Political Rationality Research Articles

Our Civilizing Mission: The Lessons of Colonial Education. By Nicholas Harrison

Nicholas Harrison’s excellent book is not only a fascinating study of colonial education in Algeria and an examination of literary texts which trace the impacts and influences of colonial teaching on writers and teachers. It is also an examination of the ‘critical anxieties about the historical and conceptual foundations of “humanities” education’ (p. 7), a topic of increasing urgency today as the humanities as an area of study is repeatedly under threat from governments who pour money into ‘profitable’ STEM subjects to the detriment of the humanities. In this highly relevant and multidisciplinary book, Harrison draws on concepts and debates from history, postcolonial studies, and literary studies. Some of the key questions he raises include: How were Algerian writers influenced by France’s ‘civilizing mission’ — France’s political rationale for empire as evoked in the title of the book — through their own education and the education they offered to their students? What might they have gained from their colonial education, what caused them anxieties, and how did their experiences as student and teacher help them to advance their writing career? The study is bookended in the Introduction and Conclusion by Harrison’s astute reflections on the value of humanities education and the teaching of literature at university level. In Chapter 1 he discusses Edward Said’s approach to the teaching of literature through his works, and he sees Said’s writing as ‘paradigmatic in its equivocal relationship to literary education and humanities education more widely’ (p. 10). The following chapter takes a historical approach to colonial education in Algeria. Chapter 3 explores writings by Mouloud Feraoun which give insight into what it was like to be a teacher during the Algerian War of Independence, while Chapter 4 focuses on texts by Feraoun, Mohammed Dib, Assia Djebar, and others which recount the culture of colonial schools through the lens of gender and laïcité. The final chapter analyses accounts of children’s experiences of learning French and French literature at school in Algeria. This thematic approach to literature about colonial education is one of the many strengths of the book, as Harrison deftly demonstrates the richness of his selected works of fiction and memoir and the complex relationship of the writers towards colonialism as contained in the texts. A further strength is that the book is very well researched; Harrison draws on many historical, biographical, literary, and critical sources, offering detailed close readings of the texts but also providing comprehensive contextualization of the period in which they were written. Furthermore, he nuances our understanding of colonial education in Algeria, arguing that many pro-colonialists were quite suspicious of using education as a colonial tool because they wanted to keep ‘indigenous’ people in an inferior position to the colonial French authorities. Harrison’s book is essential reading for scholars and students of Algerian literature and the history of colonial education; more broadly, it will be of interest to all advocates of literature and the humanities.

Situated dynamics of environmental governance in Swedish smart energy experimentation: Tentativeness, demonstration, upscaling

In this article unfolding processes of environmental governance are explored through the case of smart energy experimentation in Sweden. When experimentation merges with place-based dynamics, particular dispositions are shaped, with different implications for environmental politics. In accordance with other researchers’ findings it is illuminated how such dispositions tend to reinforce neoliberal environmental governance arrangements, whereas it is revealed how experimentation can also reconfigure governance. Attending to unfolding processes of accomplishing governance across a variety of spaces, this plasticity of experimentation is explored. The contribution consists of highlighting the situated dynamics playing out as environmental governance is produced across different places. This involves two analytical steps. First, disentangling some characteristics of experimentation as a situated disposition, through following how smart energy experimentation arranges environmental governance across the national Swedish energy and environmental policy landscape. The analysis highlights how particular characteristics of Swedish environmental governance molds experimentation into providing impetus for neoliberalization. Second, by zooming in two cases of experiments, elucidating the effects of the tentative and situated character of experimentation as governance is accomplished. Such analysis attends to the situated micro-politics of experiments, and how these can shape localized dispositions that refract broader neoliberal political rationality. Thereby the existence of a dominant ‘experimentation governmentality’, or disposition, is discovered, whereas situated experiments may always provide seedbeds of alternative forms of environmental governance due to experimentation’s plasticity.

The genealogy of integrationism: Ideational foundations of the politics of immigrant integration

This article traces the idea of (“immigrant”) “integration” from its roots in classical political philosophy and the birth of the modern nation-state, to its current relevance in the European political agenda and, relatedly, its centrality in the newly consolidated field of Migration Studies. I examine the ontological (i.e., philosophical and sociological) and political rationales behind the idea that migrants need to “integrate into society”, and the different varieties of political solutions that are offered in this sense. The paper asks: How did the migrant come at the center of the idea of an integrated society? And how did integrationism become consolidated as the hegemonic idea of governing diverse societies in post-migration contexts in Europe? Employing an extensive list of secondary literature, documentary data, policy analysis of the EU-level Framework on migrant integration, and discourse analysis of integration-related research publications, I attempt a genealogy of the idea of “integration” as it traveled across the North Atlantic West and between academia and government. The paper shows how the production of the subject of integration—the misfit “immigrant” figure—is historically marked by a consensus across the learned and the governing elites that identifies the preservation of a homogenous national social order as a societal goal. I argue that the scientification of integration governance via the “evidence-based policy” paradigm (most notably promoted by EU institutions) normalizes, naturalizes and aims to depoliticize the otherwise highly normative and contested question of migrant integration.

Changes in the governance of the reading subject: Swedish reading policy, c.1949–1984

ABSTRACT This paper analyses significant changes in the political rationality underpinning Sweden’s official reading policy between the 1940s and 1980s. Using official inquiry reports as empirical material and drawing on a discourse analytical method, we examine policy changes regarding ideal readers (what reading should result in) and administrative practices (what policy actions could be used) and the kinds of academic knowledge that was used to justify specific measures. It is found that official reading policy ceased to be limited to distributing literature and expanded to include active reading promotion. The replacement of sociological perspectives by cognitive viewpoints as constituting knowledge is also noted. It is concluded that changes in the political rationality had consequences for how the individual reader was construed, from a subject with the potential to change society to a subject who had to adjust to society. We argue that the cultivation of readers evident in reading policy constitutes a specific technique of governance not sufficiently considered in previous cultural policy research.

Disciplining India: paternalism, neo-liberalism and Hindutva civilizationalism

Abstract Policy hybrids, which combine marketizing and liberalizing reforms with social welfare programmes and state support to boost domestic production, are fast becoming the norm globally. How are neo-liberal and national-developmentalist agendas reconciled as governing practices, and what are their national and international outcomes and implications? This article focuses on the understudied case of India, arguing that a paternalist political rationality, which melds paternalist logics in neo-liberalism and the government's Hindutva civilizationalist politics, underpins its flagship economic policy, the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan (Self-reliant India Mission). This policy, through production-linked incentives, aims to boost Indian manufacturing. India has benefited from a global push to diversify supply chains and forge new geopolitical partnerships, such as the Quad, to undermine China's manufacturing dominance and geopolitical assertiveness. Yet, its current approach consolidates the dominance of large firms, producing an elitist political economy, and does not address structural weaknesses through public investment in areas like research and education. This has implications for India's development, global trade and geopolitics. These arguments are made by identifying the paternalist logics in the theories and practices of neo-liberalism, and in Hindutva civilizationalist politics; assessing the aims of the Atmanirbhar Bharat Abhiyan as elaborated by government officials; and evaluating the early outcomes of production-linked incentive schemes.

Failures of comparability in global governance: Exploring the practical dimension of the redress of law

AbstractIn The Redress of Law, Emilios Christodoulidis explores the philosophical foundations of market constitutionalism and shows how its embedded rationality shapes global governance. The author delves into critical phenomenology to lift the veil of ignorance on the fact that market constitutionalism has replaced political rationality with economic reasoning. By grounding its theory in the continental critical theory, ranging from Marxism to Weil’s existentialism and Luhmann’s systems theory, the book shows how the redress of law is also a practice that could radically transform the global political economy. However, the challenge is to displace the modern thinking of market constitutionalism that is rooted in functional differentiation and privileges constituted rather than constituent power. Such market thinking has allowed global governance experts to simplify and reduce to numbers complex polical, cultural and social phenomena embedded in constitutional legal regimes. The disembedding of law from society through functional differentiation, and the sole preoccupation of legal experts with constituted power, have contributed to the depoliticisation of constitutionalism as both theory and practice. A quintessential example of market constitutionalism in practice are global governance indicators. These indexes entail comparisons among legal regimes that empower private market rules as the final arbiter of local redistributive policies while bracketing historical, genealogical and reflexive connections to law’s social realities. The book offers several strategies of ‘redress of law’ such as rupture, contradiction and open dialectic, aiming to foreground political rather than market constitutionalism and to revamp the dialectic between constituted power exemplified by constitutional texts and constituent power, exemplified by strikes. This Article praises Christodoulidis’s sophisticated theoretical framework grounded in critical phenomenology, but at the same time pushes the author’s argument beyond the book itself. By questioning the practical implications of the redress of law, the focus on legal assumptions in global governance shows how legal experts in a variety of legal fields beyond constitutionalism have reproduced existing inequalities defined in terms of market, social and colonial hierarchies.

Life Unadministered

A discourse of care undergirded colonial political rationality during the era of Indian indenture-ship in the Caribbean. In this essay the voyage of the Salsette from Calcutta to Trinidad in 1858 serves as an entry point into a broader conversation on the repeated archival invocation of care toward coolies during their passage to the plantation colonies. Care, which is synonymous with neither affect nor benevolence, refers to a series of techniques aimed at managing bodies traded for profit. Analyzing the apparatuses through which care for indentured servants was administered, the essay illuminates the racialized and caste-based knowledge systems that were mobilized to “make live” the reserve of potential labor force aboard. Concomitantly, it reads the colonial archive for moments in which indentured servants register their presence through their responses to being or refusal to be cared for and considers the stakes of such refusal for the colonial capitalist project.

Simone Weil pensatrice del reale

This article aims to show the consistency of Simone Weil’s political thought. To this end, I will analyze some of her main writings in which a tension is displayed between an accentuated political realism and a critical longing for a politics free from the subjection to force and the legitimation of the status quo. From this point of view, Weil’s thought can be understood as a form of political mysticism in which the images, notions, and symbols of mysticism serve the purpose to innervate a renewed political rationality.

Rationalism and Relativism: An Essay on John Rawls and Michael Oakeshott

This essay creates an unlikely conversation between two 20th century thinkers: John Rawls and Michael Oakeshott. I say “unlikely” because apart from a few scant remarks in the writing of each the two did not directly engage each other. The essay begins by examining Oakeshott’s explication of “The Rationalist” and her tradition in the history of political thought. Specifically, the essay shows that rationalism in politics involves the belief that reason is an infallible guide to political activity and that the Rationalist seeks certainty and perfection in political affairs. The essay goes on to tease out the rationalistic tendencies in Rawls’ A Theory of Justice, and then it analyzes Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism and applies these criticisms to Rawls. Briefly, Oakeshott marks a distinction between technical and practical knowledge, and he argues that the principles that make up technical manuals like A Theory of Justice are abridgments of and no substitute for the understanding we gain through our practical experience and our participation in a given political tradition. While explaining Oakeshott’s critique of rationalism and Rawls, the essay indicates some of the relativistic proclivities in Oakeshott’s appeal to political practices and traditions, and then it entertains objections to Oakeshott that a Rawlsian might offer. Here Rawls’ commitment to the liberal tradition and the relativity implicit in his explanations of “reflective equilibrium” and “reasonableness” are examined and Rawls’ similarities to Oakeshott are noted. Ultimately, this essay argues that the strength of Rawls’ work lay not in the fact that his principles of justice are established by rational agents in an original position, but in the fact that they are principles that emerge from and cohere with ideas deeply rooted in the Western tradition itself.

Tinkering with (in)visibilities: Caring for older people with surveillance technologies.

New surveillance technologies have in later years been introduced in care for older people as part of a broader policy agenda of 'sustainable' welfare state retrenchment, promoting ideals of self-sufficiency and empowerment of older people 'ageing in place'. Drawing on newer approaches to surveillance studies, this article explores care workers' active labour in creating (in)visibility in a complex and ongoing process of tinkering, while negotiating political rationales of empowerment and professional accountability. Hence, visibilities are conceived as coded, reflecting different ideals and rationales. Based on extensive fieldwork in Danish eldercare, we analyse two forms of surveillance: virtual homecare and sensor-flooring, where clients are involved and positioned in different ways in accomplishing surveillance. We illuminate how the process of accomplishing (in)visibility does not only involve tinkering with technology, but also with spatial arrangements in the client's home, and with clients' behaviour. Consequently, we underscore how tinkering may turn out to be a difficult and even conflictual task of negotiating professional authority and accountability in ways that resonate with clients' sense of autonomy and policy ideals of empowerment. Our studies underline how the power dynamics of surveillance in care should not be overlooked, even though they are continuously negotiated in care practices.

The rise of the reflexive expert? Epistemic, care-ful and instrumental reflexivity in global public policy

The production of data and numbers has become the key mechanism of both knowing and governing global public policy. And yet, processes of quantification are inherently paradoxical: from expectations of technocratic rationality and political usability of producing ‘global’ numbers that count for ‘local’ politics and needs to practical limitation of measurement and the necessity to work with ‘good enough’ data. This begs a question – how do these competing epistemic, political and value orders manifest themselves through the work that experts do? In this article, we explore the problem by focussing on reflexivity as a way for experts (primarily those working in key International Organisations) to make sense of and tame the tensions inherent in their work. Through rich qualitative exploration of over 80 semi-structured interviews with experts working in the areas of poverty, education and statistical capacity development, we contribute to debates in the social studies of quantification by arguing that reflexivity is not just a mental process that experts engage in but rather an important resource allowing them to make sense of the contradictions inherent in their work and to mobilise political and ethical considerations in the technocratic process of producing numbers. We identify three types of reflexivity: (1) epistemic reflexivity – regarding the quality of data and its epistemic status as reflecting the reality; (2) care-ful reflexivity – regarding values embedded in data and the duty of care to the populations affected by the measurement and (3) instrumental reflexivity – regarding political rationality and necessary trade-off required to realise political goals. Overall, the article argues that reflexivity becomes an increasingly central expert practice, allowing the transformation of the process of quantification into one of qualification enabling them to attach political attributes and values to data and measurement.

Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability by Jacob Doherty

Reviewed by: Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability by Jacob Doherty Grace Akese Jacob Doherty, Waste Worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s Infrastructures of Disposability. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2022. 288 pp. I review this book from Accra, Ghana, where I am researching the aftermath of the demolition of Agbogbloshie, the infamous e-waste site in Accra, popularly known as the world’s largest e-waste dumpsite. In the summer of 2021, as part of the Greater Accra Regional Ministry’s campaign of #letsmakeAccrawork, the site was violently torn down amid armed military and police presence, and economic activities there were brought to a halt. What appears to be a complete erasure had precedents in evictions and similar demolitions in 1993, 2002, 2004, and 2015. Reading Doherty’s Waste worlds in the here and now of Agbogbloshie’s very own morally charged rhetoric of urban decongestion, displacement, economic precarity, and environmental harm, I couldn’t help but draw parallels about how urban social and environmental transformations manifest through waste and its infrastructure in Africa’s major cities. The title of the book Waste worlds: Inhabiting Kampala’s infrastructures of disposability is telling of the grounded and ethnographically rich nature of his accounts. Doherty offers a lively and engaging ethnography of Kampala’s waste and its infrastructural life. Waste is not just a matter of management within a technocratic regime. Waste foments lively engagements with people and places; as such, it is part of and creates lived worlds that “emerge through the process of inhabitation—the everyday world-making practices of cleaning, sorting, discarding, and salvaging” (6). Waste worlds are “the official and unofficial infrastructures and economies that constitute the city’s waste stream and develop around it” (3). In three parts, each with five chapters, Doherty thoroughly and engagingly transverses the “heterogeneous assemblage—of waste, technologies, [End Page 177] discourses, moral logics, forms of work, political rationalities” (22)—that make up these emergent worlds. What, then, do the densely inhabited waste worlds of Kampala look like? The Kampala Capital City Authority (KCCA), a new municipal authority formed by President Museveni’s government, features prominently in Kampala’s discardscape. Created primarily to subvert the power of the city’s elected officials, KCCA’s mandate includes cleaning the city. Doherty shows that the KCCA evangelizes this mandate and embraces a moral charge to cleanse, reorder, and eventually redeem a city that has fallen from grace. Assuming an overlord, the authority enrolls a regime of disposability, which among other things, manifests in evictions and displacements, a process that Doherty describes as a “destructive creation” (69) where in the name of development, some places and livelihoods are inevitably sacrificed. Even as the KCCA actively renders some livelihoods and space waste as a necessity for development, it must also remove the waste created by residents. In its waste removal efforts, the authority is unable to maintain a sealed waste stream where waste collection, often outsourced to private services (in low-income settlements), travels from spaces of generation to final disposal–from homes, offices, and factories to landfills. Para-sites comprised of so-called informal waste scavengers and salvagers punctuate the city’s imagined linear waste stream. In a system designed to exclude them, they are the conditions of possibility that makes it function properly. In this highly charged field of struggles around waste and its infrastructure, the KCCA thinks of itself as a-political, wielding only a technical mandate to clean Kampala. In this field of struggle, I find Doherty’s attention to the play out of race and racialization in Kampala one of his most compelling contributions. There is limited direct engagement of race and racialization logic in the burgeoning studies on the politics of waste in Africa. To the extent that race is engaged, studies more broadly focused on toxic waste flows from the West to Africa and associated environmental justice concerns. Following Jemima Pierre’s (2013:xii) insight that a “modern, postcolonial space is invariably a racialized one,” the final part of the book sheds light on the racialized scripts and framings of urban futures that play out in highly publicized yet mundane events like the monthly cleaning exercises organized by...

Reproductive Governance in Nordeste/Northeast (Juan Solanas, 2005, Argentina/France/Belgium/Spain)

Juan Solanas's 2005 film Nordeste/Northeast problematised maternity by presenting two female characters who conform to cultural or trans‐cultural norms of the Global North and South and personify the narratives of transnational trade. As Lynn M. Morgan and Elizabeth F. S. Roberts argue, ‘reproductive governance’ is a useful analytical tool for understanding how political rationalities affect the reproductive lives of women in Latin America and globally. Reproductive governance can also be used as a lens to analyse how contradictions and ambivalences are built into the lived experience of abortion and adoption as the complexity of maternity.

‘Blunt’ biopolitical rebel rule: on weapons and political geography at the edge of the state

ABSTRACT This article analyzes the ways in which processes of weapons acquisition and armed collectives formation contribute to shape rebel polities – with their populations and attendant political geographies – in frontier spaces. It argues that the acquisition of weapons and the formation of an armed ensemble are shaped by political rationalities and techniques of governing the entanglements between humans and weapons that are diffused throughout society as a whole. Drawing on biopolitical governmentality, I also show that by governing weapons acquisition and the formation of an armed force rebel movements shape the rebel polity’s collective identity and political geographies of ‘vital’ space in frontiers. Harnessing fieldwork-based research to study Ta’ang rebel movements in Myanmar, I find that weapons acquisition and the formation of an armed ensembles have been inflected by govern-mentalities of narcotics eradication and ethnonationality. The article concludes that some forms of rebel rule at the edge of the state in Myanmar can be qualified as ‘blunt’ following work by anthropologist Elliott Prasse-Freeman. That is to say, rebel rule lacking the governmental apparatuses to intensively know and promote life at aggregate scales still operates massifications and divisions of biological populations and political space via the formation and governing of armed ensembles.

The US liberal political and academic establishment on national-territorial transformation of Russia in 1917–1922

The paper examines the evolution of approaches and assessments of the US political and academic establishment regarding the national-territorial transformation of Russia at the final stage of the First World War, during the Revolution and the Civil War. During that period the US diplomacy was focused on developing and implementing its own ambitious program for the liberal-democratic reorganization of the post-war world with particular focus on issues of national self-determination. As a result, Wilson’s administration could not remain indifferent to the dramatic changes on the territory of the former Russian Empire. However, as the author notes, for European politicians its responses appeared rather unusual and often puzzling. The latter was due to a very specific interpretation of the principle of national self-determination adopted by W. Wilson and his associates as the right of the civil society to self-government rather than the right to ethnic separation. At the same time, the right to independently determine their own destiny was reserved, in a spirit of social-Darwinism, only for peoples who had reached a certain maturity. And moreover, each particular case was additionally assessed in terms of both political rationality and developments of political situation in Russia in general. For instance, the US liberal political and academic establishment consistently supported the independence of Poland and Finland while most other national minorities (the peoples of the Baltic region, Ukrainians, Belarusians, Armenians, Georgians, Azerbaijanis, the peoples of Central Asia, etc.) were usually encouraged to defend their autonomy within a united and democratic Russia. The author notes, that the US policy towards Russia became particularly controversial after the Bolsheviks came to power: the consistent rejection of the Bolshevik reforms was accompanied by the reluctance to incite separatism on the national outskirts out of fear of Russia’s uncontrolled disintegration and its subsequent transformation into a site of endless ethnic conflicts. As a result, the United States did not recognize most of the national entities that declared their independence in 1917–1922. At the same time, the author concludes that the growing ideological and political confrontation with Soviet Russia in the following years did not allow the US leaders to adequately assess the national-territorial transformations that were brought about by the creation of the USSR.

Governing digital circulation: the quest for data control and sovereignty in Germany

ABSTRACT How is the circulation of digital data to be governed? This question is the subject of often conflicting political rationalities. Focusing on internet and data politics in Germany, we identify fundamental problematizations in governing data circulation on the basis of a mixed-methods analysis of the public–political discussion. In doing so, we elaborate the genealogy of a tension between two political rationalities. On the one hand, there are the political rationalities of a global information society since the 1990s. These have propelled the free circulation of data across national borders and Germany’s integration into an international and competitive telecommunications and information technology market. In these rationalities, state intervention in the circulation of data is seen as a dangerous obstacle to economic competitiveness and social prosperity. On the other hand, there are the political rationalities of a digitally sovereign statehood since the early 2010s. These consider state intervention in data circulation as a guarantor of economic prosperity, democracy and the ability to govern. We argue that prominent political technologies of territorial regulation of data circulation currently discussed and experimented within Germany can be interpreted as attempts to harmonize this field of tension.

The Foreign Policy of Poland and the Problem of Political Rationale

The aim of the paper is to use international relations theories to explain the views of Polish elites in the field of foreign policy. The concept of political rationale in foreign policy, introduced by Fred Chernoff, is utilized to achieve this goal. The structure of the text is threefold. The first part introduces the theoretical approach. It is believed that it is possible to derive foreign policy mental maps from leading international relations theories such as realism, liberalism, and constructivism. The second part describes how foreign policy is understood by three groups of Polish elites. The third part compares decision-makers views identified in the second part with the theoretical models developed in the first part. In conclusion, the theory’s usefulness in explaining Poland’s foreign policy concepts is evaluated. The text presents an attempt to connect the issues of theory with observable political practice on the example of Poland’s foreign policy after the end of the Cold War. As a result, the paper shows the linkages between chosen International Relations (IR) theories and the state’s foreign policy. In this way, it incorporates the mainstream IR theories into the reflection conducted primarily in the Foreign Policy Analysis field.

Climates of control: Violent adaptation and climate change in the Philippines

This paper considers the limits of adaptation as a concept in global environmental governance and advocacy by examining the climate change policy of the populist Philippine president Rodrigo Duterte. By focusing on heterogenous state responses to the 2018–2019 El Niño drought, I demonstrate how the Duterte administration has worked to achieve a violent vision of climate adaptation through a jarring combination of practices: exhorting the devastating reality of climate change; denigrating multilateral mitigation efforts as colonial injustices; subverting indigenous peoples' land rights; and fostering the extrajudicial assassination of activists. Though Duterte's wider climate change policies are often viewed as a strategic distraction or the isolated product of an erratic populist, I argue that these recent responses to climate change in the Philippines, which fuse decolonial and nationalist sensibilities to confrontational forms of illiberalism, should be examined as part of the larger unfurling of illiberal adaptation politics across Philippine history and the Global South. These politics, and their considerable (though far from total) local resonance, challenge both universalist Western political rationalities and new directions in climate justice movement calling for ontological inclusivity. I highlight the need for a closer examination of the origins, practices and implications of violent adaptions.

Disciplinary nature of 『the politics of education』 revisited: In the middle of its identity and boundary spanning

본 연구는 새로운 교육 패러다임의 전환이 필요하다는 우려와 기대가 교차하는 시점에서 오늘날 교육정치학이 경험하고 있는 현실에 대한 이해를 바탕으로 학문적 성격 탐구의 확장을 시도하면서 이에 부합하는 미래지향적인 교육정치학의 학문적 성격을 탐색하고자 한다. 코로나19 팬데믹과 디지털 전환은 교육정치학 연구에 새로운 도전으로 등장하고 있다. 이러한 상황에서 교육정치학은 학문적 성격의 검토를 통해 정체성을 점검하고 학문의 경계 확장을 모색해야 할 지점에 서 있다. 이런 점에서 교육과 정의에 관한 탐구와 정치적 합리성으로 대변되는 논리의 탐구는 교육정치학의 성격을 내재적으로 접근하던 전통적인 방식의 확장을 가져다 줄 것이다. 이러한 논구를 통해 미래지향적인 교육정치학의 학문적 성격은 융합학으로서의 교육정치학, 국가의 동학으로서의 교육정치학, 현장기반 미래학으로서의 교육정치학으로 확립될 필요가 있다. 이에 따라 교육정치학의 탐구 영역은 개인적 행위 양식의 차원, 조직의 행위 양식 차원 그리고 제도적 수준에서 국가, 정부, 시도의회, 사법제도, 시장제도, 시민사회와 결사체 등을 대상으로 다양하게 연구할 수 있다. 교육정치학의 연구접근에 있어서는 교육문제와 그 해결 과정에서 분명하고 명료한 언어를 사용하여 사회구조를 분석하고, 행위자와 구조의 상호작용을 이해하는 통합적 추론 논리와 방법을 개발할 필요가 있다.At the time of anxiety and expectation for new paradigm shift are crossing, this study intends to understand the reality which the politics of education faces, attempts to expand inquiry on its disciplinary features, and explores future-oriented nature. Corona 19 pandemic and digital transformation have emerged as new challenges in the politics of education research. Under these current situations, the politics of education stood at the point of examining its identity and seeking its boundary spanning through the revisit to its disciplinary nature. It is expected that inquiries on the relations of both education and social justice, and the logic of political rationality would contribute to expanding discussions about the nature of the politics of education beyond its traditional approach to the nature. This study suggests the future oriented disciplinary natures of the politics of education as interdisciplinary science, the nation’s dynamic academics, and field-based futurology. Therefore, the areas of inquiries would be listed in variety as apparent behaviors and modes at the individual, organizational levels, the nation, government, national assembly, local legislative councils, market system, civil society and interest groups at the institutional level. For the research approach, social structure needs to be analyzed using clear and definitive language in education problem and problem solving processes, and it is required to develop the logic of integrative inferences to understand the interactions between actors, structure, and its practical methods.

Contributions of Game Theory to Economic and Political Rationality in Forestry

Political and economic decision-making processes take into account the rationality criteria of forests such as productivity, profitability, and economy. While these criteria in developed countries in the sense of forestry have positive values, such values of developing countries are fluctuating. In Turkey, only wood-based and non-wood forest products of forests are included in national balance sheets. Therefore, it is thought that the real value of forests could not be calculated. However, calculating the actual values will change all balances. Thus, the discussions on the capacity of forests are moved to a more mathematical ground. The fact that the capacity of the forests is not enough to meet all the needs causes the forest assets to be endangered and therefore requires rationality in using. The concept of rationality is based on rules and obtaining reasonable results, and it has been used frequently in recent studies of game theory modeling initiatives. Effective use of this approach in forest policy and economics will contribute to the development of forests, villagers and the country's economy by obtaining more rational results, and will also be beneficial to eliminate some problems between decision makers and the public. In the last 20 years, the 10-fold increase in forestry-based game theory modeling researches in the world indicates that the game theory approach has begun to be included in decision-making processes aimed at achieving sustainable forestry. As a consequence, the game theory approach seems a new and effective tool that will contribute to the economically and politically rational management of forestry.