scholarly journals Becoming a Force in the Zone: Hedonopolitics, Masculinity, and the Quest for Respect on Haiti’s Streets

2014 ◽  
Vol 29 (4) ◽  
pp. 672-698 ◽  
Author(s):  
Chelsey L. Kivland

This article explores neighborhood organizing among young men in urban Haiti as a vernacular enactment of sovereignty that involves both a hedonistic and a gendered logic. Under conditions of democratization and global governance, the urban block, or base, has become a key site for building political community and creating connections to those in power. Central to base politics are public outings that engender power and respect for the organizers by demonstrating their force not through violence but through masculine social pleasures. This article elaborates three key outings—a street party, a soccer tournament, and a beach day—organized by neighbors and supported by state, NGO, and criminal actors. By focusing on hedonopolitics, rather than on the common tropes of violence and death, this article extends recent work on the embodiment of sovereign power, while also showing that masculine pleasure represents an underanalyzed yet important dimension of sovereignty.

Author(s):  
Piero Ignazi

Chapter 1 introduces the long and difficult process of the theoretical legitimation of the political party as such. The analysis of the meaning and acceptance of ‘parties’ as tools of expressing contrasting visions moves forward from ancient Greece and Rome where (democratic) politics had first become a matter of speculation and practice, and ends up with the first cautious acceptance of parties by eighteenth-century British thinkers. The chapter explores how parties or factions have been constantly considered tools of division of the ‘common wealth’ and the ‘good society’. The holist and monist vision of a harmonious and compounded society, stigmatized parties and factions as an ultimate danger for the political community. Only when a new way of thinking, that is liberalism, emerged, was room for the acceptance of parties set.


Author(s):  
Sarah E. Murray

This book gives a compositional, truth‐conditional, crosslinguistic semantics for evidentials set in a theory of the semantics for sentential mood. Central to this semantics is a proposal about a distinction between what propositional content is at‐issue, roughly primary or proffered, and what content is not‐at‐issue. Evidentials contribute not‐at‐issue content, more specifically what I will call a not‐at‐issue restriction. In addition, evidentials can affect the level of commitment a sentence makes to the main proposition, contributed by sentential mood. Building on recent work in the formal semantics of evidentials and related phenomena, the proposed semantics does not appeal to separate dimensions of illocutionary meaning. Instead, I argue that all sentences make three contributions: at‐issue content, not‐at‐issue content, and an illocutionary relation. At‐issue content is presented, made available for subsequent anaphora, but is not directly added to the common ground. Not‐at‐issue content directly updates the common ground. The illocutionary relation uses the at‐issue content to impose structure on the common ground, which, depending on the clause type (e.g., declarative, interrogative), can trigger further updates. Empirical support for this proposal comes from Cheyenne (Algonquian, primary data from the author’s fieldwork), English, and a wide variety of languages that have been discussed in the literature on evidentials.


2020 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 100-114
Author(s):  
Karoline Gritzner

AbstractThis article discusses how in Howard Barker’s recent work the idea of the subject’s crisis hinges on the introduction of an impersonal or transpersonal life force that persists beyond human agency. The article considers Barker’s metaphorical treatment of the images of land and stone and their interrelationship with the human body, where the notion of subjective crisis results from an awareness of objective forces that transcend the self. In “Immense Kiss” (2018) and “Critique of Pure Feeling” (2018), the idea of crisis, whilst still dominant, seems to lose its intermittent character of singular rupture and reveals itself as a permanent force of dissolution and reification. In these plays, the evocation of nonhuman nature in the love relationships between young men and elderly women affirms the existence of something that goes beyond the individual, which Barker approaches with a late-style poetic sensibility.


Author(s):  
A. A. Gromyko

Anatoly Andreevich Gromyko, a professor of the Moscow State University, a corresponding member of the Russian Academy of Sciences reflects in his article on the destinies of mankind and the most complex problems facing the world community at the early 21 century under globalization and increased demand in global governance. In his analysis the author concedes that after numerous pieces of research on various aspects of these two phenomena, there are still more questions than answers. He believes that globalization might become a force serving not only private interests of big corporations but also the common good of humanity. Since interdependence is the main feature of our world we should not fall prey to the ideal images of global governance because there is no one size fit all global governance. The article elaborates the three most pressing world problems:– the need in a new way of thinking about globalization. According to the author the problems of globalization must be approached with knowledge of history and acknowledgement of social justice;– the need in morally acceptable balance among unifying potential of globalization, unchained global market and the state as the last resort of its nation;– the need to make United Nations a platform, where political and social democracy should lay ground for global governance so craved for by the mankind. The author pays special attention to the dichotomy between the force of law and the law of force as well as to the prospects for the new democratic global order accommodating the sustainable development of human civilization.


Daphnis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (4) ◽  
pp. 655-681
Author(s):  
Oliver Bach

Abstract The aim of this article is to outline how Hans Blumenberg’s conception of lifetime and world time (Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, 1986) can help to elucidate a substantial problem of utopian literature and its development from the 16th to the 18th century: utopias always try to illustrate the ways by which the single members of a political community harmonise with the community as a whole. The congruence of private good and common good, private interest and common interest, private will and general will is a main task of 17th and 18th century political philosophy. Blumenberg’s book, however, allows us to focus on the existential dimension of this harmonisation: under which circumstances may the single members become so wise and virtuous within their lifetimes that they always know about and comply with the common good? 18th century utopias seem to find answers to this question in theories of moral sense, common sense and aesthetic education.


Author(s):  
Paul Spicker

The model of civic republicanism is associated with a range of principles: a concept of the common good, citizenship, a presumption of civic virtue and freedom. The idea of radical democracy is strongly associated with a sense of active citizenship, engagement in a political community and collective action. At times, however, it tips into populism, which claims to pit a virtuous people against a corrupt elite, but risks bringing radical democracy into disrepute.


2014 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 49-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Shaun Bevan ◽  
Zachary Greene

Political parties matter for government outcomes. Despite this general finding for political science research, recent work on public policy and agenda-setting has found just the opposite; parties generally do not matter when it comes to explaining government attention. While the common explanation for this finding is that issue attention is different than the location of policy, this explanation has never truly been tested. Through the use of data on nearly 65 years of UK Acts of Parliament, this paper presents a detailed investigation of the effect parties have on issue attention in UK Acts of Parliament. It demonstrates that elections alone do not explain changes in the distribution of policies across issues. Instead, the parties’ organizations, responses to economic conditions, and size of the parliamentary delegation influence the stability of issue attention following a party transition.


1998 ◽  
Vol 33 (2) ◽  
pp. 137-151 ◽  
Author(s):  
J McKelvie

The moire fringe method is described and reviewed with particular reference to its application in strain analysis. The theory is briefly dealt with, followed by a discussion of the common methods used to analyse the information that the fringes contain and then certain non-obvious limitations are discussed. The generic grid-preparation techniques and optical arrangements are described. Moire interferometry is dealt with at some greater length, and questions that are frequently raised concerning moire in comparison to somewhat similar methods are addressed. Specific difficulties are indicated and the work concludes with a consideration of some recent work that may influence future developments of the method. Of necessity, there is much reliance on reference to quoted works.


2009 ◽  
Vol 22 (4) ◽  
pp. 677-702 ◽  
Author(s):  
ZORAN OKLOPCIC

AbstractThis article uses the contested independence of Kosovo as an opportunity to re-examine the theoretical imagery behind the concept of self-determination, and then confront those findings with the more recent approaches to polity formation from other theoretical genres: normative theories of secession, on the one hand, and the global governance approach to self-determination, on the other. What emerges from the encounter between these bodies of thought is not a new interpretation, or a theory of self-determination and its relationship to uti possidetis, but rather a plea for an approach to polity formation which is simultaneously critical and prudential. That is, an approach which would accept the role of external actors as inevitable, but goes further and unmasks them as complicit in labelling certain projects as ‘civic’ and ‘multicultural’ on the one hand and ‘ethno-nationalist’ on the other. Equally, the proposed approach reveals the ever-present aspiration to unanimity as a concealed ideal of polity formation, shared by both the ‘civic’ and the ‘ethnic’ variants of self-determination. Finally, this approach to polity formation sketches the contours of an alternative, thin vision of a political community – one not wearing the badge of peoplehood – one glued together not by normative imperatives of participation and solidarity, but rather by the acknowledgement of geopolitical fiat.


2002 ◽  
Vol 37 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bhikhu Parekh

In This Article I Do Two Things. I Begin With A Brief Discussion of the nature of political community in general, and argue that a political community is defined and constituted by the common public commitments of its citizens. Its identity is political not ethnic or cultural in nature, an important distinction that is obscured by the term ‘national identity’ and often ignored in much of the discussion of it. Its identity has an inescapable moral content. Although the latter is often shared with other communities, what distinguishes a political community is the way in which it interprets and institutionally articulates these moral principles. I then apply this general analysis to Britain and suggest how we might best define its identity.


Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document