Ulysses and the Temptation of Idleness: Thinking about Politics through Poetry

Editorials in rhyme may make bad poetry, but the poetic still talks to the political in challenging ways. This paper takes a Victorian classic, Alfred Lord Tennyson's Ulysses , and explores its portrait of a tired and idle political leader, desperate for distraction. Tennyson's intentions are ambiguous, his message about aged leaders and power open to interpretation. His apparent warning about narcissists and power are provocative, but the poem might be valued more for its rhetoric than for its political import.     

Beyond Hybridity to the Politics of Scale: International Intervention and ‘Local’ Politics

The evident failures of international peacebuilding and statebuilding interventions (PSBIs) have recently prompted a focus on the interaction between interventions and target societies and states. Especially popular has been the ‘hybridity’ approach, which understands forms of peace and governance emerging through the mixing of local and international agendas and institutions. This article argues that hybridity is a highly problematic optic. Despite contrary claims, hybridity scholarship falsely dichotomizes ‘local’ and ‘international’ ideal‐typical assemblages, and incorrectly presents outcomes as stemming from conflict and accommodation between them. Scholarship in political geography and state theory provides better tools for explaining PSBIs’ outcomes as reflecting socio‐political contestation over power and resources. We theorize PSBIs as involving a politics of scale, where different social forces promote and resist alternative scales and modes of governance, depending on their interests and agendas. Contestation between these forces, which may be located at different scales and involved in complex, tactical, multi‐scalar alliances, explains the uneven outcomes of international intervention. We demonstrate this using a case study of East Timor, focusing on decentralization and land policy.     

Beyond Natural Law Talk: Politics and Prudence in St. Thomas Aquinas's On Kingship

Abstract

As second-wave feminism crested in the 1980s, feminist intellectuals began to radically reappraise liberalism by developing a communitarian “ethic of care” that promised to remake American society and politics. The new communitarianism, however, could not be reconciled with feminist defenses of abortion rights. This tension became increasingly untenable in the late 1980s as Roe v. Wade faced new political challenges. Feminist communitarians responded by re-embracing liberalism, especially its emphasis on autonomy and independence. This history suggests that many feminist intellectuals regard their support for abortion rights as something that is prior to their larger philosophical commitments, such as liberalism and communitarianism.     

The polis and the res publica: two Arendtian models of violence

The influence of the ancient Greek world on Hannah Arendt’s thought is well documented, yet her interest in the politics of the Roman Republic is often considered less central to her work. This paper explores Arendt’s analysis of both these political worlds, with a particular emphasis on what this comparison can tells us about her understanding of the role of violence in politics. Arendt has generally been understood to structurally exclude violence from the political, in part due to the claims she makes in her later essay ‘On Violence.’ Yet in her portrayal of Roman politics, and her preference for this political system above the Greeks’ (in certain respects), a genuinely political engagement with violence can be discerned. The paper claims that this particular case study indicates the framework of the vita activa, set out by Arendt in The Human Condition, should be reinterpreted, particularly insofar as ‘fabrication’ or ‘work’ here appears as something that is legitimately part of the political, and incorporates within it some forms of violence. The claims that violence is structurally anti-political, this paper concludes, are temporally specific to a twentieth-century context, rather than constituting a foundational ‘rule’ of political practice for Arendt.     

Alternative Food Economies and Transformative Politics in Times of Crisis: Insights from the Basque Country and Greece

Why and how do alternative economies emerge, how do they develop and what is their contribution, if any, to transformative politics? Alternative economies proliferate in the countries worse hit by economic crisis and austerity, such as Spain or Greece. Yet the existing literature is stuck in a counter‐productive division between celebration and critique. We move beyond this division applying philosopher Daniel Bensaïd's understanding of politics to two alternative food economies, one in the Basque Country and one in Greece. We illuminate the activist strategies and specific conjunctures within which the two alternatives emerged and explain how they develop in the face of political‐economic barriers. Alternative economies, we conclude, can be transformational when they are inserted in activist strategies directed to extend conflict, social struggles and challenge the capital–state nexus.     

危地马拉的黑暗与光明

<正>"跟我走,就在前面。"一位危地马拉城的陌生大姐,为了给我指路,已经带我行走了很长一段路。十几分钟前,我拿着地图找这位大姐问路,不会英语的她用手势比划了一下,看我满脸迷茫后,果断拉着我开始去找我想要到的地方,我清楚地记得她原来要去的方向和带我去的方向是相反的。一路上她用西班牙语和手势与我交流,时不时发出爽朗的笑声。我一下子感受到了那种旅行中久违的温暖和快乐。这和我进入到危地马拉时的糟糕情绪完全不一样。或许,这就是危     

危地马拉的黑暗与光明

正"跟我走,就在前面。"一位危地马拉城的陌生大姐,为了给我指路,已经带我行走了很长一段路。十几分钟前,我拿着地图找这位大姐问路,不会英语的她用手势比划了一下,看我满脸迷茫后,果断拉着我开始去找我想要到的地方,我清楚地记得她原来要去的方向和带我去的方向是相反的。一路上她用西班牙语和手势与我交流,时不时发出爽朗的笑声。我一下子感受到了那种旅行中久违的温暖和快乐。这和我进入到危地马拉时的糟糕情绪完全不一样。或许,这就是危