Socio-political Order Research Articles

Toponymic renaming as a reflection of social cohesion and social justice in the City of Tshwane

ABSTRACT Recently, the concept of social cohesion has been increasingly used in the South African government and policy circles when discussing the challenges of social cohesion in a society deeply divided by race, class, and nationality. Related to this concept is the practice of naming and renaming places, precisely after regime change. Also known as a toponymic purge, new rulers change exisiting names to gian political legitimacy for their political values and to reflect the new socio-political order, rendering place names of the previous regime obsolete in the process. As a result, this paper analyses toponymic renaming as a reflection of social cohesion in the street renaming process of the City of Tshwane, South Africa. The paper uses a qualitative research approach and a case study design. A sample of 14 participants were puposively selected and data were technically analysed. The findings of the study revealed that the street renaming process accomodated Black people who had previously been marginalized. Therefore, Coloureds and Black participants believed that social cohesion and social justice had been accomplished through the process of renaming the streets. White participants, on the other hand, held a different perspective that the process did not contribute to social cohesion.

(Dé)cloisonnements et résistances interstitielles

This article is part of a research project looking at the home as a space for resistance and politicisation. Based on a field study of alternative forms of cohabitation, the aim is to rework the very definition of the home, which thus acts as a conceptual operator for rethinking a set of dichotomies that structure political philosophy: the private and the public, the personal and the collective, the intimate and the institutional, the domestic and the political. From this perspective, two types of (de)partitioning are involved: conceptually, the aim is to undo the construction of a threshold that has excluded the home from the political domain, relegating it to an apolitical, pre-political or even anti-political sphere. In so doing, we will be trying to think what kind of resistance can emerge from within the alternative home; how can we think the ability to make a world from the very margins of the world? In architectural terms, the question of partitions, the ones we add, the ones we remove, appears to be one of the recurring reasons for the appropriation and hijacking of the space by its residents. This raises the question of the insistence of a preexisting materiality - that of space, and that of a socio-political order - against which strategies of subversion inevitably clash. How can we think about the ambiguity of resistance - that of contestation and that of conservation - as a dual requirement, without losing the meaning of all political action? In the final analysis, this problematic should be seen as one of articulation between resistance and its framework, and it invites us to rethink that framework.

“Islam” and “Muslimisme” in the official discourse and categorical apparatus of the French authorities in the 1920s

Throughout history, France and the Muslim world have been connected in various ways. Their interactions have ranged from constructive collaboration to colonial (or semi-colonial) domination and mutual animosity. In this article, the author seeks to examine the nuances of the discursive mobilisation and contextualisation of terms such as “Islam” and “Muslimisme” within the public and secret documents of French diplomacy and colonial administration during the 1920s. He attempts to address the following questions: What was the terminological and semantic conflict surrounding the aforementioned concepts? What were the objectives of the French officials in articulating one or another aspect of “Islam” and “Muslimisme”? Contemporary neocolonialism and a necessity to study its historical genesis and forms determine relevance of the article. The author makes use of insufficiently researched archival and published material. This, in conjunction with the nature of the research question, provides the rationale behind the originality of the analysis presented in the essay. He employs the methodology of the “history of concepts” and comparative-historical analysis to examine the intricate interrelationship between the discursive mobilisation of “Islam” and “Muslimisme”, on the one hand, and the practical policies of Paris, on the other. The author draws on a range of sources to inform his analysis, including French diplomatic documents, the notes and reports of Marshal Hubert Lyautey, books and pamphlets by various French experts and public figures, and material from the French and Algerian press. He concludes that the semantic colouring of “Islam” and “Muslimisme” in the French official discourse of the 1920s was not homogeneous. This perception included a sense of superiority close to Orientalism, a perception of the backwardness of “Islamic civilization” and its incompatibility with the Western socio-political order, and a perception of “Islam” as a potential danger, especially if it was combined with other religious (pan-Islamism) and/or socio-political challenges (pan-Turkism, Bolshevism). Concurrently, the Third Republic’s authorities frequently regarded Islam as a means of securing Muslim allegiance and enhancing France’s “soft power”.

Социально-политическая стабильность и порядок: соотношение понятий и феноменов

Introduction. The article examines and analyzes such social phenomena as socio-political stability and socio-political order from the point of view of ideological, legal and value parameters. Theoretical analysis. For a long time, socio-political stability has been considered as an adequate characteristic of the political structure of the state. Scientists drew attention to the change of liberal and conservative cycles and forms of government, which saw a balance between order and freedom of society and a man. In this context, Russian philosophical thought linked the socio-political order with spiritual and moral principles as regulators of the state, society and a man, and also paid attention to freedom and legal institutions. The institutionalization of the socio-political order is carried out through the mechanisms of political power and its legitimization, ideology, and law based on the value preferences of society. The system-synergetic paradigm defines these mechanisms as order parameters underlying the self-organization of any social system. Conclusion. Socio-political stability is a qualitative characteristic of the socio-political order, which is determined by the historical, geopolitical conditions of society, with its spiritual factors and traditions. The socio-political order is not universal, it is invariant, determining the variability of human development.

Climate storylines as a tool for interdisciplinary dialogue on risk decision-making: Analyzing a severe drought in southeastern South America

Recently, we are witnessing a growing interest in the study of climate narratives and storylines. These are seen as critical tools both for improving shared understandings involving different stakeholders (including scientists from different disciplines) and guiding initiatives for transformative adaptation actions and decision making. This paper approaches the storylines about a severe drought event that took place in southeastern South America (SESA) in 2008/2009 from an interdisciplinary dialogue between climatologists and anthropologists. This approach responds to the need for a more robust understanding of the event and the responses adopted locally, i.e: not restricted to physical aspects but considering socio-economic and political aspects, with the aim of contributing to the development of socially relevant climatic information for realistic climate risk decision making contexts. In particular it intends to contribute to the decision-making processes of government agencies focused on climate communication and public climate services, such as national and weather services and regional agencies. Considering disciplinary differences, we account for the interpretative polyphony regarding this event, i.e.: what each actor/sector is talking about (for what and to whom they are talking about) when referring to "the drought", and analyze climate storylines as an agonistic field of meanings. This implies recognizing the disputes and contradictions among them, how different storylines promote certain lines of argumentation and meanings to the detriment of others, knowledge gaps, the role of social power relations, socio-political order factors and their impact in terms of the necessary transformations towards an environmentally sustainable and socially just horizon.

Make America hate again? Before and after Trump, there were differences in how Muslims and Islam were portrayed in American media

ABSTRACT Islamophobia has historically been used to refer to racism, prejudice, and securitization, indicating that these are structural, cognitive, or cultural aspects of the issue. The term now refers to an Islamophobic social structure in the West, where people tend to act in a way that is hostile against Islam and everything that it represents, according to the current study. The prefix neo has thus been introduced by the researchers to this phrase to account for the psychological aspect of Islamophobia, which shows itself in behaviors and discourses. In order to comprehend the nature of Islamophobia in the UK and the USA, this research aims to investigate Islamophobic discourses in the media of these two Western cultures. Using the DHA analytical methodology, it examines 446 top stories from The Washington Post (The Post editorial board has supported Democratic candidates for federal, state, and municipal offices in the great majority of U.S. elections. Decisions on endorsements and the editorial board of the newspaper are made independently of journalistic activities. It wasn't until 1976 that the Post consistently endorsed candidates for president. The Post has never backed a Republican for president in the general election since it endorsed Jimmy Carter in 1976. Instead, it has consistently supported Democrats in presidential contests. Despite this, the Post declined to either Republican nominee Vice President George H. W. Bush or Democratic candidate Governor Michael Dukakis in the 1988 presidential contest. Obama in 2008 and 2012, Clinton in 2016, and Biden in 2020 were all backed by the Post editorial board (The Washington Post, 2020).) and The Independent (The Independent is typically characterized as liberal, liberal-left, and center to center. The paper's founders believed that readers from The Times and The Daily Telegraph would be its primary audience when it was first founded in 1986 and aimed for its political stance to match the middle of the British political spectrum. It is more of a rival to The Guardian because of perceptions that it leans left on the political spectrum. On economic matters, The Independent, however, leans liberal and pro-market. The Independent described itself as a proudly liberal publication on Sunday (Luce, 2019).) between November 2016 and December 2017. This study finds that although Neo-Islamophobia is more prevalent in the US, where it is considered as a challenge to the socio-political order, classic Islamophobia is more prevalent in the UK, where Islam is seen as a threat to Europe's symbolic identity. It suggests a cycle of neo-Islamophobia that starts with problematizing Islam and moves on to ultimately securitizing Muslims.

Disease Prevention in a Communist State and the Second Epidemiological Transition: The Case of Post-war Poland

Abstract This article examines the issue of disease prevention in Poland under communist rule. The analysis is primarily focused on the second epidemiological transition – the process of displacing infectious diseases as the main cause of morbidity and mortality by chronic and degenerative conditions. The epidemiological transition coincided with the establishment of the new authorities and the stabilization of the socio-political order that the communists had introduced. This text will explore the interdependence of the political system and prophylaxis. Two interrelated problems are identified: the first is the role of the state in curbing infectious diseases; and the second is the ability of state institutions to identify and respond to new threats. The latter issue is considered in relation to the sharp rise in the incidence of cancer. This article demonstrates that the relationship between state and individual inherent in the authoritarian communist state was reflected in the ways in which prevention policies operated.

Истоки возникновения феномена культура отмены

The article is focused on a topical phenomenon of modernity – the culture of abolition or cancelling. Based on a retrospective analysis of the development of Western philosophical and sociological thought, the authors come to the conclusion that the prototypes of the practice of cancelling individual members of society were found in ancient times and in many religious customs of the peoples around the world. However, the considered practices of the past are fundamentally different from modern cancelling in the sense that they had an institutional character and reflected the peculiarities of the socio-political order of their time. In recent years, the development of the Internet and new media has allowed marginalized but extremely active social groups to participate more actively in the life of society. As a result, under the influence of the ideas of Marxism, the cancel culture became one of the main tools of the “new ethics” to promote its own pseudo-liberal agenda.

Introduction

With the establishment of communism in Eastern Europe, the churches found themselves in a precarious situation after the traumatic experiences of the Second World War. The churches were challenged to coexist with autocratic regimes. Institutionally weakened by the attempts of political power to limit their autonomy, the churches were confronted with the overthrow of the socio-political order by the Soviet-backed installation of communist regimes. The Soviet model of the communisation of societies was also adopted by the regimes loyal to Moscow in terms of religious policy, which for most churches, it meant public and political marginalisation in exchange for limited autonomy. Thus, the regimes’ religious policies, which were not aimed at the total elimination of religious life and, implicitly, of the churches, included a range of practices and instruments that involved institutional control, informational surveillance and political repression. A special case was the Greek Catholic Church, which was abolished and its clergy and bishops repressed. These methodological premises served as the basis for organising the international conference “Churches and Political Power During Communism. Individual Biographies and Institutional Mechanisms”, which brought together leading scholars from Poland, Hungary, the Republic of Moldova and Romania in Alba Iulia from 21 to 23 September 2023. This academic meeting resulted in the publication of the present volume, which includes the most representative contributions. This volume is the result of a collaboration between the LIT publishing house and Annales Universitatis Apulensis (Alba Iulia), which publishes the volume as a special issue of this journal.

“I Knew Then Who I Was. I Was a Negro”: Black Armed Defense in Walter White’s A Man Called White

Abstract This essay investigates literary and autobiographical representations of the defense of Black-owned property in the face of anti-Black mob violence during the first decades of the twentieth century. In his autobiography, A Man Called White (1948), NAACP leader Walter White represents guns as desperate tools of an always tenuous security marked by the violence of the world wars, lynchings, and racially motivated massacres. The backdrop for these struggles is woven from White’s youth amid terrifying events that will later come to be known as the Atlanta “race riot” of 1906. Repeating those events in his autobiography, White unmasks the juridical and sociopolitical order of its civilizing appurtenances and invokes the gun as a symbol of Black armed self-defense. In White’s autobiography, even as guns are used to enforce anti-Blackness they may yet be turned against the white mob to secure Black lives at the local level and turned into legal arguments by a Black collective at the national level via an organization such as the NAACP.

Anti-Systemic Counterpublics: Rethinking the Counterpublic Sphere

Amid debates over the impact of social media platforms on democratic societies, there is increasing academic interest in how they offer new spaces for destabilising forces and movements that challenge democratic values, practices and norms. This article proposes an analytical framework to study “anti-systemic counterpublics”—defined as arenas for production and circulation of discourse that undermine the legitimacy of the established socio-political order. Integrating insights from both counterpublics literature and the theoretical literature of anti-system parties, this study shifts focus from progressive counterpublics seeking to expand the discursive space for marginalised voices and groups to anti-systemic counterpublics contesting the dominant socio-political order. The analytical framework delineates three dimensions of anti-systemic counterpublics: the content of their discourse (discursive), their modes of articulation and expression (performative), and their strategies for alliance-building and positioning within broader information landscapes (positional). Using two case studies—anti-lockdown movements and a news outlet—I illustrate how such counterpublics often align with fringe political actors and hyper-partisan news media. These cases help illuminate their strategies, from crafting persuasive messages to mobilising identities, and opposing mainstream actors and narratives. This framework offers a lens to understand the evolution and influence of anti-systemic voices, both in digital and non-digital spaces.

The Ming state and neo-confucian thinking behind Kaifeng Jewry’s biculturalism

ABSTRACT Based on a fresh reading of the 1489 and 1512 kehillah stelae, this article contextualizes Kaifeng Jewry’s acculturation in the political agendas and intellectual climate of fifteenth- and sixteenth-century China. It argues that the Ming court, Neo-Confucian discourses of beliefs and Ming administration of religions and ethnic minorities drove Kaifeng Jewry towards biculturalism – adopting Confucian cultural norms while maintaining their sectarian identity. With the religious tolerance led by Neo-Confucian orthodoxy, the Ming state administered Judaists, Muslims and other religious practitioners not as religious groups but as ethnic groups who needed to settle down in a highly secular and centralized sociopolitical order dominated by the Confucian elite. Without the state’s intervention in their beliefs, Kaifeng Jewry’s religious integrity and survival had heavily relied on Jewish elite reproduction; when the Jewish elite declined, the kehillah began to disintegrate.

Social synergetics as a post-non-classical methodology in the study of socio-political order

The subject of the research is the conceptual foundations of the sociosynergetic methodology for the study of the socio-political order. The author examines the ideas of G. Haken, who proposed a synergetic methodology for studying social systems. The paper argues that the subject of social synergetics are such nonlinear categories as order, chaos, bifurcation, attractor, dissipative structures, which can be successfully used to study the formation of socio-political order.

Redistributing Power: Land Reform, Rural Cooptation, and Grassroots Regime Institutions in Authoritarian Taiwan

Can redistributive policies such as land reform help authoritarian regimes coopt rural societies? Given that land reform has the potential to disrupt preexisting sociopolitical orders, this article highlights an unresolved puzzle of how regimes balance between the objectives of expanding its rural coalitional support through transformative redistribution and stabilizing its political control over rural institutions during land reform. Using a novel dataset of Taiwan’s 1950s rural reforms under the Kuomintang authoritarian regime, I find that stronger redistributive effects facilitated cooptation of new land reform beneficiaries through a key institution – the farmers’ association (FA). However, I also find that the restructuring of rank-and-file FA membership was still subject to meddling by the native landlord class. I thus argue that land reform, while allowing regimes to broaden their rural coalitions through socioeconomic redistribution, can also paradoxically compel regimes to concede power during institutional cooptation.

The Bilingualism Bonus in Socialist Slovenia: Domestic Policy or Diplomatic Prestige?

Abstract The objective of the article is to establish why a financial bonus for Slovenian–Italian bilingualism was introduced in the District of Koper (comprising today’s Slovenian municipalities of Ankaran, Koper, Izola and Piran), which came under Yugoslav rule after 1954. Using Brubaker’s triadic nexus concept and analysis of newly discovered archival sources, the authors found that (a) on the federal level, Yugoslavia only focused on minority protection as much as it was required to by international agreements and treaties, (b) the Italian minority itself was not a relevant actor in the Yugoslav system of minority protection, (c) Italy had a marginal role in the process of protecting the Italian minority in Yugoslavia, and (d) the political elite in Yugoslavia introduced the bilingualism bonus to encourage the integration of the Italian minority when building a new (socialist) sociopolitical order. The Slovenian-Italian bilingualism bonus was therefore not an altruist measure directed at minority protection, but rather a self-serving measure by the authorities to reinforce their power.

Energizing dissensus: Socio-technical (counter) imaginaries along the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor

The China–Pakistan Economic Corridor is a featured project of China’s Belt and Road Initiative that is creating new resource frontiers in Tharparkar, Pakistan. Centered around coal mining and energy production, these new sites of resource extraction and their infrastructures have sparked dissensus throughout the Desert district of Sindh, Pakistan. Our analysis draws on research on socio-technical imaginaries and Rancière’s thoughts on political change and aesthetics. In doing so, we examine how political dissensus is represented though graffiti and works in contrast to the socio-technical imaginaries represented by the state in public signage. The differences, we suggest, represent socio-technical counter imaginaries that form a politics that disrupts the established socio-political order embedded within the political goals of the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor. These counter imaginaries have important implications for the creation of just and equitable opportunities for people impacted by the emerging coal extraction and power generation complex. Our ethnographic approach provides a street-level analysis of the politicization of imagined socio-technical futures in the Tharparkar desert and emerging energy resource frontiers.

Welfare state bordering as a form of mobility and migration control

ABSTRACT This article introduces this special issue of the Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies. In it, we present and discuss the concept of welfare state bordering. The notion of welfare state bordering that we develop refers to state-authorised practices of managing access to social rights based on residence, migrancy, and/or citizenship in a given socio-political order. These practices are in most cases implemented by national and local governments and institutions, but welfare state bordering can be implemented by various actors to whom the state has granted the power to manage access to rights, services and residence. We situate the notion of welfare state bordering in the scholarship on borders and bordering practices. We offer an overview of the four welfare state contexts discussed in this issue: the United Kingdom, Germany, Finland and Norway. We examine the ways in which various forms of welfare state bordering practices in these countries generate different configurations of exclusion and inclusion for both noncitizens and marginalised citizens on various inter-related levels of governance.

Friendship and filial piety in Ming Neo-Confucianism

AbstractThis article discusses friendship and filial piety in Ming Neo-Confucianism, particularly the Yangming learning. I argue that the Yangming jianghui provided important social settings for elevating the value of friendship. True friendship was considered as a means for moral improvement, and to prevent the risk of moral subjectivism in the Yangming philosophy.I also revisit the question of whether Ming Neo-Confucians did challenge the order of the five cardinal relationships by elevating friendship as the most important one. Through the investigation of filial piety in imperial culture and the Yangming learning, I emphasize that filial piety was not only the basis of socio-political order, but also the essence of the true self. The importance of friendship lies in its capacity to aid moral cultivation and to become a better self. It could never surpass that of filial piety. It remained a supplement to familial ethics.

Disciplinary Normalisation and the Biopolitics of COVID-19 Pandemic Discourse in Ghana

Constructing normalised sociopolitical order during the COVID-19 pandemic appeared a common feature of countries across the globe, constituting identities and engendering political struggles. This study analyses the concrete discursive practices of the President of the Republic of Ghana during the pandemic. Foucault’s notions of discourse and power provide the framework for analysing the performances and realisations of disciplinary (power) normalisation and biopolitical practices during the pandemic. How do the discursive practices of the President of the republic of Ghana construct new normalcy, a normalised sociopolitical order, and managed the virus spread during the COVID-19 pandemic? The study revealed the deployment of disciplinary normalisation and the biopolitical constitution of subjects. It found out that there is a discursive link between the discursive practices of the President of Ghana and the pandemic discourse of the World Health Organisation (WHO) and funding support from the World Bank. The President’s discursive shift from disciplinary normalisation to self-discipline increased the chances of the ruling party towards winning the December 7, 2020, general election in Ghana. Also, this study provides a better understanding of the reconfiguration of the political and the similarities between Ghana’s pandemic discourse and some Global North countries.

Discourses of Covid-19 and the Political: Introduction to the Special Issue

The contributions in this special issue explore the intersection of discourse, crises and the political during the Covid-19 pandemic. By focusing on ‘the political’, the contributors go beyond understandings of ‘politics’ as procedures and processes of decision-making. Instead, they explore the nuanced ways in which pandemic discourses shape struggles over the normalised socio-political order and its legitimate subjects. By adopting diverse theoretical perspectives on the political, ranging from governmentality to poststructuralist theory, and by employing traditions from different disciplines such as political theory, sociology, anthropology, or media-aesthetics, the articles scrutinise pandemic discourses in various regions, including in Switzerland, Germany, Italy, Ghana, Estonia and the Polish-German border region. The contributions highlight how discourses of the Covid-19 pandemic construct, stabilise and re-configure political identities,subjectivities and normalities within pandemic societies. They show that pandemic discourses allow for a recognition of shared vulnerabilities, while simultaneously perpetuating inequalities and reinforcing established neoliberal subjectivities, such as the ‘responsible subject’. The articles compiled in the special issue offer critical insights into thecomplex dynamics of pandemic discourses and put a spotlight on how societies are (re-)imagined during times of crisis.