Project Of Autonomy Research Articles

The Iroquois Confederacy and the Possibility of Heteronomous Democracy

Abstract Cornelius Castoriadis (1922–1997) argues that the project of autonomy appears in only two societies throughout human history: ancient Greece and Western Europe. Is this true? The present study examines the case of the Iroquois Confederacy with the intention of testing Castoriadis’s argument. Using the debate between Castoriadis and the members of mauss as its starting point, it interprets historic Iroquois institutions with reference to what Castoriadis presents as the two inextricably linked conditions of an autonomous society: democracy and philosophy. Ultimately, the essay contends that while Castoriadis justifiably interprets the Iroquois Confederacy as heteronomous, the confederacy’s democratic institutions compel us to doubt the necessary connection he posits between democracy and philosophy. Iroquois society created a heteronomous democracy, a type of polity that Castoriadis’s theory of autonomy occludes.

Componer y fragmentar la utopía comunitaria. Vivir la autonomía entre sueños y decepciones

The aim of this article is to discuss the practices, rules, hopes, and setbacks associated with building community autonomy in San Isidro de la Libertad, Chiapas, based on my own ethnographic experience and that of three young community members. Certain local practices lend political power to the project of autonomy, including milpa farming, saint celebrations, citizen assemblies, and shared family meals. The redefinition of these practices in a collective narrative of the past, present, and future of the town is an ongoing process that I refer to as the “utopianizing of traditional life.” These practices, in turn, give shape to the ideal subject of the community utopia, one who embodies hope but also reflects, provokes, and comes from multiple fragmentations.

Probing Velocity Dispersion Inside Coronal Mass Ejections: New Insights on Their Initiation

This work studies the kinematics of the leading edge and the core of six coronal mass ejections (CMEs) in the combined field of view of Sun Watcher using Active Pixel System detector and Image Processing (SWAP) on board PRoject for On-Board Autonomy (PROBA-2) and the ground-based K-Cor coronagraph of the Mauna Loa Solar Observatory. We report, for the first time, on the existence of a critical height hc , which marks the onset of velocity dispersion inside the CME. This height for the studied events lies between 1.4 and 1.8 R ⊙, in the inner corona. We find the critical heights to be relatively higher for gradual CMEs, as compared to impulsive ones, indicating that the early initiation of these two classes might be different physically. We find several interesting imprints of the velocity dispersion on CME kinematics. The critical height is strongly correlated with the flux-rope minor radius and the mass of the CME. Also, the magnitude of the velocity dispersion shows a reasonable positive correlation with the above two parameters. We believe these results will advance our understanding of CME initiation mechanisms and will help provide improved constraints on CME initiation models.

The “Constitution” of Idel-Ural as the foundation of multinational statehood

The question of the national autonomy of the Turko-Tatar peoples of Russia has been in the air for quite a long time. At the First All-Russian Muslim Congress, held in Moscow in May 1917, while discussing the question of the state structure of Russia, delegates split into two camps – Unitarians and federalists. The latter soon won the victory, immediately starting to draw up a project of national-territorial autonomy. One of these projects was the “Idel-Ural State”. At present, a considerable array of scientific research has been accumulated on the process of preparing and proclaiming the project of the State of Idel-Ural as a multinational state. However, among these studies there are no works that would cover the legal component of this project.
 As a result of a long meeting of the National Assembly of Turko-Tatar Muslims in January 1918, a number of resolutions came into being, which generally established the framework for the subsequent constitutionalization of law and order in the State of Idel-Ural. The combination of these resolutions can be given the conditional name “Constitution” of Idel-Ural. It fixed the path of development of constitutionalism, and guaranteed the fundamental principles of building statehood: national equality, federalism, democracy, political and ideological pluralism. The “Constitution” of Idel-Ural played a particularly important role in the practice of state building of the Tatar people. This work aims to provide a general analysis of the provisions of this legal document, and thereby reveal the hidden areas of the state-legal history of the Tatars.
 For citation: Zaynutdinov D.R. The “Constitution” of Idel-Ural as the foundation of multinational statehood. From History and Culture of Peoples of the Middle Volga Region. 2023, vol.13, no.3, pp.118–135. https://doi.org/10.22378/2410-0765.2023-13-3.118-135 (In Russian)

A Free Art Calls for a Free Society: On the Freedom of Art and Autonomy as Project

In recent years, the far right “culture war” has to an increasing extent been allowed to set the terms for cultural policy debates, in Sweden and internationally. In the Swedish context, empty accusations against public cultural institutions of “wokeist” bias and “cancel culture” have found support in a public report from the governmental Agency for Cultural Policy Analysis, which claims that national public funding bodies are imposing politically correct demands on their applicants, with a “detrimental influence” on the freedom of art. This article shows that the ACPA lacks grounds for these claims. Taking its cue from the ACPA’s report, it instead focuses on the fundamental and contested concept of the freedom or the autonomy of art. It seeks to outline what would need to characterise a critical concept of the autonomy of art today, and asks what the political implications would be of a rigorous understanding of such a concept. It argues that cultural policy should be understood as a project of cultural democratization, which should in turn be understood as a project of autonomy.

THE AUTONOMY PROJECT OF C. CASTORIADIS IN THE CONTEXT OF NEW COSMOPOLITANISM

The author addresses the prospects of the new cosmopolitan- ism project, which appears as a choice focused on individuality and its survival as an integrity in diversity. This reveals the relevance of Castoriadis’s autonomy project. The author believes that Castoriadis’s language of describing social reality can be used quite organically to characterise the latest trends in the development of cosmopolitan practices. The substantiation of the formulated assumptions is the purpose of this article. The article shows that new cosmopolitanism is an attempt to find an inclusive solution to the problem of universalism, which classical modernity and old cosmopolitanism failed to solve. The development of the discourse and practices of autonomy can become one of the effective means of such a solution. The main idea of the paper is that the projects of autonomy and new cosmopolitanism have similar goals and a direction, and they are a means of implementing cosmopolitan attitudes, or the process of cosmopolitanization. New cosmopolitan theories speak primarily of others, of otherness and autonomy. Autonomous societies can develop and implement cosmopolitan programs. If there is no adequate reflexivity in a heteronomous society, then autonomous societies are reflexive by their very nature. The new cosmopolitanism revives the project of autonomy, takes it from a purely theoretical dimension to a practical one, and allows to discuss its practical implementation. To clarify this parallel, it is important to consider Castoriadis’s interpretation of the political dimension of social life. In this case, we are talking about developing cosmopolitan citizenship, which represents the highest level of individual autonomy. The article shows the most important role of creative imagination in its interpretation by Castoriadis in solving the identified problems and establishing various institutions of society. The article concludes that paideia is the central dimension of any policy of autonomy, which gives form to social chaos. Thus, we stop to divide the human world between ‘us’ and ‘them’ — us: the only real human beings; the others: savages, barbarians, heathens, we stop considering our representation of the world as the only meaningful one. This is the essence of cosmopolitanism as it is interpreted by the new cosmopolitanism.

THE DYNAMIC CONCEPTION OF THE SOCIAL IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF CORNELIUS CASTORIADIS

The article presents a reconstruction of the dynamic conception of the social in the philosophy of Cornelius Castoriadis. A meticulous study of the philosopher’s most important works reveals, on the basis of various ideas about society and politics, the original version of his integral conception of the social. The reconstruction of this conception required a four-step study: (1) an analysis of his critique of “naïve realism” in the perception of social life; (2) an analysis of the method of revealing a symbolic component of social “things” in the interpretation of social institutions as functional-symbolic networks; (3) a study of the thematization of the virtual dimension of social life (Castoriadis’s construction of the metaphoric ontology of the “magma” of social imaginary significations, his perception of society as a dynamic (“social-historic”) formation, an elucidation of the duality of establishing and established); (4) an analysis of the way of a justification of a political project of autonomy. Our reconstruction demonstrates that the idea of autonomy is not a consequence but a cause of Castoriadis’s dynamic conception of the social. Nevertheless, in the context of the notion of “multiple modernities”, the idea of autonomy, being a key characteristic of “modernity”, can be understood not as universal content but as a universal form. The regulatory horizon of “politics” (of the project of autonomy) is determined from the reverse — depending on what is identified as heteronomy in a given set of concrete circumstances. The interpretation we propose will allow us to proceed more consistently from the principle of the diversity of “modernities”. It seems, also, that Castoriadis’s position itself is characterized by two “defects”: first, his conception of the social-historical world is based on the metaphoric ontology of the “magma”, and, second, the “philosophy of autonomy” is dualistic.

Family farmers' strategies to develop autonomy through agroecological and solidarity economy practices: The case of BioVida in the Ecuadorian Andes

AbstractConsidering the global restructuring affecting agrarian landscapes, we build on the concept of autonomy proposed by van der Ploeg and colleagues (but extended and critically complemented) to analyse how family farmers can build this autonomy to face rural capitalist tendencies and maintain their activities and identity. We offer insights from a case study in the Ecuadorian Andes, the BioVida organization that is linked to agroecological and social and solidarity economy movements. Our findings show that family farming autonomy is not being achieved homogeneously for the whole household but must be analysed through an intersectional approach. Furthermore, there are simultaneous processes to achieve different degrees of autonomy and (inter‐)dependency, which are co‐constitutive along gender and age lines and are conditioned by structural constraints. Therefore, for our case study area, agribusiness and family farming processes and spaces seem to operate co‐constitutively rather than antagonistically in practical terms. Agroecology‐based achievements so far act as a localized buffer against adversity rather than an emancipative territorial project of autonomy.

Theorizing Power in Community Economies: A Women's Cooperative in Northern Kurdistan

ABSTRACTUnder the Democratic Autonomy project, Turkey's Kurdish Movement has pursued self‐governance since the mid‐2000s and promoted cooperatives and communal modes of production across Northern Kurdistan. Drawing upon the engagement of diverse and community economies studies with assemblage thinking, this article utilizes assemblage thinking to expand our understanding of power dynamics in community economies, and to reveal the power‐led processes involved in building and maintaining community economies. The article focuses on the case of a women's cooperative spearheaded by the Kurdish Movement, which managed to circumvent state oppression and stay in business, despite the turmoil that erupted in Northern Kurdistan after the collapse of peace negotiations between the Turkish state and the Kurdish Movement in 2015.

Indian Time: Temporality, Gender, Mobility

Indian Time: Temporality, Gender, Mobility

Global land surface 250 m 8 d fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR) product from 2000 to 2021

Abstract. The fraction of absorbed photosynthetically active radiation (FAPAR) is a critical land surface variable for carbon cycle modeling and ecological monitoring. Several global FAPAR products have been released and have become widely used; however, spatiotemporal inconsistency remains a large issue for the current products, and their spatial resolutions and accuracies can hardly meet the user requirements. An effective solution to improve the spatiotemporal continuity and accuracy of FAPAR products is to take better advantage of the temporal information in the satellite data using deep learning approaches. In this study, the latest version (V6) of the FAPAR product with a 250 m resolution was generated from Moderate Resolution Imaging Spectroradiometer (MODIS) surface reflectance data and other information, as part of the Global LAnd Surface Satellite (GLASS) product suite. In addition, it was aggregated to multiple coarser resolutions (up to 0.25∘ and monthly). Three existing global FAPAR products (MODIS Collection 6; GLASS V5; and PRoject for On-Board Autonomy–Vegetation, PROBA-V, V1) were used to generate the time-series training samples, which were used to develop a bidirectional long short-term memory (Bi-LSTM) model. Direct validation using high-resolution FAPAR maps from the Validation of Land European Remote sensing Instrument (VALERI) and ImagineS networks revealed that the GLASS V6 FAPAR product has a higher accuracy than PROBA-V, MODIS, and GLASS V5, with an R2 value of 0.80 and root-mean-square errors (RMSEs) of 0.10–0.11 at the 250 m, 500 m, and 3 km scales, and a higher percentage (72 %) of retrievals for meeting the accuracy requirement of 0.1. Global spatial evaluation and temporal comparison at the AmeriFlux and National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) sites revealed that the GLASS V6 FAPAR has a greater spatiotemporal continuity and reflects the variations in the vegetation better than the GLASS V5 FAPAR. The higher quality of the GLASS V6 FAPAR is attributed to the ability of the Bi-LSTM model, which involves high-quality training samples and combines the strengths of the existing FAPAR products, as well as the temporal and spectral information from the MODIS surface reflectance data and other information. The 250 m 8 d GLASS V6 FAPAR product for 2020 is freely available at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6405564 and https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6430925 (Ma, 2022a, b) as well as at the University of Maryland for 2000–2021 (http://glass.umd.edu/FAPAR/MODIS/250m, last access 1 November 2022).

The Ritual Solidarity of Masked Processions in Calabar, Cameroon, and Cuba

The Ritual Solidarity of Masked Processions in Calabar, Cameroon, and Cuba

Patient- and parent-reported outcome measures of developmental adaptive abilities in visually impaired children: The Visual Impairment Developmental Autonomy (VIDA) scale

In the pediatric context, parents’ and patients’ engagement in the care process is strongly recommended and could be pursued using patient-reported outcome measures (PROMs), which therefore become useful for planning and monitoring treatments. Nevertheless, few data are available from families of children with neurodevelopmental disorders such as visual impairment (VI). The Visual Impairment Developmental Autonomy (VIDA) project aims to develop and validate a patient- and parent-reported tool to measure the most relevant aspects concerning everyday adaptive abilities in children and adolescents with visual impairment: the VIDA scale. The present paper illustrates the Delphi process of item generation engaging parents and patients and presents a protocol for the validation of this new co-designed tool in an Italian visually impaired pediatric population. Twenty-three families and five adolescents provided a list of 192 items and assessed their relevance. Items were categorized in 5 areas of adaptive abilities (i.e., table manners, clothing, personal hygiene, orientation and mobility, and socio-affectivity) and into three age ranges based on the patient’s age. The final 102-item Vida Scale will be administered to a minimum of 300 visually impaired children together with measures of quality of life and child adjustment to investigate its psychometric properties.

Empowering the Resident Learner

Surgical resident autonomy is an essential element of the transition from supervised training to independent practice. However, in an age of duty hour restrictions, legislative constraints, increased litigation, and heightened societal expectations, training an autonomous resident proves increasingly difficult. To tackle these barriers to training successful surgeons, the American College of Surgeons Committee on Resident Education initiated the Resident Mentored Autonomy Project. As a subdivision of this project, the Empowered Learner research team here presents a framework for training the self-directed and empowered surgical resident learner. There are many strategies by which surgical faculty, program directors and chairs, and residents themselves may engage to improve resident operative autonomy.

Peasant and indigenous autonomy before and after the pink tide in Latin America

AbstractAutonomy should not be understood as an inherent quality of rural subjects but as fundamentally a political and cultural project. This paper will present an overview of the evolution of the idea, project, and practice of peasant and indigenous autonomy in Latin America from the 1990s to today. It will trace the origins of the process and examine how the different dimensions of the concept of autonomy (economic, political, ideological, and ethnic) came together in the early 1990s to form a coherent although contradictory political project, which attempted to present an alternative to neoliberalism and political paternalism. The paper will assess the extent to which this project addressed the main challenges that the different sectors of the peasantry faced with the neoliberal restructuring of the economy and the deployment of neoliberal multiculturalism in the region. Through the case studies of Brazil, Ecuador, Nicaragua, and Mexico, the paper will argue that the autonomy projects entailed serious contradictions since their inception because by wanting to solve some problems through certain mechanisms, rural movements exacerbated other problems. The paper also highlights the difficulty that peasant and indigenous movements had through the years in maintaining a strong alliances with each other.

Формирование политической субъектности сирийских туркоман в рамке постимперского национального государcтва

The article focuses on the issue of minorities political actorness during the current armed conflict in Syria. The author speculates on why a country where the ethno-confessional structure of the population has not changed significantly for decades, suddenly faced an intensive politicization of communal identities. The tested hypothesis is that this has emerged from a long process of the state capacities weakening both in the territorial and functional aspects. In this context, the author studies the community of Syrian Turkmen, the third largest ethnocultural group in the country. The selection of this case was guided not only by a lack of relevant in-depth studies, but also by the group's self-identification as a part of the Turkic (Ottoman) world. The application of “Brubaker's triangle” as an analytical tool made it possible to view the nationalism of such minorities in relation to the policies of the “nationalizing state” and “external national homeland”. The study involves analysis of (a) the system of regulation of socio-cultural pluralism in the Ottoman Empire, (b) the peculiarities of state- and nation-building in Syria and (c) the process of Turkmen community politicization during the civil conflict. It is concluded that its political actorness was formed due to such factors as violation of the “social contract” between the ruling elite and the population during the period of neoliberal reforms, the “external homeland” (Turkey’s) support, as well as the persistence of mechanisms of tribal solidarity and self-government among the Turkmen, which allowed them to partially implement the project of cultural autonomy in Northern Syria.

Post-capitalist marketization in Northern Kurdistan

Dominated by conflict, Turkey’s Kurdish question has transformed over time, opening up new areas of inquiry. Under the Democratic Autonomy project, ongoing since the mid-2000s, Turkey’s Kurdish Movement has promoted cooperatives and communes – a post-capitalist marketization project – in Northern Kurdistan. Drawing upon economization studies and diverse and community economies studies’ engagement with assemblage thinking, this paper scrutinizes the retailers’ cooperative model the Movement experimented with and explains the practices linked to post-capitalist marketization: creating inclusive platforms for debate, incorporating ordinary actors as experts, and upscaling post-capitalist marketization through building relations with other cooperatives.

Global Horizons of the Atlantic Alliance: the Biden “Vaccine”

The article examines the conceptual issues of the transatlantic relations under the American administration in 2021 and the renewal of the NATO strategy. The NATO summit in Brussels on June 14, 2021, which was attended by US President Joe Biden, was initially seen as a US “coming back” to Europe after a turbulent “trumpism” period in transatlantic relations. The summit communiqué defines the main lines of the alliance transformation in response to the growing challenges to Euro-Atlantic security, considering the main ones incoming from Russia and China, while also imposed by international terrorism. The analysis of the Summit decisions and the follow-up of Joe Biden's European meetings proves the alliance globalization trend, both in geopolitical and functional terms. The summit, while having adopted the NATO 2030 Agenda, decided to adopt a new strategic concept at the next meeting in Spain in 2022. The author argues that the unresolved transatlantic problems and the allies’ disagreements internally challenge the alliance “global” strategy. The “trusted leadership” the Biden administration sets against the “Trump Doctrine” undermines the allies’ ability to step up the European strategic autonomy project, including in relations with Russia and China, as well as in after-Brexit Euro-Atlantic rebalancing.

City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut

City of Beginnings: Poetic Modernism in Beirut

Loraux y Castoriadis: la fundamentación de la democracia griega

El presente artículo se ocupa del problema de la fundamentación de la democracia griega —siglo V a. C.—, mediante el análisis crítico de los planteamientos de dos pensadores contemporáneos del mundo griego, Loraux y Castoriadis, en lo relativo al lenguaje utilizado por la democracia ateniense y a las representaciones e instituciones que esta creó. El análisis trata afirmaciones que plantean varias preguntas: si la democracia griega no fue un régimen fundamentable como tal (Loraux), ¿qué podemos entender por el término ‘fundamentado’?, ¿qué implicaciones tendría dicha ausencia de fundamentación?, ¿es válido aceptar el planteamiento de Castoriadis, cuya fundamentación parte de la aceptación de una praxis intersubjetiva basada en el proyecto de autonomía social e individual y en la realidad de las instituciones?
 Para desarrollar los anteriores interrogantes, este trabajo se encuentra dividido en dos sesiones: la primera estará dedicada a presentar el problema formulado por Loraux, acerca de la ausencia de una fundamentación democrática de la democracia, y, en la segunda, se analizará la respuesta dada por Castoriadis, quien sostiene que dicho fundamento habría que buscarlo en las instituciones y en la práctica de la democracia. En este sentido, se sostiene como tesis que, más que posiciones encontradas, hay una complementariedad, ya que, en la medida en que el logos se constituyó como el instrumento político por excelencia del intercambio igualitario -Loraux-, es en tales debates donde la sociedad ateniense creó, de forma autónoma, unas instituciones y significaciones imaginarias sociales que posibilitaron que una colectividad pudiera explícitamente autogobernarse –Castoriadis-.