Political Realm Research Articles

Short Selling – On Ethics, Politics, and Culture

Abstract Lawyers and economists do not always speak the same language. Where economists present crisp and clear numbers, lawyers get lost in lengthy discussions about fairness and justice. Or so it seems. Arguably, the regulation of short selling illustrates a worrying clash of cultures. Economists understand short selling as a value-free market mechanism while (not only) lawyers suspect a profit, unfairly gained at the expense of others: “Short sellers not only profit from the misery of others, they also cause it”. In what follows, we address implications of this culture clash in the realm of ethics and politics. We conclude with a hypothesis, submitting that there might be traces of another clash to be observed when comparing regulatory cultures across countries. A preliminary look at data seems to suggest that short sale bans are less common in countries with a strong capital-market tradition and more common for countries which are newer to this game. If this holds true, important lessons are to be learned for the European Commission’s plan to set up a capital market union.

Localizing resilience: discursive projections, entrapments and domination

Resilience has become a central notion in the discourse of international foreign aid and development institutions and actors. Although it was often used metaphorically in political realms, extensiv...

Changing Demands on Leadership

ABSTRACT The sociological perspective emphasizes the context for leadership. That context has changed broadly over the last fifty years. In corporations, there has been a move from bureaucratic to more collaborative structures, which place new demands on leaders. More recently, the major contextual development has been polarization of value-orientations, most evidently in the political realm but also in many corporations. In such polarized settings, the ability to lead public conversations becomes critical. Although there are relatively few examples of such leadership in companies, and even fewer in societies, some promising examples suggest the key elements, including not only facilitation skills but also the ability to design and manage processes of engagement over time.

The New Federal Impact Assessment Act: Implications for Canadian Energy Projects

Implementation of the new Impact Assessment Act regime is now underway, changing the process for federal assessment of energy projects. While the reformed regime resembles its predecessor in many ways, it also includes many changes, including new requirements with respect to climate change, the rights and interests of Indigenous peoples, sustainability, and economic considerations. Despite much criticism of the Impact Assessment Act in public and political realms, implications for energy projects, particularly in Alberta, remain not well understood. It has been unclear, for example, the extent to which the changed federal process will actually affect whether a project is approved or not. This article provides an overview of the new federal regime and examines what it may mean in practical terms for energy projects, with an emphasis on the Alberta context. Particular focus is devoted to changes from the previous federal regime, chiefly with respect to the assessment and final decision-making phases. Overall, the analysis indicates that for the small number of projects that trigger application of the regime, the assessment process is likely to be more onerous but unlikely to result in fewer project approvals. Rather, the new process still provides significant latitude and discretion that will likely see most projects approved, and the more robust assessment process may translate into broader public support.

Journey of Survivance from a Cultural Practice to Legal Precedent in Kashmiri Rhetorics: An Indigenous Study of Memoirs of Basharat Peer and Rahul Pandita

This research focuses on the practice of survivance and its journey from a cultural practice to legal precedent for likely move to constitutional praxis in the Kashmiri context. It analyzes this practice as a priori argument of the Kashmiri narrativized rhetorics selecting two memoirs, Basharat Peer’s Curfewed Night and Rahul Pandita’s Our Moon has Blood Clots, representing two Kashmiri communities. The objective is to pinpoint survivance practices as the basis of the Kashmiri assertion for indigenous sovereignty over the land, assuming Kashmiri narrativized rhetorication of the Kashmiri culture assists survivance practices transforming them into legal precedents even if they are oral testimonies of the indigenous legal claims likening them to the Vizenorian claim of the fourth person. The research validates this argument that the Kashmiri survivance practices enter the political realm and compete with paracolonialism in legal validation of the native claims but fall short of claiming constitutional praxis which requires further research through a legal standpoint regarding their affectivity in this arena.

New Face of Contemporary Sufism in Southeast Asia: Experience of Indonesia and Malaysia

The current global spiritual revival has been reflected in the revival of Sufism, to the extent that Sufism now has a different appearance from its earlier conventional manifestations. Global developments have driven Sufism to put its appearance relevant to the demands of global living. Focusing on the experiences of Indonesia and Malaysia, this paper attempts to examine the developments of Sufism. These countries seem to represent contemporary trends of Sufism in Southeast Asia. The new face of contemporary Sufism called “urban Sufism” is found in Indonesia. The practices of urban Sufism, which is influenced by the political realm, can be observed within Majelis Dzikir Nurussalam (MDN) established by the former President Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono. In Malaysia, the new appearance of Sufism was initiated by Dar al-Arqam, which later changed its name as Ikhwan Global (IG). This group actively encourages its members to be economically self-reliant by undertaking a range of business activities and at the same time promotes a Sufi lifestyle as the focus of its activities. This research found that contemporary Sufism is no longer oriented exclusively toward the pursuit of spiritual achievements, but it also becomes an instrument of political and economic interests.

FAKE NEWS DETECTION USING LINEAR REGRESSION MACHINE LEARNING ALGORITHIM

Fake news has become a significant part of social media and the political realm in recent years. Fake news detection is an important research project, but it comes with its own set of obstacles. Some difficulties may arise as a result of a scarcity of resources, such as a dataset and published literature. The majority of smartphone users prefer to read news on social media rather than on the internet. The news is published on news websites, which also serve as a source of authentication. The challenge is how to verify news and articles shared through social media platforms such as WhatsApp groups, Facebook Pages, Twitter, and other microblogging and social networking sites. Believing in rumours and pretending to be news is damaging to society. Stopping rumours, especially in emerging nations like India, and focusing on accurate, verified news items is the need of the hour.

Walking the Line: Borderlands and the Politics of Hiking

This article takes the Arizona Trail (AZT) as a case study to consider the ways that hiking is made to serve a political purpose in part through its representation as apolitical. I show how certain opposition to border wall construction employs the figure of the hiker as one that is both beyond the realm of politics and aligned with practices of good citizenship. This move then entails the production of that figure’s other, the migrant whose criminalized walking the wall is meant to prevent. In leaving that other largely unmarked and unaddressed, opposition to the wall’s construction can claim to be disengaged from politics while tacitly affirming the necessity of borders and their enforcement.

COVID-19 in Georgia: State Emergency as Political Non-law and Its Impact on Pluralism

ABSTRACT The article scrutinizes COVID-19-related state of emergency which tested and hence exposed vulnerability of certain values of liberal democracy where it has been fragile. It opened a window of opportunity for governments to operate in a political non-law realm through introduction of state emergency measures. Georgia was no exception, its political space has been particularly affected by the COVID-19-related state of emergency. Hence the research is interested in why the state emergency was damaging for democracy in Georgia? The article argues that by introduction of state of emergency the Georgian Dream government ushered Georgia—a hybrid democracy with rather limited history of power-sharing and weak democratic institutions—in a “state of exception,” in a sense put forward by Carl Schmitt. This political act further flattened political diversity through limiting the space for political pluralism.

Steven Spielberg: Interviews, Revised and Updated ed. by Brent Notbohm and Lester D. Friedman

Reviewed by: Steven Spielberg: Interviews, Revised and Updated ed. by Brent Notbohm and Lester D. Friedman Lawrence Baron (bio) Steven Spielberg: Interviews, Revised and Updated. Edited by Brent Notbohm and Lester D. Friedman. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2019. 212 pp., ISBN 9781496824028 (pb), US $30.95. One can gauge how much attitudes toward Steven Spielberg’s movies have changed between the publication of the first edition of Steven Spielberg Interviews in 2000 and the updated version by comparing Lester Friedman’s introductions to each. In the former, Friedman laments the dearth of scholarship about Spielberg’s films and attributes this neglect to the preference of academics to analyze auteurs and neglect commercially successful filmmakers like Spielberg for pandering to popular taste. Until the interview on Empire of the Sun (1987), Spielberg dwells on the vicissitudes of financing films, their box-office success, and his goal of entertaining audiences. As he turns his attention to topics such as the Holocaust in Schindler’s List (1993), slavery in Amistad (1997), and the carnage of war in Saving Private Ryan (1998), his responses to questions become more substantive and thoughtful. Conversely, the introduction to the revised edition highlights the scholarly recognition of Spielberg as a serious director. Friedman cites a spate of books published in the interim by film studies scholars including Nigel Morris, James Kendrick, Dean Kowalski, Andrew Gordon, Richard Schickel, and Friedman himself, that acknowledge Spielberg “as a supremely skilled filmmaker unafraid [End Page 240] to tackle significant, and sometimes, controversial issues” (ix). While Spielberg has never abandoned action-adventure or fanciful fare, over the past two decades he has inverted recurring themes from earlier films. The benevolent aliens in Close Encounters of the Third Kind (1977) and ET: The Extraterrestrial (1982) morphed into the menacing tripods from The War of the Worlds (2005). Rather than marvel at the wizardry of science and technology, Spielberg now warns against their potential for authoritarian abuse and dehumanization in works from A.I.: Artificial Intelligence (2001) and Minority Report (2002) to Ready Player One (2018). Moreover, his films increasingly venture into the realm of politics, exploring the bureaucratic obstacles to granting asylum in The Terminal (2004), the moral ambiguities of lobbying in Lincoln (2012), and the cycle of violence arising from Israel’s targeted assassinations of terrorists in Munich (2005). One wishes that Friedman would have expanded the introduction to include a review of the Spielberg scholarship he mentions and expounded more on the contrasts between the movies from the first half and last half of his career. Notbohm and Friedman have retained most of the interviews that appeared in the first edition of the book. These reiterate the familiar stories of Spielberg’s suburban childhood where he encountered instances of antisemitism that fostered his sense of being an outsider; his making of films as a teen about space and war to enthrall family and friends; and his meteoric rise to fame by renovating formulaic genres with flashy aural and cinematographic techniques. Readers of Jewish Film & New Media will find the interviews conducted by John Richardson (100–110) and Stephen Schiff (111–130) about Schindler’s List the most germane to their areas of specialization. The former captures Spielberg’s directorial process during the shooting of the film, whereas the latter places the movie within the context of his personal and professional maturation. Therein Spielberg discloses how he convinced screenwriter Steve Zallian to heighten the profiles of key Jewish characters and follow what happened to them during the ghetto liquidation scene. This challenges the criticism commonly leveled at Schindler’s List by Holocaust scholars who fault the movie for diminishing the Jewish dimension of the Holocaust by focusing on the transformation of its German protagonist. That viewpoint ignores how Spielberg renders Schindler’s deeds as the rare exception to the rule since they are consistently bookended by the escalating brutality and lethality of German anti-Jewish measures. The new material in the book starts with an interview regarding Catch Me If You Can (2002) and ends with one devoted to Ready Player One. Not all the [End Page 241] films Spielberg made in this period are accorded an interview. It would have been...

Advancing Preservation for Archives and Manuscripts

Advancing Preservation for Archives and Manuscripts

Risk and the gender gap in internal political efficacy in Europe

This study confirms the existence of a substantial gender gap in internal political efficacy in contemporary European democracies with survey evidence from the ESS08 and 09 waves. This gap is rooted in gendered patterns of socialisation according to which men are more likely than women to be socialised in ways that emphasise psychological traits such as assertiveness, predisposition to risk, competition, or self-promotion. Findings show that those who perceive themselves as ready to take risks are more likely to feel able to play an active role in politics. Using mediation analysis, this article shows that part of the gender gap in internal political efficacy is a result of the lower inclination of women to take risks in comparison to men. These findings confirm the masculine character of the political realm. A realm that is often perceived by citizens to be more in line with gender stereotypes about men.

Legitimising detention and deportation of illegalised migrant families: reconstructing public controversies in Belgium and the Netherlands

ABSTRACT In Belgium and the Netherlands, the detention and deportation of illegalised migrant families with underage children has recently caused public controversy, resulting in the eruption of anti-deportation protests. This controversy is rooted in the unresolved tension for liberal states to protect children’s rights on the one hand, while limiting ‘unwanted migration’ on the other. Previous literature documents protest reactions to efforts to deport families with underage children, as well as general state tactics to legitimize such coercion. This paper instead centres the state’s legitimation work in response to societal protest and draws on publicly available material on two recent controversies: the Belgian debate on family detention and the determination of the child pardon in the Netherlands. For Belgium we highlight that the government frames detention as the ‘ultimate measure’, used only when less restrictive measures ‘failed’. For the Netherlands we show how the government reallocates political responsibility from elected officials to bureaucrats. Both strategies transform what is essentially a moral-political debate into a web of administrative procedures and discussions on legal conditions. The Belgian and Dutch governments thus invisibilize moral conflict by drawing it outside the realm of democratic politics, to the backstage of bureaucratic administration.

Declining hegemony and the sources of Trump’s disengagement from multilateral trade governance: the interaction between domestic politics and the international political economy

As a result of the economic and political rise of China and Trump’s decision to undermine the liberal international order, theories of hegemony have regained center stage in both policy-oriented and scholarly debates. Yet, a careful analysis of the evolution of the US foreign policy strategy in the realm of international trade politics reveals that traditional theories of hegemonic decline are ill-equipped to account for both the timing and the content of the Trump administration’s behavior in this issue area. This paper argues in favor of integrating structural theories of hegemonic transition/stability with an analysis of the domestic sources of trade policy preferences. To do so, we draw on the International Political Economy literature highlighting how the domestic political process triggered by the dynamics of international economic competition combined with structural forces in shaping the timing and content of the Trump administration’s disengagement from the existing multilateral trade governance structures.

Review: Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles, by Laura Gabbert

Review: <i>Ottolenghi and the Cakes of Versailles</i>, by Laura Gabbert

Political Para-Social Relationship as a Predictor of Voting Preferences in the Israeli 2019 Elections

The idea that the success of media personae in attracting audiences and maintaining their loyalty depends on the creation of a pseudo-friendship, known as para-social relationships, has been a mainstay of mass media research for more than half a century. Expanding the scope of para-social relationship research into the political realm, the notion that political support could be predicted based on the intensity of para-social relationships between voters and political figures was demonstrated in a recent study. The current exploration tests the predictive power of Political Para-Social Relationship (PPSR) in the context of the April and September 2019 Israeli election campaigns. Findings from online panel data ( n = 1,061) demonstrate that PPSR toward Netanyahu was a positive predictor of voting for Netanyahu’s Likud party and a negative predictor of voting for opposition leader Benny Gantz’s Blue and White party in both campaigns. The opposite was true for PPSR toward Benny Gantz. The PPSR constructs also predicted shifts in party support from the February to October (post-election) waves of the study, and loyalty toward the parties. In all models, the PPSR constructs were among the strongest predictors of political support.

WOMEN LEADERSHIP IN OPTICS FEMINIST INTERPRETATION

This paper tries to make a discussion about women leadership perspective feminist interpretation. As is known, women leadership status until now is still invite a polemic morever for muasir-academis circles. On one side, there is a opinion that classic interpretation model about gender is considered irrilevent more with modern context. Because term of obscurity gender more take sides to men. And than in other side, movers feminist exaggerating in interpret many verses al-Qur’an for supporting their opinion. In al-Qur’an, the verse that always made reference when discussing about gender is QS. al-Nisa’ [4]: 34. This verse is considered as amplifier by many people that leadership must be in hand men. But is that true that the important message in this verse as like it ? are role women restricted in political realm ? Must be recognized that al-Qur’an (QS. al-Naml [27]: 20-44) has told about Queen Bilqis, she is woman phenomenal leader who succes changing Saba’ country become a prosperous country. In QS. al-Nisa’[4]: 34 and al-Naml [27]: 20-44 look contradicting, but actually not like that because each of these two verses tell different context. Irrespectively of many argument for movers feminism, discuss more about women leadership in their opinion is so interesting. At least, this paper attend for stopping long debate between twu stronghold, between patriarchism and feminism that have not find clarity .

Beyond Personalistic Politics: A Progressive Congresswoman’s Challenge to a Political Dynasty in Dinagat Islands, Philippines

Abstract Political dynasties remain powerful in Philippine politics to this day. However, in recent years, the Philippines has experienced some significant transformations in the realm of traditional politics. Some politicians have emerged at the local level willing to confront those supported by dynastic politics. Since most literature on Philippine politics have emphasized the durability of elite domination, such changes have not yet been fully studied. This article addresses how progressive politics evolves in contention with a political dynasty based on a qualitative, exploratory case study approach by highlighting the case of Dinagat Islands where a progressive congresswoman who ran for Congress defeated a candidate from an entrenched political dynasty by practicing programmatic governance. It explores how government capacity to respond to demands of the people can be improved. As a result of this, the article clarifies a new, though not common, dynamic of Philippine politics in the 2010s and provides important implications for the possibility of future political development and theorizing in the country.

Informed consent, clinical research, Covid-19 and contact tracing apps: some neuroethical concerns

The explosion of the Covid-19 pandemic has led us to introduce numerous states of exception in our everyday lives, sparking debates about their appropriateness at various levels. Among other changes we have adopted, there has been an increase of apps supporting our fight against Covid-19 all over the world. From apps helping us to join and coordinate clinical trials to contact tracing apps, various are the instances in which digital technology has -at least attempted to- come to rescue to the scientific, public policy and political realms during the challenging times we are currently living in. Particularly in relation to contact tracing apps, ethical concerns have been raised over the level of transparency that they can guarantee, often stressing how the State needs to ensure a number of variables to be granted to citizens: from privacy to fairness of access and distribution through their compulsory status or not. In Western liberal democracies, the assumption has been that all risks associated with this digital technology would have to be dealt with by the State -hence making its misuse “only” public, albeit authoritarian in their most dystopian versions. Here, the intention is to stress some of the overlooked dimensions of the use of different types of Covid-19 related apps. More specifically, this paper takes issue with the secondary use of data that various private companies engaged in the fight against Covid-19 could make -with an unclear role for informed consent. Especially when in the hands of private, for profit, companies, attention should abound on what states of exceptions we are allowing to slip through our ethical supervision -and to what we are actually giving consent to when downloading these apps.

Pulling Back from Politics: Second Nature and Oikonomia in the Franklin's Tale

ABSTRACT Guided by the scene in the Franklin's Tale where Aurelius is intercepted by the clerk outside of Orléans and redirected to the latter's house, this article argues that the Franklin's Tale deviates from politics in order to facilitate the historical convergence of oikonomia and second nature. In the Franklin's Tale we find ourselves trapped within the second nature produced by oikonomia: the world seems unchangeable only because we have lost sight of its historical character. Meanwhile, the realm of politics—and the authentic freedom it makes possible—hovers just outside the borders of the tale, a destination recalled but never reached. Fortunately, we have Dorigen's meditation on “the grisly feendly rokkes blake” to provide us with a model for the objectification of critical consciousness and thus with an apprehension of freedom. In Dorigen's critical “memory of nature,” we find our emancipation from inert second nature.