The War of “Who Is Who”: Autochthony, Nationalism, and Citizenship in the Ivoirian Crisis

2006 ◽  
Vol 49 (2) ◽  
pp. 9-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Marshall-Fratani
Keyword(s):  
State Power ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
The West ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
The Past ◽  
Ways Of Life

Abstract:Over the past four years the Ivoirian crisis has seen as its central dynamic the mobilization of the categories of autochthony and territorialized belonging in an ultranationalist discourse vehicled by the party in power. More than just a struggle to the death for state power, the conflict involves the redefinition of the content of citizenship and the conditions of sovereignty. The explosion of violence and counterviolence provoked and legitimated by the mobilization of these categories does not necessarily signify either the triumph of those monolithic identities “engineered” during the colonial occupation, nor the disintegration of the nation-state in the context of globalization. The Ivoirian case shows the continued vitality of the nation-state: not only as the principal space in terms of which discourses of authochtony are constructed, but also in terms of the techniques and categories that the political practice of autochthony puts into play. While in some senses the Ivoirian conflict appears to be a war without borders—in particular with the “spillover” of the Liberian war in the west during 2003—it is above all a war about borders, crystallizing in liminal spaces and social categories and on emerging practices and ways of life.

scholarly journals Empoderando vidas y naciones resilientes desde el giro biográfico-local.

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseba Agirreazkuenaga
Keyword(s):  
Human Development ◽  
Local Communities ◽  
Historical Research ◽  
The Political ◽  
Global History ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
The Past ◽  
Globalized World ◽  
Global And Local ◽  
Local Research

In order to establish and consolidate the themes and ways of writing history, historians must be attentive to the global and local public agenda. Empowered lives - Resilient nations is a program for human development promoted by the UN. As long as there are local powers and local communities it will be necessary to carry out biographical-local research, analyzing these powers and communities in the past and present, establishing resilience patterns. We transform the historical research of the local past into global history. The personal and the political cannot be dissociated because “The personal is political and the political is personal”. Even eating is a political practice in today’s globalized world.

Shintō Shrines and Secularism in Modern Japan, 1890–1945

2017 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 128-156
Author(s):  
Karli Shimizu
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Political System ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The West ◽  
Late Eighteenth Century ◽  
Secular Institution ◽  
The Government ◽  
Academic Discourses

From the late eighteenth century to WWII, shrine Shintō came to be seen as a secular institution by the government, academics, and activists in Japan (Isomae 2014; Josephson 2012, Maxey 2014). However, research thus far has largely focused on the political and academic discourses surrounding the development of this idea. This article contributes to this discussion by examining how a prominent modern Shintō shrine, Kashihara Jingū founded in 1890, was conceived of and treated as secular. It also explores how Kashihara Jingū communicated an alternate sense of space and time in line with a new Japanese secularity. This Shintō-based secularity, which located shrines as public, historical, and modern, was formulated in antagonism to the West and had an influence that extended across the Japanese sphere. The shrine also serves as a case study of how the modern political system of secularism functioned in a non-western nation-state.

From outside the Imperium: Gandhi's Cultural Critique of the ‘West’

1981 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 171-194 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashis Nandy
Keyword(s):  
Political Economy ◽  
Cultural Relativism ◽  
The Political ◽  
Cultural Critique ◽  
Nation State ◽  
The West ◽  
Equitable Distribution ◽  
Modern Culture ◽  
Shifting Baseline ◽  
Modern Nation State

Gandhi considered the cultural gap between the modern and the non-modern cultures deeper than that between the West and the East. It is the modern culture he rejected, not only as a social ideal, but also as a framework within which one could struggle for an equitable distribution of the products of modernity. Thus, to him, the demonic aspects of the modern Western culture did not centre around only the political economy of modernity, but also around modern West's scientific secularism, technologism, overorganization, ideologies of adulthood and masculinity, giganticism, stress on normality and oversocialization, and cultural evolutionism. Such a critique allowed Gandhi to see the West as a differentiated structure and the Western man as a co-victim of the oppression of the modern nation-state system, centralized economy, mass media and technocracy, and an ethic which was openly ethnocidal. Traditional cultures also were not undifferentiated to him. He was a critical traditionalist, not an uncritical defender of faiths, and he believed in ‘negative’ relativism, not in the anthropologist's version of cultural relativism. No culture could be perfect in his model, not even a traditional one; it could only be useful as a shifting baseline for cultural criticism.

scholarly journals The Nationalization of the Elite in Russia in 2010-Ies as an Element of Political System Insurance in Case of Realization of the Destructive Scenario

2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (4) ◽  
pp. 13-18
Author(s):  
P. B. Salin
Keyword(s):  
Law Enforcement ◽  
Political System ◽  
Political Elite ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Practice ◽  
Exit Strategy ◽  
The West ◽  
Second Stage ◽  
Large Project ◽  
Governmental Management

The relevance of this topic is due to the forthcoming of the open stage of transit of the Russian political system, which will inevitably be accompanied by a change of generations of the political elite. It raises the question of what “exit strategy” exists for the existing elite, which is now at the levers of governmental management. It will have a decisive influence on the course and outcome of the transit of the political system. The purpose of this article is to analyse the implementation of the government’s strategy for the nationalisation of the elite, which is carried out in the 2010s, to assess its progress, limitations and problems it faced. The article deals with the Russian experience of nationalisation of the elite of the last seven years, both in terms of changes in legislation and, most importantly, law enforcement and political practice. The author placed particular emphasis on the existing limitations of this project — lack of “exit strategy” of the current elite and lack of a large project that could mobilise the elite. The author concludes that the events of 2014 and the ensuing confrontation with the West have done much more to nationalise the elite than the purposeful efforts of the authorities for two years before. However, the political practice has not yet answered the key question — what will be the second stage of nationalisation of the elite, which will be completed by 2022–2024.

scholarly journals A Critique of the Concept of “Non-Western Political Process”

2021 ◽  
Vol 1 (1(50)) ◽  
pp. 5-31
Author(s):  
Dmitry V. Mosyakov ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Social Structure ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Political Process ◽  
Active Phase ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Economic ◽  
Universal Mechanism

The article is devoted to criticism of the concept of the so-called “non-Western political process”. Author expresses the opinion that this concept, formulated back in the mid-50s of the 20th century, is outdated today. The fact is that after the active phase of the globalization process and huge changes in the political, economic and social structure of Eastern societies over the past 60 years, the differences between how politics is done in the West and the East have virtually disappeared. The article provides evidence that now we can see a certain universal mechanism of power, which is equally intensively used in both Western and Eastern societies and states.

scholarly journals The Hero Fallen: Zhang Yimou and the Question of Unstable Authorship

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Mark Ellsworth
Keyword(s):  
The Political ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Prior Work ◽  
National Politics ◽  
National Cinema ◽  
The West ◽  
Cultural Authenticity ◽  
Chinese Nation ◽  
Chinese Films ◽  
The Way

<p>When Zhang Yimou’s film, Hero (2002), was released it was one of the most successful Chinese films ever screened in American theaters. While many critics applauded the film’s aesthetics, other reviewers condemned the film for undermining the political potency of Zhang’s early films and promoting a fascist ideology. The interpretation of Hero as fascist propaganda has incited a controversy over the reception of the film that has penetrated academic as well as journalistic circles. A close look at this controversy reveals that there has been a tendency in the West to read a film and filmmaker in a manner predetermined by where they are from and the discourse that already exists. This ‘auto-reading’ or ‘auto-positioning’ tendency is symptomatic of a reliance on discourses of authorship and national cinema. The manner in which these discourses have permeated the way that the West has responded to Zhang and his films has given rise to three ‘recurring motifs:’ aesthetic virtuosity, cultural authenticity, and national politics. These motifs are characteristics which have been repeated so often that they became defining qualities of his authorship and have often determined the interpretation of his films. This thesis involves a mapping of the critical reception of Hero and the way it relates to Zhang’s prior work, his auteur status, and his relationship to the Chinese nation-state. Specifically, this thesis examines how the discursive reception of Zhang’s career and films provided the context out of which emerged the framework that justifies reading the film as fascist. Tracing the recurring motifs throughout the Western reception of Zhang’s films reveals the problematics of the reliance on the discourses of authorship and national cinema. This thesis will also explore Hero directly to investigate how the film’s ambiguities have contributed to the reading of the film as fascist but also how ambiguity facilitates the potential to interpret other meanings in the film.</p>

Is Democracy Possible in Russia?

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-27
Author(s):  
Andrei Val’terovich Grinëv
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Political System ◽  
Private Property ◽  
Political Regime ◽  
The Political ◽  
Short Term ◽  
The West ◽  
Basic Principles ◽  
Democratic Development ◽  
The Past

Abstract This article discusses the question of why a Western-style democracy has not been formed in Russia. The prerequisite for the formation of a democracy as a political regime is the domination of small and medium-sized private property and a middle class. Since the middle class has been small in Russia throughout most of its history for a number of objective reasons, the country has hardly known full-fledged democracy, and the current political system only imitates it. Russia’s attempts to enter the trajectory of democratic development—both in the early twentieth century, and since the early 1990s–have failed, and the trend of abandoning the basic principles of democracy has prevailed over the past two decades. The blame for this lies not only on the current Russian leadership but to no lesser extent on the political leadership of the West, which for the sake of short-term self-serving interests or political ambitions has contributed much to the formation of the current Russian regime.

Restitution and the Politics of Repair

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Magdalena Zolkos
Keyword(s):  
International Law ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Religious Thought ◽  
The West ◽  
The Public ◽  
The Past ◽  
The Social ◽  
Politics And Law

This book develops a political philosophic approach to restitution and repatriation of objects, by arguing that the development of restitutive norms in the West has been auxiliary to the emergence of modern state sovereignty. It draws on critiques of international law of cultural heritage return, and of its Western humanistic underpinnings, including the ontological binary distinction between things and persons. Rather than accept the restitutive goals of politics and law seeking to do justice for the past and to ‘undo’ the expropriations and dispossessions that have occurred, and are still occurring (be it in contexts of coloniality or war), this book looks at the limits and aporias of restitution in texts of philosophy, literature and social theory. As such, it identifies figures and objects situated beyond the possibility of restitution and repair. This includes analysis of the social fantasies and imaginaries that ‘prop’ our contemporary reparative politics—making the past ‘unhappen’, or cancelling out the occurrence of wrongs. What the analysed texts have in common is that they articulate restitution through the motifs of undoing and making-unhappen, as a reparative and curative procedure, and a prelapsarian return to a place, time or condition prior to the event of violence. Insofar as this reading uncovers the mythical-religious ‘substrate’ of the restitutive tradition, and illuminates the political and affective allures of prelapsarianism, this book also offers insights into Western secularism, not as disappearance of religious thought in the public domain, but as its ‘repression’ (in a psychoanalytic sense).

Vietnamese or Chinese: Viet-kieu in the Vietnam-China Borderlands

2005 ◽  
Vol 1 (2) ◽  
pp. 217-232 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yuk Wah Chan
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Multiple Identities ◽  
Economic Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Post Cold War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Cross Border ◽  
Personal Histories ◽  
The Media

AbstractThis article examines the contested identity of a particular group of Viet-kieu, who were born in China and who returned to Vietnam in the 1970s, by looking into their personal histories, descent backgrounds and the political and socio-economic processes they lived through in the past few decades. Unlike other Viet-kieu who returned from the West, the Viet-kieu in the borderlands rarely received any attention from the media or academia. They led a double life both in China and in Vietnam and experienced dramatic changes of fate from the 1970s, through the 1980s, to the 1990s. Their hybrid cultural endowment and cross-border familial ties were both detrimental and beneficial to their social and economic life within different historical contexts. Reopened borders around the world in the post-Cold War era have generated discourses on transnational economic integration, regional connectedness, as well as fluid mobility and identities. It has become a fashion to criticize the study of culture and identity as rigid entities, while the increasing stress on subjectivity and agency has made identity seem ever more evolving and changing. Putting aside the romantic notion of fluid and multiple identities, this article brings up a number of empirical cases to illustrate how identity is often shaped by the possibilities and constraints under different politico-economic circumstances.

“No Deceit Safe in Its Hiding Place”: The Criminal Trial in Eighteenth-Century Spain

2002 ◽  
Vol 20 (3) ◽  
pp. 449-478
Author(s):  
Fabio López-Lázaro
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Central Government ◽  
The Political ◽  
The West ◽  
Spanish Society ◽  
The Past ◽  
Political Criticism ◽  
Uncritical Acceptance ◽  
Looking Back

The least understood aspect of the punishment of crime in pre-nineteenth-century Spanish society is trial procedure. This is not surprising. Our misapprehensions and misinterpretations of the past are principally the product of eighteenth-century reality being sieved through an uncritical acceptance of nineteenth-century political criticism. The West inherits much of its modern paradigm from the Spain of 1808 to 1834, from Romantic images of Goya as the enlightened individual fighting obscurantism to portrayals of heroic guerrilla patriots seeking to wrest political reform from a reactionary central government. It also inherits, although less consciously, the political rubrics of liberal and conservative (and absolutist) from nationalist polemics during the 1808–1814 French occupation. When looking back half a century later, Spaniards wanted to distinguish themselves clearly from the past.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document