Politics Of Twenty-first Century Research Articles

International Relations and Ernst B. Haas, Ernst B. Haas and International Relations

ABSTRACT Ernst B. Haas is a seminal figure in the study of International Relations whose work helps guide our understanding of twenty-first century politics as well. He was instrumental in developing many of the themes commonly used to understand world politics: regional integration, international regimes, science and institutions, and nationalism. He was also a founding father of Constructivism. This piece serves as an introduction to this special issue on Ernst B. Haas.

New Virtuality

Our multimedia website project, “The New Virtuality”, explores the implications of highly realistic images that interact and socialise with human users, often seemingly “live” in real‑time. Created with imaging technologies such as holographic projection or virtual reality (VR) and usually boosted by AI and machine learning, we argue that these images present unprecedented directions in understanding how reality, liveness and presence are discerned and believed. Radically breaking down differences between real and unreal, they point to an era of blurred boundaries, dematerialization and limbic spaces which converges visual media with twenty-first century politics of dis/misinformation, post-truth and deep fakery. In this project, we discuss this era as “the new virtuality.” These developments underpin the project’s research questions: how to understand this media that so freely and near-seamlessly mix virtual and actual realities? How to place this phenomenon in media’s long history of blurred environments, while still appreciating their distinctive newness and challenges? What are the impacts of the new virtuality on our apprehensions and constructions of realities? How might this mediated reality relate – as code, as language, as consciousness – to the wider contexts of information that colour contemporary times? In our methodology, we interwove theory, multimedia expression and fiction as multiple voices to articulate the project’s arguments across three frameworks of distinct approaches, media elements and genre features. The first framework is a historical context with which to understand the continuities and divergences of virtuality. The second is the connection of theory – particularly from film, screen and media studies – with textual readings drawn across multiple media, including paintings, cinema, performance, VR, apps and architecture. The third is the employment of fiction and multimedia. Inspired by the “scientific fiction” work of Kai-Fu Lee and Chen Qiufan (Lee and Chen, 2021), we intertwined a fictional story through the project for greater animation and accessibility – a creative warp to the academic weft. Multimedia via the essays’ image margins and a 33‑minute video essay function as audiovisual “mood boards” to provide elaboration, illustration, colour and setting for conveying the new virtuality’s poetics of fudged and adrift unsettling across this new reality. The result is a work of multiple voices and hybridity which identifies a new framework of reality through contemporary mixed media. This new virtuality is no longer about the questions of realism or illusion (e.g. Friedberg 2009; Grau 2003) from computer‑generated imagery (CGI) or even deepfakes. They are about new technical codes and information which give rise to revised conceptions of ontology, anthropology, epistemology, literacy, time and space. They are new systems of complex linkages between media, codes, expressions, consciousness, change and history. These ideas not only impact understanding of our world. They also revise orientations of truth values and identifications of moral spaces.

The Masturbation Article Affair: Japanese Manga, Scholarly Publishing, and the Twenty-First Century Politics of Censorship

The Masturbation Article Affair: Japanese Manga, Scholarly Publishing, and the Twenty-First Century Politics of Censorship

Institutional Memories and Transgenerational Dynamics: The House of Terror and the Memorial of the Victims of Communism and of the Resistance

This article provides an insight into the twenty-first century politics of institutionalized memory in two former communist countries, Romania and Hungary, as illustrated by their respective human rights memorial museums’ practices of documenting communist era abuse. After discussing the ways in which the two museums under consideration here inscribe themselves into the red and dark tourism phenomena, the article focuses on acts of over-remembering and misremembering that affect the politics of museal representation, highlighting the emotional communities created by these museums as well as the incomplete representation of the victim-victimizer rapport. In doing so, the article argues that institutionalized museal interventions into recent collective national and regional memories are representative of the still undecided legacy of communism in East and Central Europe.

Political Appeals to Narrow and Broad Groups: Biko for Blacks, Woolf for Women, Mannheim for Mobilizations…

A political campaign tends to succeed if the spectacle of struggle mobilizes previously uninvolved people to support the movement’s cause (Schattschneider 1960). Mobilizations for racial justice (Biko 1978, Douglass 1852, Du Bois 1903, Fanon 1961), for women’s rights (Wollstonecraft 1792, Woolf 1938, Waring 1988), for the poor (Piven and Cloward 1979, Bhave 1955, Fei 1971) or other causes simultaneously make particular appeals to coerced groups and general appeals to broader audiences. Strategies of inclusivist movements (Alinsky 1971, Tarrow 2011) resemble those of exclusivist or nationalist campaigns (Xi 2017), even if their goals are diametrically different. Twenty-first century politics are increasingly dominated by rising economic inequalities (Piketty 2014) and by the strength of unresponsive bureaucracies (Weber 1919), in both rich and poor countries (Bermeo 2016, Rodan 2018). Karl Mannheim (1936) generalizes parallels among mobilization strategies, distinguishes ways in which they are based on either existential choices or evidenced interests, and stresses the role of activism for increasing knowledge in social science.

How Has Cultural Heterosexism Affected Thinking about Divorce? Asymmetric Framing of Same-Gender and Mixed-Gender Divorces in News Media and in Minds

ABSTRACTHerek’s notion of cultural heterosexism describes an ideology that works implicitly through language, and leads non-heterosexuals to be framed as “others.” National statistics in many countries indicate group differences between same-gender and mixed-gender couples in divorce rates, and we used media accounts and individual interpretation of group differences in divorce to operationalize it here. We found qualified support for three hypotheses in two studies. In Study 1, analysis of 412 English-language news articles on divorce indicated that comparative statements overwhelmingly positioned same-gender couples as figure and mixed-gender couples as ground. In Study 2, 88 participants read about how same-gender couples differed from mixed-gender couples, or about how mixed-gender couples differed from same-gender couples in their reasons for dissolving relationships. Results indicated that participants showed higher perceived legitimacy of inequality, higher sexual prejudice, and higher estimates of global divorce rates in the former conditions. Analysis of participants’ explanations of group differences in divorce rates indicated that they spontaneously contrasted mixed-gender couples against same-gender couples more of the time. As the media discourse focused on male couples (Study 1) and the effects of linguistic framing was evident only when male couples were described (Study 2), we discuss how these studies, which operationalized and evidenced cultural heterosexism, may point to the emergence of homonormative ideologies that recognized gay men more than lesbians in twenty-first century politics.

Image, self-presentation and political communication in the age of interconnection: An alternative understanding of the mediatization of politics

Abstract The way politicians ‘look’ is taken to be one of the essential aspects of the ‘mediatization’ and ‘professionalization’ of politics. Yet there is very little research about the role of image and self-presentation in political communication. This article presents the results of a study that aims to fill this gap by mapping where and how image fits within broader processes of identity and meaning construction in contemporary politics. On the basis of 51 interviews, it compares the role of personal image in the everyday political practices of both British and Italian local politicians and members of the European Parliament. The analysis develops an alternative conceptual framework to make sense of the role of image in twenty-first century politics, showing that the alleged deleterious effects of a ‘cult of appearances’ on democracy reflects more the narrowness of academic enquiry and the legacy of outdated linear models of politics-media relationships than the much more variegated and networked reality of contemporary politics.

Book Review: Luciano Bardi, Stefano Bartolini and Alexander H Trechsel (eds), The Role of Parties in Twenty-First Century Politics: Responsive and Responsible?

Book Review: Luciano Bardi, Stefano Bartolini and Alexander H Trechsel (eds), <i>The Role of Parties in Twenty-First Century Politics: Responsive and Responsible?</i>

Book Review: Europe: Shaping Europe: France, Germany and Embedded Bilateralism from the Elysée Treaty to Twenty-First Century Politics

Book Review: Europe: Shaping Europe: France, Germany and Embedded Bilateralism from the Elysée Treaty to Twenty-First Century Politics

Krotz, Ulrich und Joachim Schild. Shaping Europe. France, Germany, and Embedded Bilateralism from the Elysée Treaty to Twenty-First Century Politics.

Krotz, Ulrich und Joachim Schild. Shaping Europe. France, Germany, and Embedded Bilateralism from the Elysée Treaty to Twenty-First Century Politics.

Responsive and Responsible? The Role of Parties in Twenty-First Century Politics

This article focuses on a particular aspect dear to theories of democracy in general and theories of representation in particular: the tension between responsiveness and responsibility affecting political parties in modern, liberal democracies. In doing so, it engages with Peter Mair’s intellectual passion for this topic, which he developed over the years and intensively worked on until his premature death in 2011. He argued that this tension became ever more apparent, putting the very functioning and legitimacy of democratic government under great pressure. This contribution goes back in time, to the very beginning of the modern state, and argues that already the nascent parties and party systems were affected by the tension between responsiveness and responsibility. It then offers a synopsis, organised in a series of ‘pictures’ or ‘frames’ of the historical parcours along which this tension has impacted on the development of political parties. The article also presents and summarises the collective effort undertaken by a number of scholars, coming together to honour Peter Mair’s work, to shed further theoretical and empirical light on this fundamental tension.

One Family under God: Love, Belonging, and Authority in Early Transatlantic Methodism

Anna M. Lawrence, who teaches at Florida Atlantic University, subtly challenges the argument of Lawrence Stone and E. P. Thompson that eighteenth-century evangelicals, especially the Methodists, promoted the repression of sexuality and companionate marriage. She contends that Methodists in England and America lived out an elastic idea of family in which “brothers,” “sisters,” “fathers,” and “mothers” in the faith provided an alternative form of family that relativized the biological family unit and prompted a reconsideration of gender roles. The Methodist inclination toward intimacy among believers also strengthened emotional bonds in a manner that accelerated rather than hindered evangelical participation in the eighteenth-century turn toward romantic marriage. Methodist “family values” in the eighteenth century had little in common with the family values that have insinuated themselves into twenty-first century politics. Through studies of Mary Bosanquet Fletcher, Hester Ann Roe Rogers, and Catherine Livingston Garretson, Lawrence illustrates how early Methodists found that their conversion into John Wesley's community often required a break from their birth families. The Methodists, however, offered them a new family of fictive kin who used emotional, erotic, and romantic language to express their ecstatic love for each other. Their love feasts and watch-night services offered anti-Methodist critics repeated opportunities to accuse them of sexual improprieties, and there were a few missteps, but Methodists were more likely to learn, through their experiences of God, how to make more independent decisions about marriage and family.

Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (review)

Reviewed by: Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory James Delbourgo Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa, eds., Postcolonial Enlightenment: Eighteenth-Century Colonialism and Postcolonial Theory (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009). Pp. xiii, 378. $100.00. What is Enlightenment in 2011? A once cheerfully unified area of intellectual history has been redefined, fragmented, vilified, and re-championed by an array of scholars in recent years. Is it still a vital concept, or an anachronistic retrospective designation? Should it serve to ground a progressive twenty-first century politics, or do its moral blind-spots leave it fatally compromised? In an era defined by Bush-led assaults on constitutionalism, rhetorical attacks on multiculturalism (the resurgence of the right in the Netherlands is a particularly bitter irony in light of that country's early modern toleration), not to mention the international financial industry's neo-liberal war on the very notion of the public, democratic politics could surely do a lot worse than reclaim the Enlightenment to defend its progressivism in the name of the common good. Academically, meanwhile, perhaps the Enlightenment is on its way to becoming an undead historical category, to borrow a phrase from Mario Biagioli. Rumors of its death are routinely exaggerated, as it appears destined to walk the earth, or at least to inhabit university curricula, as a unifying characterization of the European eighteenth century, drawing strength from the notion that the origins of what we think of as Western modernity must be sought in that era. Its historiographical utility thus seems assured. But what about the global situatedness of this ostensibly universal European project? This is the pivotal issue, which many Europeanists repeatedly fail to address, on which Postcolonial Enlightenment innovatively turns. This is an unusually interesting volume of essays, edited and framed by Daniel Carey and Lynn Festa with care and wit. As the volume's title suggests, the collection aims to explore the potential fruitfulness of a certain creative anachronism, if not paradox, in thinking the Enlightenment post-colonially. Its contributors are literary scholars working intensively through a variety of historical sources. Srinivas Aravamudan pursues the suppressed colonial contexts of Hobbes's philosophy of sovereignty and its entanglement with England's colonial ventures in the seventeenth-century Atlantic world. David Lloyd explores Burkean and Kantian sublimes: Kantian republican rationality (which savages lack) is contrasted with royalist Burkean emphasis on experiences of shock and awe, such as when whites encounter blacks. Daniel Carey explores the complexities of Edward Said's well-known method of contrapuntal reading to ask: what does the lack of evidence of Friday's enslaved status really signify in Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719) in the period of the British slave trade's decisive acceleration? Felicity Nussbaum describes the remarkably heterogeneous eighteenth-century signification of the term "black" and suggests that it was only with abolitionism that distinct discourses of African "blackness" and eastern Orientalism emerged. Siraj Ahmed re-reads Orientalism at mid-century and argues that British praise for Indian legal traditions served as moral cover for imperial debt-financing in the revenue system established by the Permanent Settlement. Doris Garraway pursues Gayatri Spivak's emphasis on subaltern peoples' textual silence by exploring the politics of speaking natives in Lahontan and Diderot. In ventriloquizing non-European critiques of polite civilization, however, French Enlighteners, she contends, were merely engaged in legitimating their own domestic reformism while granting no authentic voice to racial others. Daniel Carey [End Page 422] and Sven Trakulhun's essay—the richest in the book—on the play between cultural intolerance and relativism in the German Enlightenment mitigates critiques of Enlightenment universalism by reminding us of eighteenth-century commitments to religious toleration and linking these to contemporary multiculturalism, while also placing them in tension with conjectural histories of stadial development, which have often been read as licensing the conversion or liquidation of other cultural traditions. Finally, Karen O'Brien aims to connect themes of Newtonianism, global trade, and imperial cosmopolitanism in eighteenth-century British poetry. The editors and authors must be congratulated for maintaining a fine tension between sympathetic and critical exploration of postcolonial techniques throughout. The overall effect is both experimental and disciplined: this is not an agenda...

British government and politics: balancing Europeanization and independence

This deeply informed text sets the government and politics of Britain firmly in the context of Britain's enduring membership in the European Union. Michael Mannin thoroughly applies the concept of 'Europeanization' across the political system to explore how far change is a product of Britain's interdependent relationship with the EU. He shows how the EU's treaty relationships present new challenges to sovereign states, especially Britain, whose psyche has long revolved around iconic notions of Parliamentary sovereignty, imperial power, national independence, and an assumed cultural homogeneity. Examining the cultural, economic, and social background to Britain's twenty-first century politics, Mannin challenges some of the historical myths on which Britain's exceptionalism is founded. He then analyzes contemporary political institutions and processes in the context of Europeanization, as well as the impact of the EU on policy and policy making. Ideal for courses in British and European politics, this book breaks new ground in exploring the complex interdependence that the EU should bring to the study of European political systems.

Introduction: Gender, Citizenship and Participation: Opportunities and Obstacles in the Twenty-first Century Politics

Introduction: Gender, Citizenship and Participation: Opportunities and Obstacles in the Twenty-first Century Politics

The African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective (review)

African Diaspora: A Musical Perspective. Edited by Ingrid Monsoii. (Critical and Cultural Musicology, 3.) New York: Routledge, 2003. [vii, 366 p. ISBN 0-8153-2382-4. $50 (hbk.); ISBN 04159-6769-4. $19.95 (pbk.).] Music examples, illustrations, map, bibliography, index. This volume presents eleven musical case studies from diverse regions of the African diaspora, including the African continent, the Caribbean, Latin America, North America, and Europe. contributors intersect their discussions with the topics of race, gender, politics, and nationalism, and address why music claims such pride of place, using examples of the interwoven construct of the local and global, as they are found in the lives of musicians and their audiences. In her introduction, Monson reminds the reader, If the Jewish diaspora was the quintessential example of diaspora before the 1960s, the African diaspora has surely become the paradigmatic case for the closing years of the 20th century (p. 1). Acknowledging a cue from Paul Gilroy in Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), Monson identifies the centrality of music as emblematic of transnational identities and global inter sections which constitute the complexity of the African diaspora. remainder of the introduction presents an overview of the book's three sectional themes: Traveling Music and Musicians, Beyond Tradition or Modernity, and Contradictory Moment. Part 1, Traveling Music and Musicians, consists of four essays that explore the globalization of African diasporic musics, paying particular attention to exchanges between African Americans, Europe, and the Black Atlantic. Travis A. Jackson begins this section with Jazz Performance as Ritual: Blues Aesthetic and the African Diaspora. Based on ethnographic research conducted in New York City's vibrant scene, he argues that is driven by both an encompassing blues aesthetic, and a sense of as a sacred ritual of transcendence. Jackson makes the claim for a nonessentialized concept of the blues aesthetic, that privileges interaction, participation, and formal flexibility in the service of transcendence and communication of normative values and cultural (p. 71). In chapter 2, Communities of Style: Musical Figures of Black Diasporic Identity, Veit Erlmann examines Mbube, the South African song classic written and recorded by Solomon Linda in 1939, and its reinterpretations known outside of South Africa as Wimowet, or The Lion Sleeps Tonight. Erlmann introduces the concept of endotropic performance in relation to the multiple versions of this piece that have been recorded over the years, showing that its multiple performances and situated reception exemplify the intraracial construction of identity through a shared experience of style which has emerged under the increasingly globalized and mediated conditions of social life since the late nineteenth century. This is a strange situation in which a person's understanding of himself or herself and their sense of the social world no longer coincide with the in which they take place (p. 76). These reworkings demonstrate the crucial role the autohypnoses and fiction of identity and global order, with all their contradictory intermixtures and mirrored affinities, play in formulating the rudiments of a politics of twenty-first century (p. 99). chapter Jazz on the Global Stage by Jerome Harris, is a wide-ranging insider's view of the history, present state, and future implications of the spreading and flourishing of in locales far from its African American birthplace. Harris, a prominent guitarist and bassist with twenty years of experience on New York's scene, defines an ecology of jazz (pp. 104-5) as a web of interrelationships between art makers, art users (audience), and mediators (broadcasters, record producers, promoters, and managers). …