scholarly journals Brazil in the Time of Coronavirus

2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (Especial) ◽  
pp. 239-249 ◽  
Author(s):  
Maite Conde

This essay outlines and analyses the spread of the coronavirus in Brazil. In doing so it explores how the pandemic, whilst initially brought into the country by the wealthy elite, has predominantly affected the country’s poor, revealing structural inequalities that encompass class, race and ethnic differences, in which the poor are not afforded the right to live. It additionally examines the response to COVID-19 by the country’s far right president, Jair Messias Bolsonaro, looking at how his laissez faire reaction to the virus builds on a history of violence against the marginalized, especially to the country’s indigenous peoples, that has not just excluded them from the nation state but at times actively and violently eradicated them.

Author(s):  
Barbara Cosens

Indigenous rights to water follow diverse trajectories across the globe. In Asia and Africa even the concept of indigeneity is questioned and peoples with ancient histories connected to place are defined by ethnicity as opposed to sovereign or place-based rights, although many seek to change that. In South America indigenous voices are rising. In the parts of the globe colonized by European settlement, the definition of these rights has been in a continual state of transition as social norms evolve and indigenous capacity to assert rights grow. From the point of European contact, these rights have been contested. They have evolved primarily through judicial rulings by the highest court in the relevant nation-state. For those nation-states that do address whether indigenous rights to land and water exist, the approach has ranged from the 18th- and 19th-century doctrines of terra nullius (the land (and resources) belonged to no one) to a recognized right of “use and occupancy” that could be usurped under the doctrine of “discovery” by the conquering power. In the 20th and 21st centuries the evolution of the recognition of indigenous rights remains uneven, reflecting the values, judicial doctrine, and degree to which the contested water resource is already developed in the relevant nation-state. Thus, indigenous rights to water range from the recognition of cultural and spiritual rights that would have been in existence at the time of European contact, to inclusion of subsistence rights, rights sufficient for economic development, rights for homeland purposes, and rights as guardian for a water resource. At the forefront in this process of recognition is the right of indigenous peoples as sovereign to control, allocate, develop and protect their own water resources. This aspirational goal is reflected in the effort to create a common global understanding of the rights of indigenous peoples through declaration and definition of the right of self-determination articulated in the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.


2019 ◽  
Vol 118 (4) ◽  
pp. 921-927
Author(s):  
Jeremie Caribou

This essay reveals the true history of my people. It demonstrates our highly developed social, spiritual, and political governance structures. Our use of the water systems underscores the ecological integrity of sustainable development that we fostered for thousands of years. Yet, due to colonization and oppressive policies designed to destroy Indigenous identity, culture, and history, Indigenous knowledge and governing systems have been put in jeopardy. Colonial policies intended to dispossess and oppress First Nations by depriving us from Indigenous lands, controlling all aspects of our lives, which created dependence by limiting Indigenous peoples’ abilities to provide for themselves. Furthermore, these policies had no Indigenous input or representation and were designed to eradicate or eliminate Indigenous rights, titles, and the right to self-determination to easily gain access to Indigenous lands for development and industrialization, such as in the case of the massive hydroelectrical dams that continue to alienate my home community today.


2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (4) ◽  
pp. 413-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mauro Barelli

AbstractThe right of peoples to self-determination represents one of the most controversial norms of international law. In particular, two questions connected with the meaning and scope of this right have been traditionally contentious: first, who constitutes a ‘people’ for the purposes of self-determination, and, secondly, what does the right of self-determination actually imply for its legitimate holders. Against this unsettled background, the 2007 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (UNDRIP) affirmed, in a straightforward manner, that indigenous peoples have the right to self-determination. In light of the uncertainties that were mentioned above, it becomes necessary to clarify the actual implications of this important recognition. This article will seek to do so by discussing the drafting history of the provision on self-determination contained in the UNDRIP and positioning it within the broader normative framework of the instrument.


2020 ◽  
Vol 65 (4) ◽  
pp. 1245-1258
Author(s):  
Evgenii A. Koloskov ◽  

The article is devoted to the history of the formation and transformation of the theory of the Huns in contemporary Bulgaria through the prism of the political history of the country from the beginning of the debate about the origin of Bulgarians up to present day. The article examines how political reality impacted the processes of shaping scholarly and educational images, i.e. constructing a “convenient” usable past by the Bulgarian academic and non-academic circles. The main aspect in the study is related to the question of various interpretations of the ethnic origin of the Bulgars, the Huns and the role of the Slavic factor in the ethnogenesis of the contemporary Bulgarians. The milestones of the difficult history of Bulgaria and changes in political regimes have become the reasons for rejecting “Slavic” origin or, in some case, returning to it depending on external and internal circumstances. Today the Hun theory in all its variations and interpretations lies outside the professional scope of academic circles but is becoming the domain for various marginals. However, increasing activity of the right and the far-right in the politics of Europe capitalizing on the 2015 refugee crisis might return to the mainstream of official academic discourse the theory of the Hun The upcoming challenges of foreign policy (Euro-skepticism, ambitious projects outside the EU framework) and internal political issues (the question of national minorities) may also have a significant impact on this issue.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jan Boesten

This essay aims to utilize the concept of conviviality for connecting the coexistence of seemingly contradictory phenomena in Colombia. It argues that while conviviality implies a normative content – a society in which members do not slaughter each other is better than one in which members resort to violence – the meekness of that normative claim suggests that it is better used as an analytical tool that seeks to connect the contradictions that coexist in the real lifeworld. Colombia’s history of violence and democracy is such a contradictory case. Comparativists have situated Colombia’s deficits on the “extra-institutional playing field”, lamenting that it is a “besieged” or “threatened democracy”. Conviviality helps us to specify these “extra-institutional” defects by suggesting impediments exogenous and endogenous to the state-building logic of the Colombian nation-state.


2017 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 43-62 ◽  
Author(s):  
Edith Oltay

AbstractThe classical meaning of citizenship evokes a nation-state with a well-defined territory for its nationals, where national identity and sovereignty play a key role. Global developments are challenging the traditional nation-state and open a new stage in the history of citizenship. Transnational citizenship involving dual and multiple citizenships has become more and more accepted in Europe. Numerous scholars envisaged a post-national development where the nation-state no longer plays a key role. While scholarly research tended to focus on developments in Western Europe, a dynamic development also took place in Eastern Europe following the collapse of communism. Dual citizenship was introduced in most Eastern European countries, but its purpose was to strengthen the nation by giving the ethnic kin abroad citizenship and non-resident voting rights. In Western Europe, the right of migrants to citizenship has been expanded throughout the years in the hope that this would result in their better integration into society. Eastern Europe and Western Europe operate with different concepts of citizenship because of their diverging historical traditions and current concerns. The concept of nation and who belong to the national community play a key role in the type of citizenship that they advocate.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Oliver Hicks

This thesis will investigate and examine the French theatre The Grand-Guignol (1897-1962) and the film movement New French Extremity (1990s-roughly 2008). The theatre and the film movement will be examined in terms of their origins, evolutions and eventual declines. These will be related to French society and culture at the times as well as their historical contexts, for instance the long history of violence on French soil and the rise of the far-right in the 1980s/90s leading to the rise of New French Extremity. There will be an interrogation of the theatre and film movement’s use of ‘othering’, examining how they both alternately exploit the trope and subvert it, allying themselves with the so-called ‘other’. There will also be an examination of the term ‘Grand-Guignol violence’, often used colloquially to describe gruesome violence in entertainment. The term will be examined in relation to the stage violence inflicted during Grand-Guignol plays on stars like Paula Maxa and compared with the violence inflicted upon women in the mainly-female-led New French Extremity films. The escapist, entertaining violence of the theatre will also be contrasted with the nihilistic violence of New French Extremity, which often seeks to reinforce social commentary from the creative teams. The theatre and the film movement are both positioned as key moments in French horror history. This thesis will examine the ways that they are similar and the ways that they fundamentally differ, beyond their obvious stage/film barriers.


Author(s):  
Pavel Parshin

Indigenous peoples are inheritors of earlier population of their present day territories of modern states, committed to their land and traditional way of life. The world community for many decades proceeds along the path of recognition the rights of indigenous peoples, the main of which, in the author’s opinion, is the right to choose the degree and form of their integration in the modern society. Historically, the attitude towards indigenous peoples’ rights developed from recognition of their right “to be as other peoples are” to the consent to their right to be different an original. One of the main tenet ensuring the realization of their right to originality, which has important practical implications, is the principle of free, prior and informed consent (FPIC) of indigenous peoples to affecting them economic and cultural activities of their dominant neighbors, as well as to more particular (including special) rights and implementation procedures resulting from them. In economic terms, it primarily concerns nature management and, especially, extraction of natural fossil and usage of biological resources, military activities, and waste disposal. The article analyzes the history of ideas about the of indigenous peoples’ rights and their legal fixation, as well as problems of interpretation of the principle of free, prior and informed consent and its implementation in various regions of the world and spheres of activity.


2020 ◽  
pp. 340-356
Author(s):  
Shiv Visvanathan

The essay traces a sequential history of violence of the Indian nation state, marking the Partition and the Bengal famine as its repressed inaugural events, its ‘creation myths’. Outlining the vision of the nascent Indian state which internalized and fetishized development, planning and related economic rationality, he argues how we need ‘iconographic meditation’ and ‘conceptual reflection’ to understand the genocidal violence of these categories. Further, reflecting on the paradigmatic moments of violence in the post-independent India—Emergency, Narmada, Naxalbari, Bhopal, and Gujarat—the essay unravels hidden layers of statist and developmental violence. As the state marvelled in the ‘new possibilities of evil’ in its systematic apathy to the phenomenology of suffering, there was routinization of disasters and normalization of riots. The essay concludes with an articulation of an urgent need for a new language, a new discourse to understand the routinization of violence and fragility of citizenship that are built into the value system of the current political regime.


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