Western Nation-states Research Articles

Transnational Identity and Humor in Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman

ABSTRACT Bernardine Evaristo’s Mr Loverman narrates the story of Barry, a closeted homosexual and an elderly Caribbean-born man who has been living in London for 50 years. Barry experiences an identity conflict due to the clash between his sexual orientation and the heteronormative norms of the Caribbean society. His sense of belonging to the Caribbean community constantly shifts because of his sexual identity affiliated with Western nation-states. This unravels his transnational identity since transnational identities are constantly positioned and repositioned in different national and/or cultural spaces. Barry’s humorous perspective, his jokes, and comic anecdotes dominate the narrative while intensifying and complicating his problematic sense of belonging. The constant change of the direction of Barry’s laughter which either targets the Caribbean or the non-heteronormative community enhances his transnational identity and compels the reconsideration of identity categories. In this sense, focusing on humor and Barry’s jokes in Mr Loverman, this study discusses that humor is employed to transgress the concept of identity by drawing attention to Barry’s transnational identity.

Holistic Pragmatism: the Chinese Approach on International Relations

Different geographical environments produce different histories, cultures, civilizations, philosophies, and mentalities, all of which have an enormous impact on their decision-making and foreign policy-making. Thousands of years of social norms and tradition have shaped Chinese people's holistic and pragmatic thinking and approach, determining China's policymakers' objective and overall approach to state governance and international relations. Above all, China, as a civilizational state that has been unified for thousands of years, distinguishes itself from the Western nation-states formed in modern times through continuous wars and peace treaties. Consequently, China has formed different perceptions and interpretations of national and international affairs, and distinct approaches and decision-making processes in terms of inter-state and international interactions and conflict management. By studying various dimensions of Chinese history, culture and philosophy, as well as analyzing its foreign policy-making and active participation in global affairs, this study argues that holistic pragmatism has pervaded China's domestic and foreign policy-making, influencing Chinese policymakers’ decision-making and people's thinking habits. This highlights the necessity to broaden the academic scope of international relations to encompass diverse geographical, cultural and historical perspectives, thereby providing a more comprehensive and profound understanding of international relations in our interconnected world.

A layered governance approach to regulating Big Tech

After decades of unregulated growth, the world's largest technology companies have now attracted the attention of regulators in both Europe and the US. Regulating “Big Tech”, however, has proven to be challenging, partly because of their size, but also because of their strategic importance in maintaining a competitive advantage between western nation-states and rising economies in Asia. The paradox is that regulators hope to create a regulatory regime that constrains the oligopoly power of Big Tech without quashing their capacity to innovate. Traditional regulatory theories are not equipped to address this paradox. Drawing from neo-institutional theory, we propose a “layered governance” model of regulation to address this problem. Layered governance is an emerging regulatory regime that distributes power across multiple government and non-government organizations while providing the regulated organizations with a degree of flexibility and choice by the organizations themselves as to the mode of regulation. We elaborate how layered governance is consistent with current understandings of regulation as derived from neo-institutional theory, elaborate how it differs from traditional approaches to regulation, and discuss how a layered governance approach to regulating Big Tech may evolve in the future.

Myth of Sovereignty in the Era of Hyper-Globalisation

Globalisation has made it necessary to review modernity’s paradigms. One such paradigm that may no longer be an accurate descriptor (if it ever was) of international society is that of the sovereign nation-state. Through an exploration of both the western nation-state and the space collectively referred to as ‘postcolony’, two different experiences of globalisation are exhibited, each with different power manifestations. For the former, globalisation has challenged both internal and external legitimacy, which as in turn led to perceptions of a loss of sovereignty. However, the loss of sovereignty does not imply the loss of power; sovereign power has morphed into biopower, with power remaining within that space. In contrast, the postcolony’s historical relationship with sovereignty is one of negation- the denial of it. Globalisation thus threatens not the specific manifestation of power in sovereignty, but rather the continued subordination to western sovereignty. This has occurred due to a continuation of the ‘state of exception’ and socioeconomic hegemony. The piece does not, however, claim to be a definitive analysis of power, sovereign or otherwise, under globalisation. Such an inquiry would be a much greater project that went beyond the two broad categories west/postcolony, looking at specific national contexts: ‘realities’ rather than ‘reality’, accounting for the heterogeneity of both the forms and experiences of colonialism. It is a map of the terrain, and like any map is pitched at the level of generalisation.

Η ποικιλομορφία και η πολυλειτουργικότητα του ρατσισμού σε άρθρα μεταναστευτικής εφημερίδας

Contemporary western nation-states are built on national and racist discourses and values which are not easily contested by majority members and may affect the discourse and behaviors of minority members as well, even though the latter suffer from the discriminatory consequences of such discourses and values. Research has shown that minority members do not always resist national/racist pressures but often succumb to them, thus accepting majority values and perceiving themselves as Others, namely as majority members usually perceive them. In this context, the present study attempts to explore ways of detecting minority members’ (in the present case, migrants’) internalized racism (Pyke, 2010). The critical analyses performed on two newspaper articles written by young female migrants living in Greece aim to show that, in their effort to adjust themselves to the Greek linguacultural context and to form ties with majority members, the authors reproduce racist views and values usually attested among members of the Greek majority. Given that these articles are published in a newspaper of left wing, antiracist, and pro-migrant orientation, the co-existence of racist and antiracist meanings and values in the same texts blurs the boundaries between racism and antiracism. This renders the texts examined here instances of liquid racism (Weaver, 2016), namely an ambiguous form of racism giving rise to opposing (i.e. racist and antiracist) interpretations and further entrenching the hegemony of racist discourse.

The problem of teleological history education and the possibilities of a multispecies, multiscalar, and non-continuous history

ABSTRACT In its concern with orienting students in relation to past, present and future, history education is crucially placed to pioneer generative approaches for making sense of change over time and to equip students to critically scrutinise meanings of history. Impending climate catastrophe, the still unfolding global pandemic and rising xenophobic populism are interconnected crises that demand an expansive view of historical understanding that might equip students to recognise the myriad, powerful ways that meanings of history are imagined and mobilised in human societies. Yet, in the history curricula of Western nation-states, that task remains remarkably narrow, focused on the kinds of knowledge and understanding that modern historical thinking can produce. Our focus in this article is two-fold. First, we show how history curriculum in Australia, Canada, and the United States already implicitly conveys meanings of history – which we label ‘teleological’—and provides only limited opportunities to engage critically with alternate meanings of historical change. Second, we canvass some expanded and enlarged forms of historical thinking that embrace discontinuity, rupture and more-than-humanness that might help students and teachers imagine radically different futures.

Ascriptions of migration: Racism, migratism and Brexit

This article offers an analysis of scholarly attempts to make sense of the nexus of race and migration in Brexit-era UK discourse. To illustrate my arguments that intend to challenge and extend existing scholarship, I discuss exemplary snapshots from news articles, blog posts and social media sources. Building on critical race and postcolonial studies as theoretical background, I trace the phenomenon of naming the discrimination against East Europeans – which is undeniably one of the driving forces of the Brexit discussion – ‘racism’. Sometimes, and this shows the pattern of the overgeneralization of the term, ‘racism’ gets extended to name the post-Brexit exclusion of any EU nationals. This use of ‘racism’, however, is based on methodological nationalism and conceptual whiteness as my analyses show. To make sense of the overlapping racist, anti-immigration and anti-EU rhetoric that marks the pre- and post-Brexit moment in the United Kingdom, this article introduces the concept of ‘migratism’ – a name for the power relation that ascribes migration to certain people, constructing them as migrants and discriminating against them. The terms ‘migratism’ and ‘migratization’ function grammatically in an analogue way to ‘racism’ and ‘racialization’. If racism is the power relation that racializes (=ascribes race to) people, migratism if the power relation that migratizes (=ascribes migration to) people. The terms are not symmetrical but have a complicated interdependent relationship. Racism and migratism are bound to each other and play a crucial role in organizing the Western nation state. The suggested concepts foreground a postcolonial understanding of race and racism and make it possible to analyse both migration-based discrimination and discrimination based on perceived migration in violence and hate crimes connected to the Brexit referendum.

Fish, People, and Systems of Power: Understanding and Disrupting Feedback between Colonialism and Fisheries Science.

AbstractThis essay explores shifting scientific understandings of fish and the evolution of fisheries science, and it grapples with colonialism as a system of power. We trace the rise of fisheries science to a time when Western nation-states were industrializing fishing fleets and competing for access to distant fishing grounds. A theory of fishing called "maximum sustainable yield" (MSY) that understands fish species in aggregate was espoused. Although alternatives to MSY have been developed, decision-making continues to be informed by statistical models developed within fisheries science. A challenge for structured management systems now rests in attending to different systems of knowledge and addressing local objectives, values, and circumstances. To deepen and illustrate key points, we examine Pacific herring (Clupea pallasii) and the expansion of commercial herring fisheries and state-led management in British Columbia, Canada. A feedback between colonialism and fisheries science is evident: colonialism generated the initial conditions for expansion and has been reinforced through the implementation of approaches and tools from fisheries science that define and quantify conservation in particular ways. Some features may be unique to the herring illustration, but important aspects of the feedback are more broadly generalizable. We propose three interconnected goals: (a) transform the siloed institutions and practices of Western science, (b) reimagine and rebuild pathways between information (including diverse values and perspectives) and decision-making, and (c) devolve governance authority and broaden governance processes such that multiple ways of knowing share equal footing.

The anti-Antigone: Pākehā settler masculinity, racialized kinship, and contested paternity in Carl Nixon’s Settlers’ Creek

ABSTRACT This article places Carl Nixon’s novel Settlers’ Creek (2010) alongside Sophocles’ Antigone as the springboard for an inquiry into the dynamic relationship between kinship bonds and state legitimacy in a settler-colonial context. Loosely based on a high-profile legal case in Aotearoa New Zealand regarding funerary practices, the novel highlights tensions between settler and indigenous constructions of law. Settlers’ Creek and Antigone share a central premise: rival claims for justice centred around the matter of an unburied corpse. However, where Antigone has been read in Continental philosophy to theorize the ascendance of the impersonal modern state and the deposition of kinship, Nixon’s novel can be read as an allegory of the reverse historical process through a (re)turn to filiative relationships in western nation states. By highlighting the Pākēhā protagonist’s failures to engage with bicultural kinship, the novel critiques a paternalistic colonial regime and undermines the affective grounding of settler cultural racism.

Framing African Nation-States in Transnational Francophone African Literature

Transnationalism and its permutations constitute the currently dominant theoretical frameworks in Francophone African literary studies. This state of affairs does not seem untenable, if only by virtue of the expatriate status of the field’s most celebrated contemporary writers and the issues raised in their works. While transnationalist criticism presupposes the obsolescence of national boundaries, these are almost always those of Western nation-states. Transnationalist critics often ignore texts set in Africa by expatriate writers, as these texts usually uphold the heuristic value of national borders. This article frames an African nation-state, Togo, in works by Théo Ananissoh and Edem Awumey

International Migration and The Rise of Islamophobia as A "New Racism" Type

The phenomenon of international migration is a problem that is more prominent than other types of migration today. It is observed that human mobility, which has increased due to various crises in the recent period, is especially concentrated in the prosperous and economically developed Western nation-states. This situation causes more people from different religions, languages, ethnic origins and cultures to meet and experience adaptation problems. In addition, these developments deeply affect the daily lives of Muslims, who are a minority in Western societies. In the process that evolved from xenophobia to a "new racism" based on Islamophobia, Muslims are now seen as members of an incompatible and dangerous religion. When evaluated together with these developments, the subject of the study is to examine the effects of dynamics in the encounters of people from different religions on their lives and understandings, which is one of the results of the phenomenon of international migration today. This study aims to analyze the rise of Islamophobia, one of the consequences of international migration, and the reasons for its transformation into "new racism" together with historical developments. A comparative historical sociological analysis method has been adopted. The most important findings of the study are that the phenomenon of international migration compares people from different cultures, languages, ethnic origins and religions more in Western societies with a higher socioeconomic level and makes integration problems more unsolved, especially with internal dynamics such as the far-right and the media. Especially in Western societies, in the context of historical crisis and developments of Muslim immigrants, xenophobia and a kind of new-cultural racism are more frequently encountered. This situation makes visible a dangerous process developing from Islamophobia to anti-Islamism.

Hong Kong as special cultural zone: Confucian geopolitics in practice

Responding to An, Sharp, and Shaw’s article, ‘Towards Confucian Geopolitics’, I consider how strategies and interpretations of Chinese geopolitics are playing out in Hong Kong with attention to their cultural dimensions. First, I reflect upon the reactions of individuals and the media in the West—specifically Britain—to the protests and street violence that rocked its former colony in the summer of 2019. Second, to reckon with An, Sharp, and Shaw’s contention that the hybridized nature of Chinese geopolitics emerges from its ‘strategic adaptability’, thereby enabling the integration of foreign ideas into Chinese cultural traditions, I offer a brief critique of cultural and infrastructural developments in Hong Kong relating to the West Kowloon Cultural District. Initially intended to showcase local culture and link it into the art world’s global circuits, the megaproject is increasingly being made in China’s image. Third, as a counterpoint to the supposed flexibility of the Chinese geopolitical imagination, I address the ossification of Western geopolitical thought and practice. In order for geographers to build more pluralistic critical geopolitics, engaging with a diversity of geopolitical approaches and their cultural underpinnings is key. For Western nation-states, failing to practice a more hybridized geopolitics may represent a more existential risk.

Teaching Gender and Cultural Studies in Australia as Part of Asia: Reflections on Classroom Politics and Pedagogies

ABSTRACT Gender and cultural studies is, at its core, a pedagogical project for social and political change. Students are invited to new ways of thinking and acting in the world, shaped by intellectual traditions evolving from various social movements around race, class and feminism in mostly Western nation-states. Our students’ imaginations are very much captured by these political possibilities, including international students whose reception and interpretation of these knowledges are filtered through different cultural contexts and in different language registers. Teaching gender and cultural studies in Australia with increasing numbers of international students from Asian countries presents a range of practical, intellectual, and ethical questions. How might we translate different intellectual traditions and languages across local and international student groups, in ways that enhance learning for both cohorts? How might we be implicated in the reshaping of international students’ imagination of their own genealogies, and their futurities? What colonising logics might unwittingly be reproduced in our curriculums that are expressly committed to the rhetoric and activism of decolonialism? Through the perspective of two classroom practitioners, this article investigates the challenges and possibilities of teaching Gender and Cultural Studies to local and international students in Australia.

Politica linguistica, democrazia e plurilinguismo: quali prospettive?

From the point of view of political philosophy, the relationship between literacy and democracy appears quite problematic, if the issue of linguistic diversity is set aside. The debate between equalitarian liberals and multiculturalists emerging with the rise of multiculturalism as a theoretical paradigm has highlighted that the historical affirmation of the Western nation-state has been built upon the negation of internal linguistic diversity, favoring some languages over others, a trend which has not lost its strength with the advent of democracy. However, one of the main results of such debate, largely indebted to the Rawlsian conception of justice, has been seemingly the idea that the extended promotion of plurilingualism (that is, a kind of promotion which does not aim to support second or third language acquisition only for the benefit of the so called ‘minority’ or ‘disadvantaged’ groups and languages) could not be a viable alternative for contemporary democratic theory to ameliorate its performance. Drawing upon the field of language policy, this article envisages showing that such a result is tied to a certain number of theoretical assumptions concerning language, which are controversial both in political philosophy and in linguistic theory. In the final section, the article tries to provide some suggestions to develop a reflection more open towards the extended promotion of plurilingualism and to acknowledge the human ability to learn more than one linguistic code.

Skill-less Tricks: A score for moving through walls

In the current context of restricted movement due to COVID-19, I have found myself reflecting upon my connection to friends and collaborators in Palestine. This article proposes my use of a performance score - ‘Skill-less Tricks’ - as a method of cultivating an ongoing connection with those friends and collaborators. As many western nation states have spent much of the last year policing their borders in ways anathema to the freedom of movement expected by global tourism, my time and relationships in Palestine have been brought into sharp relief. This article begins with a discussion of my connection to Palestine and how I came to be regularly working with communities in the West Bank. It explains the personal and political impulse for crossing the wall between Israel and Palestine, and the bodily experience of ‘what it takes to cross a border’ (Noeth 2019). The main reason for my ongoing work in Palestine is due to working with the SkatePal charity in the West Bank who build skateparks and teach children to skateboard. This article reflects on the role SkatePal take within this specific political context. The history and current context of the Palestine/Israel conflict have been well documented in numerous sources including Elizabeth Matthews’s edited collection with David Newman and Mohammed Dajani Daoudi (2011). This source presents a range of viewpoints on central aspects of the conflict from sixteen contributors and offers a balanced introduction. Instead of repeating work that has been done elsewhere, this article reflects on aspects of the current state of the conflict from my own personal perspective captured in journal entries, which are scattered throughout the main body of the text. This selection of journal entries is - more or less - as they were written during the three weeks I spent with SkatePal in the summer of 2015. I have selected material from my journal that is most directly associated with experiences of the wall, of crossing checkpoints and borders and about expressive movement practice. The decision I made to journal my experience was inspired by reflective practice in performance and dance broadly as a research method, and by anthropologist Michael Taussig’s own reflections and experience of Palestine in his article, ‘Two weeks in Palestine’ (2013). Finally, the article discusses the creation of my score, Skill-less Tricks - its origination as part of my Ph.D. research, its adaptation for this new use, its translation from English into Arabic and my intentions for using this as the basis for the continuation of an informal remote exchange. © 2020 Intellect Ltd Article.

Between Government and Grassroots: Archaeology as Advocacy in Southern Belize

The consolidation of archaeology as a scientific discipline reinforced the power of the nation-state as archaeologists produced material and intellectual data that was used to bolster state identities at the expense of the history and heritage of Indigenous peoples. Accordingly, there are inherent structural inequalities within the discipline that favour researchers from Western nation-states in knowledge creation about the past. In this paper I explore the political implications of advocating for an equitable archaeological practice in Belize, Central America. Though archaeological research has incorporated grassroots engagement and community-based approaches, there is a gap in the discussion about negotiations with government officials. Among the issues surrounding grassroots advocacy is walking a ‘middle ground’ between negotiating with government officials for excavation permits and working closely with disenfranchised communities. Building relationships between registers of power supports the practice of a socially just archaeology abroad and could mitigate the structural inequalities inherent in our discipline. I illustrate this ‘middle ground’ with the Aguacate Community Archaeology Project, which I conducted in collaboration with Aguacate village, Toledo district, from 2012 to 2015. I explore the role of the archaeologist as an advocate for local communities’ control over knowledge produced on their community land.

Muslim State in a World of Nation-State

Muslim views on the polity represent the paradigmatic understandings of how Muslims relate citizenry, authority, territoriality, and sovereignty to the overarching influence of the Western nation-state system. For instance, the meaning of citizenry in the modern state system was adopted by several Muslim societies during the decolonisation period. Faith or submission to the will of Allah was the main criterion to become part of the group (usually referred to as the ummah). However, orientalists regarded ummah as a synonym for tribe, while Arab linguists insisted on a religious connotation. Authority, on the other hand, is ultimately enshrined in the personhood of the Prophetﷺ who is the spiritual leader, executor, legislator, and judicial interpreter of Allah’s message. Since in reality the Prophetﷺ is no longer existing, leadership is bestowed on the subsequent followers, and sometimes the ummah may possess leadership status through a social contract between the ruler and the ruled. The manifestation of operationalised authority needs a political space, domain, or place, which is attainable via the notion of territoriality. This is loosely conceptualised as an ummah that has geographical aspects, cultural traits, and a lingua franca. In the 8th century, jurists divided Muslim territoriality into two analytical terms, the abode of Islam (dār al-Islam) and the abode of war/the enemy (dār al-Harb), while the Shia version of abodes rests in the Qur’ānic dichotomy of “oppressed–oppressor.” The last concept pertains to sovereignty (hakimiyyah), commonly understood as “the will of God” and advanced by Islamists in the 20th century. In medieval times, it was understood as the promotion of public welfare envisaged in Sharī’ah, while in modern times, Islamic modernists argued that Islamists wrongfully understood sovereignty and that the root word used in the Qur’ān meant “to govern.” Nowadays, the assertion that symbolises Allah’s sovereignty can be found in some modern Muslim states.

The ‘affective liminality’ of young immigrants in Belgium: from ruly to unruly feelings on the path towards formal citizenship

ABSTRACTThis paper focuses on affective citizenship amongst young immigrants without formal citizenship. Citizenship studies use the ‘affective turn’ to address the central role of affect in current integration and citizenship policies of many Western nation-states, but the lived affective experiences of new immigrants without formal citizenship status concerning these policies remain poorly understood. We advance an analytical framework of ‘affective liminality’ for examining differences in the collectively patterned affects of young immigrants, according to their specific situations of liminal legality and in relation to governmental ‘feeling rules’. An ethnographic study in Belgium reveals that, in general, fear, frustration and hope are key features in the lives of these young people, reflecting the insecurities and ambiguities of their ‘in-between’ legal statuses. Different situations of liminal legality are entangled with different affective outcomes. Counter-intuitively, as young people progress along the path towards formal citizenship, their feelings become more ‘unruly’, and thus less likely to comply with the feeling rules of the state. In addition to being paralyzing or disciplining, their affective experiences might thus be emancipatory as well, inciting them to fight exclusion.

Deja vu: Medieval Motifs in Modern Arab Political Life

The article analyzes specific elements of the Arab societies’ political life which distinguish it from political relations in the Western nation-states. Admitting the existence of a large number of such kind of elements, the authors focus only on three of them which are related to the sources of power and its distribution. Emphasizing that these elements are deeply rooted into the Arab-Muslim political tradition, so that they have tended to be present throughout the whole Islamic period of the region, the authors find out that each of them has its own medieval countertype. Thus, the article addresses the dichotomy of the supreme power of caliphs and sultans, formed in the IX – XI centuries and manifested today both in Jihadist organizations (i.e. ISIS, Al-Qaeda) and in the political strategies of moderate Islamist movements, such as Tunisian party Al-Nahda. The second example is the urban militias, which are correlated with the medieval phenomenon of «young hero» or «chivalry» communities – fityan. The fityan communities have seven specific traits, which not only are characteristic of the militias, but also demonstrate fundamental difference between the militias and urban criminal groups. Major attention is paid to Libyan militias, which are studied on the materials of field research conducted by one of the authors. Finally, the third element discussed is the particular role of the army and other security forces in the Arab political systems.The authors provide three possible interpretations of all the revealed coincidences. According to the first one, they are presented as aberrations of the researcher’s scientific consciousness, which make them look for historical equivalents to contemporary issues. Second interpretation belongs to the tradition of «the new medievalism». According to it, the described phenomenon is in fact the revival of some medieval practices, caused by the end of the Modernity era. The last interpretation views the analyzed elements as distinctive civilization traits of the Arab world.

Politics in the Marketplace: Work, Gender, and Citizenship in Revolutionary France. By Katie Jarvis

Not long ago, the French Revolution held a position in the European historiographical imagination comparable only to that of the Holocaust. Moreover, given its seminal positioning as the harbinger of global modernity, tracing the Revolution’s causes and course became the testing ground for various new methodological approaches from “history from below” to the “cultural turn.” During the last few decades, however, the deplacement of a Eurocentric vision of modernity coupled with the ascendence of global and transnational histories has undermined the Revolution’s former centrality to our narrative of global and even European history. Although historians have continued to produce new and insightful work on the period, they do so outside its previous pivotal position as the foundation of the modern Western nation-state. It seems possible to admit that François Furet’s 1978 declaration that “the Revolution is over” has finally become reality. This historiographical context makes Katie Jarvis’s finely wrought and persuasively argued Politics in the Marketplace all the more refreshing and important. Jarvis returns to sources bases, topics, and questions that might have appeared exhausted by generations of scholarly literature, and, with an exceptional archival eye and delicate analytic brushstrokes, reveals them to be still alive with insights and possibilities. Jarvis does so by entering into one of the most fundamental debates in the Revolution’s literature: the role of economic factors in explaining the Revolution’s momentum. For the historians of the mid twentieth-century, influenced by Marxism, the French Revolution was fundamentally a question of class, spurred by a rising bourgeoisie who chafed under the strictures set by an obscolescent aristocracy. This interpretation was challenged first by the careful work of social historians who demonstrated the heterogeneity of these supposedly united classes and then by historians of the “cultural turn,” who tended to ignore the economic altogether in favor of focusing on the Revolution’s discursive and symbolic dimensions. Subsequent scholars have returned to the role of the economic factors, but from a cultural standpoint, stressing the importance of new economic philosophies rather than materical factors themselves in explaining the Revolution’s course, or from the standpoint of imperial and transnational commercial networks.