scholarly journals Symbolic boundaries in the politics of Soviet identity: gender dimension (On the materials on the Great Patriotic War’s cinema)

2020 ◽  
pp. 10-25
Author(s):  
Oleg Riabov
Keyword(s):  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Symbolic Boundaries ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Politics Of Identity ◽  
Gender Discourse ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
In The Beginning ◽  
Negative Identity

Using the boundary approach, the paper dwells upon the role of gender discourse in politics of the Soviet identity in the time of the Great Patriotic War. In the beginning, it discusses what role symbolic boundaries created with help of gender discourse play in politics of identity. Then, the essential traits of politics of Soviet identity are examined on the material of the film “Circus” (1936). Finally, the paper focuses on utilizing the gender discourse by cinema of the Great Patriotic War. It investigates how the films used the representations of femininity in such directions of the politics of the Soviet identity as producing the images of “us” and forming the feeling of belonging to the political community; providing the national unity through weakening internal symbolic boundaries; strengthening external symbolic boundaries and forming negative identity through constructing the images of “them” — the women of Nazi Germany. The author comes to the conclusion that the boundary approach has significant heuristic potential and may be employed in Gender Studies.

‘To activists: Please post and share your story’: Renewing understandings on civic participation and the role of Facebook in the Indignados movement

2017 ◽  
Vol 32 (6) ◽  
pp. 583-597 ◽  
Author(s):  
Venetia Papa
Keyword(s):  
Social Media ◽  
Civic Participation ◽  
Political Community ◽  
Political Activity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Structured Interviews ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
International Financial Crisis ◽  
Online Social Media

The global upsurge in protest, which has accompanied the current international financial crisis, has highlighted the extensive use of online social media in activism, leaving aside the extent to which citizenship is enacted, empowered and potentially transformed by social media use within these movements. Drawing on citizenship and communication theories, this study employs a cross-country analysis of the relationship between citizenship, civic practices and social media within the Indignados movement in Greece and France. By the use of semi-structured interviews, we attempt to discern the degree of involvement of actors with the political community in question and explore the complex layers of their motivations and goals around participation. Content analysis employed in the movement’s Facebook groups allows us to critically evaluate the potential of social media in (re)defining the meaning and practice of civic participation. Findings indicate that the failure of traditional forms of civic participation to attain and resolve everyday political issues becomes its potential to transfer the political activity in other sites of struggle. The role of Facebook is double: it can reinforce civic talk and debate through activists’ digital story telling (around shared feelings and personal stories) significant for meaningful activist participation online and offline. Second, it can support new forms of alternative politics inspired by more participatory modes of engagement.

scholarly journals Arendt’s Political Theology—From Political Religion to Profanation

2019 ◽  
Vol 3 ◽  
pp. 111-131
Author(s):  
Bulent Diken ◽  
Carsten Bagge Laustsen ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Human Freedom ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Religion ◽  
Politics And Religion ◽  
The Republic ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Voluntary Servitude

The article elaborates on Arendt’s take on the religious and the political and on how they interact and merge in modernity, especially in totalitarianism. We start with framing the three different understandings of religion in Arendt: first, a classic understanding of religion, which is foreign to the logic of the political; second, a secularized political religion; and third, a weak messianism. Both the classic understanding of religion and the political religion deny human freedom in Arendt’s sense. Her transcendent alternative to them both is the notion of the democratic political community: the Republic. Then we turn to Arendt’s political theology, illuminating why interrogating Nazism is central to examine the relationship between politics and religion in modernity. This is followed by a discussion of Nazism as a type of political religion. We focus here on totalitarianism, both as an idea and actual institution. We conclude with an assessment of the role of profanation in Arendt’s work and its significance vis-à-vis the contemporary ‘return of religion’ as well as totalitarian tendencies which call for new forms of voluntary servitude.

scholarly journals Violence of war, ontopology, and the instrumental and performative constitution of the political community

2017 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 64-82
Author(s):  
Klejda Mulaj
Keyword(s):  
International Relations ◽  
Human Behaviour ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
Complete Understanding ◽  
Post War ◽  
Performative Power

AbstractThis article considers a neglected question in International Relations, namely how violence of war contributes to the constitution of the political community at the intersection between war and peace. It exposes limitations of means-ends, instrumental understanding of war violence due to the overlooking of violence’s performative attributes stemming from the centrality of bodily injuries in war. The instrumental violence on which the constitution of the political community is grounded finds expression in an order of representation that can be termed ontopology, and a pervasive – circular – relationship between ontopology and violence insofar as ontopology has inspired extreme forms of human behaviour and also been used to justify violence as a means to enact an ontopological goal. Yet, recognising the role of bodily injuries in the course of fighting allows for a more complete understanding of war. Crucially it enables an interpretation of the structure of war as a relation between war’s interior content – casualties in war – and the exterior, verbal issues standing outside it (pertaining to security, identity, sovereignty, authority, ideology), that lead to a surrogate contest of reimagining political community in the process of which performative power of violence contributes directly to the emerging post-war peace and laws that justify it.

Zapovedniks or Tourist Resorts?

2019 ◽  
pp. 57-83
Author(s):  
Victoria Donovan
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
The Body ◽  
Social Solidarity ◽  
The Political ◽  
National Unity ◽  
Soviet People ◽  
Strategic Role ◽  
Correct Understanding ◽  
Political Principles

This chapter addresses the role of cultural heritage in the drive to strengthen social solidarity and national unity in the ideologically unstable era of de-Stalinization. During the second, reconstitutive phase of de-Stalinization after 1961, the heritage of the Northwest played a strategic role in “imagining” the post-Stalin Soviet nation, a community founded on the political principles of socialist democracy, collectivism, and internationalism. The chapter shows how the creation of a touristic infrastructure in the region served as a means of exhibiting the heritage of the Northwest to the Soviet people. A key component in this enterprise is the body of touristic and kraevedenie materials focusing on the region's historic architecture. These texts reinforced a politically correct understanding of heritage as an integral part of Soviet modernity.

scholarly journals Corruption, Marginality and Social Disorder as Threats to National and Human Security in Nigeria

2015 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
pp. 1-26
Author(s):  
Philip Ogochukwu Ujomu
Keyword(s):  
National Security ◽  
Economic Crisis ◽  
Common Good ◽  
Human Security ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Disorder ◽  
The Social ◽  
The Common

This essay focuses on the issue of corruption, marginality and the social disorder attending it, as threats to national and human security in Nigeria. It not only examines the problems of corruption in Nigeria and the implications of this for national security, but also, discusses the role of an ethical idea of citizenship in tackling corruption and reinventing the political community. In Nigeria, corruption has played a key role in aggravating the political and economic crisis besetting the country. Depreciation of human dignity and collapse of infrastructures have ensured the systematic elite misappropriation of state power, the primitive accumulation of capital, ethno-cultural intolerance and political manipulation in the society. This paper searches for a set of norms capable of mitigating needless dehumanization and inequalities, and improving welfare of the majority by evolving public citizens oriented to the common good.

The Grey Zones of Violence in Political Resistance

Theoria ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 67 (165) ◽  
pp. 10-36
Author(s):  
Tal Correm
Keyword(s):  
Political Community ◽  
Frantz Fanon ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Resistance ◽  
Short Term ◽  
Organic Life ◽  
Fresh Perspective ◽  
Life Force ◽  
Ongoing Project

This article addresses the ambivalent role of violence in liberation struggles by staging a mutually enriching dialogue between Hannah Arendt and Frantz Fanon. It challenges the binary distinction between justifiable resistance that allows for only short-term, instrumental use of violence, and unwarranted resistance where violence is intrinsically justified as a creative, organic life-force of the oppressed. Instead, it discusses the constitutive role of violence as a condition of possibility of politics – highlighting the impossibility of separating the bloody moments of revolution from the constitution of the political community as a space of public freedom. The reconstructed debate on the relation between violence and freedom presents a fresh perspective on the justifiability and costs of violent resistance in circumstances of radical inequality and the extent to which liberation may remain an ongoing project to sustain the fragile achievement of freedom.

The estate of merchants in the parliament of 1381

2001 ◽  
Vol 74 (185) ◽  
pp. 331-345 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christian D. Liddy
Keyword(s):  
Fourteenth Century ◽  
Political Community ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Public ◽  
Public Record

Abstract The discovery among the class of ancient petitions in the Public Record Office of two documents containing lists of members of two parliamentary committees throws new light on the role of the urban element in the medieval English parliament, about which the parliament rolls say very little. This article places the two lists, undated but almost certainly of 1381, in the immediate context of the response of the political community to the Peasants' Revolt, and explores the idea of an estate of merchants meeting in parliament in the second half of the fourteenth century.

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