the recent events in Honduras, see, for example, Vigna 2010 Vigna, A. 2010. Cómo Blanqear un Golpe de Estado. Le Monde Diplomatique en español, XIV(172): 24 [Google Scholar]. 3. Geo-political interventionism can be taken as a clear sign of imperial power and during the nineteenth century, before the rise of communism, the United States intervened 103 times in the period from 1798 to 1895, in a wide range of countries, from Japan and China to Nicaragua and Argentina – see Zinn (1996 Zinn, H. 1996. A People's History of the United States, New York: Longman. [Google Scholar], pp. 290–291). 4. In this sense I would disagree with Arditi (2008 Arditi, B. 2008. Arguments about the Left Turns in Latin America: a post-liberal politics?. Latin American Research Review, 43(3): 59–81. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar], p. 60) who is quoted by Escobar and who has written an imaginative paper on ‘Left turns’ in Latin America; rather than maintain that struggles against imperialism and infringements of sovereignty are in decline it can be seen that with Chávez (Venezuela), Morales (Bolivia) and Correa (Ecuador) – not to mention Cuba – these are urgent and contemporary issues. 5. Elsewhere I have dealt with this issue in some detail, see Slater (2009 Slater, D. 2009. Exporting imperial democracy: critical reflections on the US case. Human Geography, 2(3): 24–36. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]). 6. For a detailed review and analysis of Latin American social movements, see Stahler-Sholk et al. (2008 Stahler-Sholk , R. et al. 2008 Latin American Social Movements in the Twenty-first Century , Boulder, CO , Rowman & Littlefield Publishers . [Google Scholar]). 7. This is an extensive field of analysis, but for two recent texts which are particularly useful see Chakrabarty (2008 Chakrabarty, D. 2008. Provincializing Europe, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]) and Connell (2007 Connell, R. 2007. Southern Theory, Cambridge: Polity Press. [Google Scholar]). 8. The Mexican social anthropologist Roger Bartra made the point that in many ways Latin American intellectuals are more global in orientation than their counterparts in the North, since in the global south intellectuals keep up to date with their own literature as well as that produced in the North – interview in Mexico City, April 2005. See Bartra (1996 Bartra, R. 1996. Las Redes Imaginarias del Poder Político, Mexico City: Editorial Oceano de Mexico. [Google Scholar]) for related discussion. 9. For an excellent critical review of these three international financial institutions see Peet (2009 Peet, R. 2009. Unholy Trinity, London: Zed Books. [Crossref] , [Google Scholar]).

Mozambique’s 2009 Elections: Framing Democratic Consolidation in Context

Mozambique's fourth post-conflict elections, held in October 2009, accorded citizens and the political elite an opportunity to assess their democratic experiences over two decades of transition from one-party to multi-party democracy. Dominated by the two oldest political parties, the incumbent Frelimo and the opposition Renamo, the election tested the degree to which Mozambicans were able to consolidate their democratic gains and exposed the extent of the political elite's capacity to play by the rules of the democratic game. Despite robust electioneering, heated debate and the exclusion of some presidential and party candidates from standing, the election was conducted in relative peace, attesting, by and large, to the elite's ability to combine political competition, cooperation and a few selfless compromises in pursuit of safeguarding hard-won democratic gains, peaceful co-existence, political stability and a modicum of economic growth. This article analyses Mozambique's 2009 elections with specific reference to: the major issues which dominated the elections; the framing and salient features of post-conflict democratic consolidation or the lack of it; and the role of the new political parties in the party alignment. By addressing these issues, we hope to shed light on the implications of the elections for post-liberation politics and democratic consolidation.

The Myth of the Multitude, or, Who's Afraid of the Crowd?

Who’s Afraid of the Crowd? Today we speak of multitudes rather than crowds. Or, to be more precise, if we want to suggest that the immanent potentials of a collective are politically progressive we call this collective a multitude, whereas if we want to cast it as regressive we call it a crowd. Crowds, supposedly, belong to the past of the (neo)liberal democracies of the global North. By the same token, they also mark the present of nonor insufficiently liberal polities in the global South. To simplify somewhat, crowds are the dark matter that pull on the liberal subject from its past, whereas multitudes occupy the emergent horizon of a postliberal politics. It is as if, even now, speaking of crowds means speaking of something crude and stupid. So we use qualifiers. In our internet age we hear a lot about the network society with its smart mobs and virtual crowds.1 Decentralized assemblages, the networks of the so-called knowledge society, involve nimble, selforganizing crowds. But the hotheaded savagery of the old, regressive crowd is never far behind, particularly when race or class comes into play. Consider how commentary on Barack Obama’s 2008 presidential campaign bifurcated. Never before, we were told, had the internet so cleverly been used to coordinate a virtual social movement around a political candidate. At the same time, conservative pundits wrinkled their noses at the whiff of the “Third World” that hovered around this “politics of crowds.”2

Arguments about the Left Turns in Latin America: A Post-Liberal Politics?

This article proposes a conceptual framework to discuss the left and left turns in Latin American politics. It then proceeds to argue that winning elections—the recurrent criterion for these turns—might generate tremendous enthusiasm but is also a restrictive benchmark. Other indicators I discuss here include the left’s agenda-setting capacity, its redefinition of the political and ideological center, and its incipient challenge of the liberal setting of politics as actors experiment with post-liberal arrangements. Resumen: Este articulo propone un marco conceptual para caracterizar a la izquierda y el giro a la izquierda en la politica latinoamericana. Luego sugiero que el entusiasmo generado por su reciente exito electoral no significa que las elecciones sean el unico criterio para explicar el resurgimiento de la izquierda. Por eso planteo otros indicadores, entre ellos, su capacidad para incidir en la elaboracion de la agenda politica y el hecho de que la izquierda esta redefiniendo el centro politico e ideologico. Por ultimo, discuto su incipiente desafio al esquema liberal de la politica a medida en que los actores experimentan con modos de participacion que podemos denominar como pos-liberales.

Post-liberation Politics in Africa: examining the political legacy of struggle

This article examines the politics of African states in which insurgencies or liberation movements have taken control of the government. It analyses the impact on governance of reforms introduced by these post-liberation regimes, their relations with traditional authorities and civil society and relationships within and between competing guerrilla movements. It interrogates the nature of the state that emerges from this process. The ‘post-liberation’ state label is argued to be both meaningful and useful, as part of a larger project of exploring and explaining the post-colonial African state, highlighting debates about representation, citizenship and nation building. While post-liberation regimes have advantages in implementing state building projects, they are also subject to contestation when the new state institutions and regime incumbents become too exclusivist or predatory.

Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society by David Trotter (review)

474 Reviews in It', 'desire [. . .] finds open expression in this story,forthe firstand only time in the corpus examined in this book' (p. 257). In 'Daisy Miller', 'the matrix story about the representation of women', the conflict between an 'active heroine' and the 'defining, interpretative, and normative activities that go on around her' (p. 245) results in the high moral sanction and cold comforts of death. 'Mora Maltravers' reverses this plot, butnotwithstandinga fleetingglance in the direction ofthe 'New Woman', the reader is left to conclude that this tale, as the telos of the book as a whole, exemplifies the subordination of the historical and social to the realms of technical and theoretical capriciousness. Portraying the Lady should occupy a seminal place in a crowded pantheon less for the secure architecture of its own argument, then, and much more for unforgettable readings of tales it will certainly move into the centre of James studies. University of the West of England Peter Rawlings Paranoid Modernism: Literary Experiment, Psychosis, and the Professionalization of English Society . By David Trotter. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. 2001. viii + 358pp. ?35. ISBN 0-19-818755-6. A critical subindustry has mobilized around the issue of professionalization in the nineteenth and twentieth centures, focused on the institutional, economic, techno? logical, and social contexts within which writers marketed themselves, sold their products, and sought recognition. David Trotter's Par anoid Modernism relates such concerns to developments in psychiatric and psychoanalytic theories emerging in the same period. The result is a complex book that situates certain modernist trajectories within a range of intersecting cultural discourses, each signalling pressures that writers had to confront in an increasingly rationalized and commodified social world. Literary modernism is explored in relation to issues such as fear of contin? gency and randomness, manifested in anti-mimetic perspectives; questions of identity and subject formation, and the psychological consequences of professionalization; the elaboration of post-liberal politics in response to the spread of democracy; and anxieties about gender evidenced in rhetorics of hyper-masculinity. The key issue is the relation between paranoia and professionalization. Paranoia is understood here as a delusional psychic system in which individuals fantasize that they are of special significance but fear their uniqueness is not recognized. Emphasis on systemis central; paranoia is a perverse structure of feeling in which everything is made to conform to its rigid terms. It is a delusion, but internally consistent, eliminating chance by an anti-mimetic attribution of meaning to haphazard events. Trotter finds close links between this delusional structure of feeling and the emergence of literary modernism, especially those strands (Hulme, Lewis, and bits of Lawrence) committed to abstraction. Two arguments follow: firstly,that the will to abstraction is in some sense paranoid because it is anti-mimetic and in thrall to private fantasy rather than concerned to engage with reality; secondly, that modernist writers were vulnerable to delusion because under a professionalized meritocracy and a commod? ified culture they were forced to accrue symbolic capital 'by the exhibition of ability' (p. 22), which led to 'a psychopathy of expertise' (p. 8). Paranoid modernism is a psychological diagnosis of writers and a textual theory that draws on this diagnosis by explicating literary works in terms of writers' desire to assert their unique identi? ties within a rationalized cultural realm?the 'politics of paranoid narrative' offers'a militant objection to social mimesis' (p. 186). Trotter's emphasis on the link between anti-mimetic aesthetics and a cultural cri? tique of social mimeticism traceable to writers such as Godwin, Mill, Collins, and MLRy 99.2, 2004 475 Dickens is suggestive; the exploration of the consequences for professional identity of a bureaucratized social world is necessary; and assessing writers' reactions to the commodification of culture is valuable. One welcomes Trotter's reflections on these issues, and some of his analyses of texts (Conrad's, Ford's, Lawrence's) perceptively discuss their explorations of psychosis. But there are problems with this book's premisses and arguments, principally in the collocation of 'paranoia' with 'modernism' and the over-psychological reading of writers' responses to professionalization. The collocation of abstraction and paranoia is made to carry a good deal of weight...

Comrades in Business: post-liberation politics in South Africa by HERIBERT ADAM, FREDERIK VAN ZYL SLABBERT and KOGILA MOODLEY Utrecht: International Books, 1998. Pp. 240. £18.00 (pbk.).

<b>Comrades in Business: post-liberation politics in South Africa</b> by H<scp>ERIBERT</scp> A<scp>DAM</scp>, F<scp>REDERIK VAN</scp> Z<scp>YL</scp> S<scp>LABBERT</scp> and K<scp>OGILA</scp> M<scp>OODLEY</scp> Utrecht: International Books, 1998. Pp. 240. £18.00 (pbk.).

Comrades in business: post-liberation politics in South Africa

Comrades in business: post-liberation politics in South Africa

Democracy and Abundance: the Declining Middle and Postliberal Politics

Democracy and Abundance: the Declining Middle and Postliberal Politics