Role In Contemporary Politics Research Articles

Роль популистского дискурса в агонистической модели конфликтного политического взаимодействия

Populist discourse plays an important role in contemporary politics, as it is a way to mobilize broad sections of the population and build mass support for political action. However, populism is not only demagogy, as is commonly believed. It is also a specific form of mentality that is based on social antagonism. The article aims to provide a conceptual explanation of populism, which will not only be reduced to a political technology, such as demagogy, but will also allow to expand the knowledge of populism within populist discourse. The article provides a conceptual analysis of populist discourse from the perspective of communicative approach and agonistic discourse. Particular attention is paid to the causes of populism, which is built on social contrasts, what kind of antagonisms it uses and to what extent they influence the public mood. It is suggested that this view of populism will allow us to approach the question of defining the discourse of populism and to determine the role of (conflict) communication in the construction of an agonistic model of conflictual political interaction. The article can help to better understand the agonistic model of conflictual political interaction. Study of the social antagonisms used in populist discourse and an analysis of their impact on public attitudes can clarify the mechanisms of conflict and suggest ways to resolve them within the agonistic model.

Political animals in the Modern World: An Investigation of the National Animal Symbol

AbstractNational symbols play a significant role in contemporary politics by shaping national identities. However, national animals receive little attention in the scholarship. This paper analysed the national animal’s history, strengths, formation and implications as a political symbol. It argues that using the animal as a national symbol has distinctive strengths because animal symbols have concrete traits and an interactive dimension. However, the national animals are not granted the same political significance in the formal institutional setting as other symbols because of the concern about exacerbating disunity between nations and potential undesirable international responses. Nonetheless, when the separatist movements of Catalonia and Flanders utilise the national animal, it does not face the same challenges and therefore has received more popularity from the nationals.

Depoliticisation and Repoliticisation of Feminist Knowledge in a Nordic Knowledge Regime: The Case of Gender Budgeting in Finland

ABSTRACT Knowledge has a growing role in contemporary politics and policy-making. As a response to new forms of governance and evidence-based policy-making, feminist knowledge has become an important device of gender equality policy. This article analyses the role, form, and producers of feminist knowledge in contemporary policy-making. It focuses on the depoliticizing as well as the repoliticising tendencies in feminist knowledge production. It takes as its focus the recent gender budgeting initiative in Finland. The article shows that the role of feminist knowledge is symbolic; that the preferred form of feminist knowledge is quantified knowledge; and that the credible producers of feminist knowledge are gender experts and economists. All these elements of feminist knowledge production are characterized by a constant movement between depoliticization and repoliticisation.

The state (of mind) of Dumrul

This article re-reads the tale of Deli Dumrul (one of the stories of the Book of Dede Korkut), who built a bridge over a dried-up riverbed to collect tribute from both passengers and non-passengers. He usually surfaces when a government demands new taxes, drafts new regulations putting the citizens in charge, a bureaucrat or politician asks bribery for their duties, etc. This article suggests that Dumrul is one of the archetypes that represent the image of the state in the political culture of Turkey. Deli Dumrul presents a scheme to track some specific affects which play an active role in contemporary politics, such as individual and/or collective anxiety of survival.

Performative Rights and Situationist Ethics

Recent critiques of rights have enabled alternative understandings of their role in contemporary politics. In this article, I focus on the emergence of a performative understanding of rights, which conceptualises rights claims as reiterative acts that remake the protections and privileges marked out by rights. This promising reconstruction of rights requires a rethinking of the ethical justification of rights claims. If rights claims are creative political acts, rather than especially important duties, a justification focused on certainty and constraint will not do. Yet, we must still ask: what is a good rights claim? I argue, first, that a performative account of rights requires an ethical justification that embraces contingency while still providing an account of good political creativity, and, second, that focusing on the use of normative claims to address specific problems, which I term a situationist ethics—drawing on the philosophy of John Dewey, provides better grounding for performative rights claims.

CONTRIBUTION OF ROYAL MUGHAL LADIES IN THE FIELD OF ART AND ARCHITECTURE FROM 1526-1707 A.D: A BRIEF SURVEY

Indian woman since ancient days had played an important role in the socio-cultural and philosophical development of the country. Especially in Medieval India, the royal ladies of the Mughal court were almost as remarkable as their male counterparts. Royal Mughal ladies like Hamida Banu Begam, Haji Begam, Nurjahan Begam, Jahanara Begam, Roshanara Begam, Zeb-un-Nisa Begum etc. not only played a dominant role in contemporary politics but also contributed a lot to artistic field. The present article is an attempt to highlight the contribution of Royal Mughal ladies especially in Artistic field.

Unsettled spirits, performance and aesthetics of power: the public life of liberation heritage in zimbabwe

ABSTRACTThis paper investigates how meanings of liberation heritage have been constructed and institutionalised in Zimbabwe, and how this has elicited responses from local communities. While most treatises on liberation heritage have focussed on the politics of election of heroes and heroines or the contested meanings and symbolism of sites, archives or objects associated with liberation heritage, this analysis, drawing from the Zimbabwean context, examines the strategies used to frame ideas and practices around liberation heritage. The article brings together different practices centred around the Zimbabwean liberation war, where practices around burials became a way of renewing the legitimacy of the state in a period of increasing economic and political turmoil in post 2000 Zimbabwe. The selected curatorial projects and state sponsored commemorations or rituals, show that the conferment of official heritage status to spaces, sites, routes or personalities associated with liberation wars provides space for public performance of the state’s narrative of the past, conferring it with an accentuated visibility in the public sphere. The paper highlights the strategies deployed and the language used to entrench the liberation war narrative as part of official heritage, all choreographed and performed at burials, visitations, rituals and other commemorative practices. While the configuration of the war past as official heritage confers visibility to the state, it also produces a fractured and highly contested heritage complex, stimulated by emerging counter practices that resist state-sponsored forms of memorialisation. The production of heritage in post-2000 Zimbabwe points to the intensifying politicisation of heritage in times of increasing economic and political tensions. The developments foreground the fluid and ever-changing nature of the uses of heritage and are a demonstration of how tropes of heritage continue to take a central role in contemporary politics in Southern Africa.

‘Gender nationalism’: The new (old) politics of belonging

This contribution takes a look at the phenomenon of ‘gender-nationalismʼ. It argues that references about gender equality and women’s rights play an important role in contemporary politics of belonging: these references are used as boundary markers in nationalist narratives, constructing the self versus the immigrant other. The contribution traces the emergence of this phenomenon in Europe, and focuses on its occurrence in recent debates. It concludes that whilst gender equality is a crucial claim that needs to be upheld in the public sphere, we also need to pay attention to intersectional mechanisms of exclusion and oppression which are at play in contemporary versions of gender nationalism.

Ideology in the age of mediatized politics: from ‘belief systems’ to the re-contextualizing principle of discourse

Mediatized politics is often associated with a metamorphosis of politics; a shift from philosophical fermentations to effective media campaigning and from rational argumentation to personal appeals, sound bites and dramatic effects. The question this article raises is whether this alleged metamorphosis allows some space for ideology to emerge and play any role in contemporary politics and, if so, what the implications for the study of political ideology in the age of mediatization are? As I will argue, to study ideology in the context of mediatized politics is not to make big claims about the survival or demise of some ‘grand’ belief systems but to analytically address the potential of political discourse, as it is articulated through several media genres within specific socio-political contexts, to re-contextualize symbolisms from the past serving the effective exercise of political power in the present. I will further illustrate this attempted revisionism by briefly examining three televised political advertisements, which I take as an example of mediatized politics, by the American Democratic Party for the 2008 presidential election in the US, by the British Conservative party for the 2010 general election in the UK and by the Panhellenic Socialist Movement for the 2009 parliamentary election in Greece, respectively.

Paths of Research in Religion and Politics: An Introduction

Religion plays an important role in contemporary politics, both as a public and political actor, and as set of values. As a public actor, religion widely participates in the political spheres of European countries. At the same time, both European and non-European societies are experiencing a profound reshaping of their political landscapes. In these contexts, it has become clear that new modes of governance redraw the boundaries between institutional actors and citizens, and create space for horizontal and/or transnational networks. Today, the separation between religion and politics is being questioned more or less radically, and the meaning and the substance of democracy likewise. This special issue aims to offer a wide range of examples of studies focusing on the interactions between religion and politics from different disciplinary perspectives and scientific traditions. Ranging from single case studies to transnational comparative analyses, from sociology of religion to political science, and from the analysis of specific religious traditions to comparative studies, the articles presented offer a useful insight of topics and debates. This heterogeneity allows the readers to have an overview on some of the most important religious actors (movements, associations, groups and, parties in contemporary democracies, such as Christian traditional parties in Europe and the US, Islamist groups in Turkey and in Pakistan. At the same time, this collection of article shows different approaches through which is possible to analyse these movements, such as cross-country comparative approaches, comparison between different cases of religious groups’ collective action within the same national contexts or in the same urban area, or in-depth case studies of the specific role of religious groups in a broader national mobilization. The common element of these different contributions is the objective of looking at the complex relationships between religious organizations (both movements and parties) and political mobilizations, and analysing the religious factor neither as a mere effect of conflicts driven by non-religious factors, such as economic or utilitarian motives, nor as essentialist phenomena driven by non-rational logics of action.

Public health at a crossroads: assessing teaching on economic globalization as a social determinant of health

This article examines how public health faculty prepare students to respond to economic globalization, and more broadly considers the response of public health academics to structural challenges that fall within the realm of global economics, politics, and policy. At this moment, public health is at a crossroads of formalizing its education through graduate competencies and certifications. This research undertook in-depth interviews with public health faculty from across the US to explore how students are prepared to critically consider root causes and respond to political and economic trends shaping health. These interviews reveal a general dearth of attention to globalization, as well as several factors shaping public health academic knowledge production. These include the deep influence and shortcomings of funding resources; a general lack of critical perspective in public health; and both methodological and faculty competence deficiencies. Interviewees also discuss political influences and conflicting student demands, as well the strength of public health as an interdisciplinary profession and potential opportunities for improving public health's responsiveness. Interestingly, while there was near unanimity regarding public health's role and obligation to advocate for change on these issues, there was also uncertainty about how to appropriately model and teach advocacy skills, and tension over public health's role in politics and policy. While public health has a rich history of addressing structural and political factors shaping health, this research reveals an ongoing need to define public health's role in contemporary politics and policy, and in advocating for change at the global policy level.

Pulcinella, or the metaphysics of the nulla: in between politics and theatre

This article argues that Pulcinella, a figure of classical Italian commedia dell’arte, could also be considered as emblematic for the reordering of politics in the early-modern and modern periods. By placing emphasis on the common underlying theatrical aspects of ‘representation’, it effectively connects the absolutist and democratic periods and helps us to understand why actors and acting came to play such a prominent role in contemporary politics, whether as politicians imitating actors, or as actors actually becoming politicians. The article also shows that this sublimation of theatre into politics is not even a contemporary phenomenon but can be traced back to the ancient mime, following the origins of Pulcinella, and the first crisis of democracy, in classical Athens, in the footsteps of Plato.

Reply to the Comments

First, I am pleased to note the broad area of agreement among the four of us. We concur fully that polls are useful, powerful, and play an important role in contemporary politics. My three responders also acknowledge the significance of alternative ways in which citizens can express their opinions and, furthermore, that public opinion is more diverse and nuanced than any dichotomous split between the pros and cons on a particular issue recorded at a particular time might suggest. Sir Robert chides me explicitly, and Gary Langer by implication, for failing ‘to use the opportunity of the keynote address to speak to the purveyors of polling data … to set a standard of excellence of survey methodology, a standard of excellence of survey reporting, and a standard of excellence of survey critique.’ I plead guilty. My decision was deliberate. What point would there have been in further preaching to the already converted? A discussion focused on the nature of public opinion, how it informs government and possibly translates into better policies struck me as more appropriate.

The Study of Islamic Culture and Politics: An Overview and Assessment

▪ Abstract Among the four major world cultural traditions—Confucianism, Hinduism, Islam, and Christianity—Islam appears to have the most pervasive role in contemporary politics. The vast and varied spectrum of the scholarly works that have addressed this distinctive phenomenon started with a tradition that presumed a conflict between Islam and political modernity, while noting the centrality and universality of the faith for Muslims. This conception runs contrary to the admission of the reality of secular politics in historical Islam. If there is, on the contrary, a congruity between Islam and modernity, one still needs to provide an account of the speecificity of Muslim politics. Addressing this issue, another tradition stressed that because of its very survival into the modern era, the great Islamic tradition can play a significant role in political modernization and nation building. While this argument may be true in the cases of the historical experiences of a number of Islamic countries in the early twentieth century, it is not consistent with the overly transnational and other worldly objectives of radical Islamism of late. A third tradition opted for the analysis of the macro social processes in order to account for the rise of political Islam, while a fourth focused on the micro processes of the objectification of religion and the fragmentation of religious authority to explain Muslim politics. These explanations, however, would be incomplete without a serious assessment of the role of the rentier economy in the rise of Muslim exceptionalism. Following a critical assessment of the extant literature, this essay makes several suggestions for future research.

Ola Rotimi: "Humanity as my Tribesmen"

la Rotimi lives somewhat in the shadow of his fellow Nigerian dramatist, the Nobel Laureate Wole Soyinka. But while Soyinka commands international respect and admiration, Rotimi's reputation within Nigeria, both as playwright and director, is unsurpassed. Born in 1938 of Yoruba and Igbo parents (a significant cross-community. parentage in terms of Rotimi's committed stance against the destructive elements of tribalism) Rotimi was educated at the prestigious Methodist Boys High School in Lagos, and then in the USA, with degrees from Boston University (B.F.A.) and Yale (M.F.A.), where between 1963 and 1966 he was Rockefeller Foundation Scholar in Playwrighting and Dramatic Literature. Like many other contemporary Nigerian playwrights (Omotoso, Osofisan, Clark-Bekederemo, Sofola, Sowande, Lakoju, etc.) Rotimi works from a base in university teaching, in his case from the universities of Ife and Port Harcourt. His first play, Our Husband Has Gone Mad Again, was written and produced at Yale in 1966 (and published by OUP in 1977). It is a light-hearted satire which shows alertness to the ridiculous posturing of politicians and some sense of the menace that lurks behind the farce. It is also very "modem" in its ideological stance, with women's role in contemporary politics given considerable emphasis. Rotimi's reputation was established, however, with three major dramas he both wrote and staged following his return to Nigeria in the autumn of 1966 — The Gods Are Not to Blame (produced at the first Ife Festival of the Arts in 1968), Kurunmi (second Ife Festival, 1969) and Ovonramwen Nogbaisi (fourth Ife Festival, 1970). These three plays will be discussed briefly in order to give some insight into Rotimi's methodology and concerns, leading to a fuller discussion of two important later works, If (first performed University of Port Harcourt Theatre, 1979) and Hopes of the Living Dead (first performed University of Port Harcourt Theatre, 1985.)