Cultural Engineering Under Authoritarian Regimes: Islamization of Universities in Postrevolutionary Iran

The purpose of this article is to analyze the efforts that have been made to Islamize Iranian universities, specifically since the emergence of hardliners in 2005. After the 1979 Iranian Revolution, the Islamic regime relentlessly intensified its efforts to Islamize universities to train a new generation of ideologically driven students. In the three decades following the Revolution, three major periods of university Islamization have been implemented. The Cultural Revolution, which started in 1980, was the first step in the Islamization of Iran's universities: to cleanse the higher education systems from students and professors who criticized the new established Islamic regime. By increasing the number of students and the development of universities throughout Iran in the Rafasanjai era, the second wave of the Islamization of the university was triggered by Ayatollah Khamenei in 1994. During the reform era, the Islamization of universities slowed because of the many confrontations between the Supreme Leader and the reformist administrations. With the victory of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in the 2005 presidential election, the Islamization of universities intensified. While there are a few publications about the Islamization of universities, they mainly focused on the first and second decades following the 1979 Revolution. Focusing on the third period, this article will investigate the different strategies and tactics for the Islamization of universities, as well as reasons for its failures.     

Looking to the past,uncertain about the future: Japan's politics in an era of disaster and stagnation

The Japanese state and society face major challenges due to more than 20 years of economic stagnation and steady political transformation. The books reviewed here dissect a nation in the midst of change: its politics, political economy, and response to the triple disaster of the Tohoku earthquake, tsunami and Fukushima nuclear incident (commonly referred to by the Japanese as 3.11) in 2011. John Dower considers Japanese difficulty in confronting its wartime past, while Frances Rosenbluth and Michael Thies lay out the broad sweep of Japan's political history. Ellis Krauss and Robert Pekkanen focus an institutional lens on the evolution of the Liberal Democratic Party (LDP) from hegemonic to merely dominant party, while Leonard Schoppa and colleagues examine the emergence of a two‐party system since the political shakeup of 1993–1994. Robin LeBlanc employs a gender approach to parse the nature of male values and show how they shape the actions of political candidates and activists. Lucy Birmingham and David McNeill provide an on‐the‐ground view of individuals reacting to the 3.11 calamity. The McKinsey & Co. collection includes varied articles, from optimistic pieces urging Japan towards a quick rebound to more sober assessments of long‐term national decline. Together, these books provide an excellent snapshot of Japan at a metaphorical turning point.     

Chaoplexic warfare or the future of military organization

Scientific methods and concepts have been exerting a powerful influence on the exercising of armed force since the Scientific Revolution and the dawn of the modern era. In association with the respective technologies of the clock, engine and computer, the scientific theories of mechanism, thermodynamics, and cybernetics have all in turn been recruited to shape distinct approaches to the challenges of imposing order on the chaos of the battlefield. Today, it is on the basis of the new sciences of chaos and complexity that the latest regime of the scientific way of warfare is being erected. Chaoplexic warfare draws on the study of nonlinear phenomena of self‐organization to propose a radical decentralization of armed forces through the adoption of the network form. For all its present flaws, network‐centric warfare and its operational concepts of self‐synchronization and swarming mark an important step on the path to chaoplexic warfare.     

Citizen-led democratic reform: innovations in Indi

Contemporary political systems are experiencing a democratic disconnect between formal institutions of representative government, and the more informal spaces of political participation. Rather than offer an institutional remedy, this article turns to practice and considers how citizens themselves are seeking to transform dysfunctional democratic practices. The article provides an in-depth analysis of democratic events that have unfolded between 2012 and 2017 in the Australian federal electorate of Indi. The analysis explores the intertwined participatory efforts of the citizens’ group, Voices4Indi, and the local Independent federal member, MP Cathy McGowan. The Indi experience demonstrates that while citizens may be frustrated with ‘politics as usual’, they are not rejecting the system but rather instigating creative democratic reforms.     

Survive and Thrive: Field Research in Authoritarian Southeast Asia

The literature on field research methods has focused almost exclusively on the strategies available to scholars working in democracies. By comparison, there has been scant guidance for those working in authoritarian regimes. This is despite the distinct set of challenges that arise where civil liberties and political rights are not consistently or well protected. The purpose of this article is to address this deficit. Drawing on the region of Southeast Asia as a natural laboratory for comparative analysis, it offers guidance on how to successfully conduct archival research, carry out interviews and undertake participant observation under authoritarianism. The resulting conclusions are applicable to the pursuit of primary research by scholars at all career levels and in other regions of the world.     

Intimations of democratic impatience: The Book of Job

This article challenges democratic theorists’ disregard for democratic impatience by showing that the Book of Job not only defends impatience but that it intimates the merits of democratic impatience. Job is impatient along four dimensions that should speak to democratic theorists: he refuses to suffer, identifies his suffering as unjust, seeks to hold arbitrary power accountable, and recognizes patience’s irrationality in the face of injustice. Critically, I demonstrate that Job remains impatient in his mind, and thus does not abandon impatience – not even in an epilogue designed to stifle his impatient voice. While Job’s impatience is justified, it is not yet democratic, for it reneges on broader democratic claims, is not shared, and is undermined by his social privilege. I thus turn to Job’s wife – who is “Everywoman” both in a feminist and more generally democratic sense – to more fully develop a concept of democratic impatience.     

Georgii Mirskii and Soviet Theories of Authoritarian Modernization

This article examines Soviet thinking about authoritarian modernization through the life and thought of Georgii Mirskii, a noted expert on Arab politics. Mirskii was a regular adviser and speechwriter for the Soviet Central Committee, and was also followed by the KGB for his criticism of Stalin. In the late 1950s and early 1960s, Mirskii looked to the example of Egyptian leader Gamal Abdul Nasser to develop a theory of military-led modernization. This article examines how Mirskii's faith in the ability of Third World militaries to function as modernizing forces changed over time. The course of military politics in the Third World during the 1970s and 1980s, when military coups proliferated, bringing to power violent and self-interested regimes, disabused Mirskii of any faith in military modernization. Examining Mirskii's thought not only sheds light on the ideas that motivated Khrushchev-era Soviet foreign and development policy, it also provides an illuminating comparison for better-studied theories of authoritarian modernization in the United States.     

Mixed messages: youth participation and democratic practice

The article begins by observing that, over the last decade, the idea of youth participation has once more become a popular part of contemporary political talk both in Australia and in many Western societies. Indeed most Western governments now advocate enhanced youth participation as part of a discourse about modern citizenship, so much so that it has become a policy cliché to say ‘increased youth participation’ will ‘empower’ young people, help build community and remedy a range of social problems. It is also noted that, if the idea of participation itself is an old idea central to the liberal democratic tradition, the current ‘rediscovery’ of youth participation is arguably part of that political orthodoxy. Drawing on selected State, national and Commonwealth government youth documents, the question is asked whether the official enthusiasm for youth participation has much to do with democratic practice. It is argued that the recent government enthusiasm for youth participation is problematic for three reasons. First, it fails to recognise the significant obstacles that young people currently experience when trying to participate socially, economically and politically. Second, there is a failure to think through what democratic practice requires. Third, both the conceptualisation and operationalisation of official youth participation policies reveal an agenda that is seriously at odds with the rhetoric of democratic participation. This raises questions about whose voice is actually being heard and to what effect.

A litmus test of any government, however it may describe itself, is its treatment of children. (Yakovlev 2003 Yakovlev A 2003 A Century of Violence in the Soviet Union New Haven, CT: Yale University Press  [Google Scholar], 33)     

Democratisation: Antidemocratic and democratic elements in the political culture of China

The nature of the political culture itself is often seen by commentators as the cause of democracy failing to take root in China; the antidemocratic elements of that culture being overemphasised while the democratic elements are underemphasised. This paper examines the application of the ideas of democratic culture in China to the current state of play, including the possibility of the democratic card being played by factions within the Chinese Communist Parry (CCP). There are indeed cultural problems associated with Chinese democratisation such as cultural anomie, unconscious authoritarian personalities, the legacy of egalitarianism, the radical polarisation of Chinese culture, difficulties of institutional compromise and the irrational control of aggression and fear. While the antidemocratic culture is stronger at present than the democratic culture, the new Chinese democratic culture is likely to gather strength in the future.     

Wolfgang Streeck's conception of the crisis-phase of democratic politics: a post-Keynesian critique

Depictions of the politics of crisis in advanced societies (what crisis is and what can be done) continue to pit different strands of political science and heterodox political economy against each other. Economic sociologist Wolfgang Streeck's contributions to these controversies have emphasised ‘embeddedness’, or the need for economies to incorporate non-functional or deliberated elements which allow functional and market-focused processes to play themselves out. Streeck's recent writings on debt-induced crisis nonetheless accept too much orthodox liberal disquiet: most fatefully, a contempt for politics based on what seems to be an untenable assertion – that rich societies have hit the limits of their capacity to increase taxation. Capitalism has entered an ‘end point’, he claims. This article presents, again, contrary evidence and offers suggestions for a revised heterodox understanding of capitalism's current malaise.     

Giuseppe Mazzini and the democratic logic of nationalism

ABSTRACT. This article brings the thought of Giuseppe Mazzini back into the field of nationalism studies, from which it has been largely missing for a half century. It suggests the following: that Mazzini is much more modern and secular than he is usually portrayed; and that his commitment to liberal policies while rejecting liberal principles suggests that the distinction between civic and ethnic nationalism has been misconceived. Nationalism, to Mazzini, was not an end in itself but a means to an end – government of, by and for the people. The demand for such a government was manifested in three popular demands in nineteenth‐century Europe: in the West as democracy, in the East as national sovereignty (the precondition for democracy) and in both East and West as social democracy. Thus nationalism may be instrumental rather than an end in itself, and it may be attributable not to ethnic groups' natural striving for autonomy but to the pursuit of democracy.