The People's Climate March: Environmental populism as political genre

Contemporary political ecological research on populism has demonstrated how authoritarian and strongarm tactics come to be hitched to reductive symbolic representations of “the people,” often with disastrous environmental impacts. Advocates of “left-populism” argue that such research can give the erroneous impression that “populism” and “authoritarianism” are essentially synonymous. Skeptical of formalist arguments, Gramscians argue that populism, as a quite variegated and fundamentally spatial phenomenon, must be viewed historically, in situ. But all three arguments share a quick assessment of populism, without always attending to its embedded multiplicity. Bringing together insights from Stuart Hall and Lauren Berlant, this article seeks to expand geographical understandings of the dynamic forms and styles of environmental politics by proposing thinking of populism as a political genre. This theoretical schema helps to cut through formalist versus historicist debates while directing attention to the affective scenes through which populism is performed. In order to demonstrate the utility of examining populism's genre and scenes, I examine political essays written surrounding the 2014 People’s Climate March. Essays debated activist expectations concerning political subjectivity, tactics, scales of action, signifiers, and aesthetics for best confronting global inequality and the climate crisis alike. Through contesting the meaning of “the people” and “populism,” divergent leftist political interpretations both repeated and tweaked generic populist forms. By examining the performative construction and contestation of “the people” through languages and spaces of climate action, I advocate a humble yet still critical political ecological approach to understanding contemporary populism.     

拉美研究中的民众主义:概念含义的演变

西方拉美学界对于民众主义这一概念的含义的界定发生过较大的变化。早期现代化理论学者和依附论学者强调民众主义概念的社会经济特征和历史阶段性特征,西方自由主义经济学界将民众主义界定为一种特定的经济政策。80年代以后,这种界定方式受到实证与理论上的双重挑战,于是,有的学者将民众主义界定为一种政治策略。这一修正使得这一概念可以用来解释80年代以后拉美政治发展的新现实,因而是有价值的。     

Golden age,apathy or stealth? Democratic engagement in Britain, 1945–1950

This article revisits democratic engagement in post-war Britain in a context of debates about political disaffection in the current period. The study systematically reanalysed volunteer writing in the Mass Observation Archive and represents a significant methodological advance on previous studies. Little evidence was found to support common existing interpretations: whether ‘golden age’ narratives of deference to authority, partisan alignment and high voter turnout or revisionist accounts of apathy. Instead, evidence was found of something akin to what Hibbing and Theiss-Morse call ‘stealth democracy’. Citizens thought democracy to be important and felt a duty to vote, but wished for government by experts in the national interest. This ‘stealth’ interpretation builds on existing studies of duty, populism and expertise in twentieth-century Britain. It helps to move discussion of democratic engagement after the Second World War beyond the binaries of self/collective and private/public, and to explain the paradox of high voter turnout in a context of hostility to party politics. It also promises to inform debates about declining political support in the current period.     

On the Tragedy of the Modern Condition: The ‘Theologico-Political Problem’ in Carl Schmitt,Leo Strauss,and Hannah Arendt

This article addresses Eric L. Santner’s claim that “there is more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought” by analyzing the “theologico-political problem” in the work of three prominent twentieth-century political thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt share a preoccupation with the crisis of modern political liberalism and confront the theologico-political problem in a similar spirit: although their responses differ dramatically, their individual accounts dwell on the absence of incontestable principles in modern society that can justify life-in-common and the persistence of the political order. Their writings thus engage with the question of the place of “the absolute” in the political realm. In particular, Arendt’s indirect approach to the theologico-political problem is crucial to understanding the radicality of a political world in which traditional certainties can no longer be re-established. The theoretical trajectory I present suggests that the dispersion of political theology in everyday life has a specific corollary: modern politics operates within the tragic and paradoxical nature of its unstable and common origins that cannot be incorporated in exceptionalist versions of the body politic.     

A Textual Ethnography of Collaboration in Early Sámi Studies

This is an ethnographic study of collaboration for publishing textual representations of the Sámi based on ethnographic experience that reflect acquisition of agency and contingent intertextuality. The textual ethnography unravels early twentieth-century collaborative frameworks in which the investigated works were generated and their historical context. Consequently, my paper proposes to re-evaluate the role and impact of the ethnographic writing by Emilie Demant Hatt in addition to her collaboration with Johan Turi. This entails an exploration into personal histories and relationships, gendered ramifications, intellectual and political context, the creative process, the contingent editorial activities and their reception histories.     

Populism during the period of the 1911 Revolution

Russian populism spread in China at the turn of the twentieth century in the name of anarchism, nihilism, and socialism, and gradually contributed to the formation of modern Chinese populism. Populism around the time of the 1911 Revolution had two characteristics: one was its deep hatred of capitalism which regarded capitalism as an ugly, decadent, and regressive historical phenomenon; the other characteristic was an attempt to get around the developmental stage of capitalism in order to proceed directly into socialism. Compared with Russian populism, modern Chinese populism did not have well-organized proponents, nor did it have any systemic system of populist political thought. It manifested itself more as a populist intellectual tendency without a strong self-awareness. Agrarian civilization and Confucianism provided the hotbed for populism, and a superficial understanding of Western capitalism was the main cultural drive that bred populism. The most important feature of modern Chinese populism was the fantasy of leaping from a backward agrarian country into socialism by surpassing capitalist industrialization.     

Authoritarian Neoliberalism,Radical Conservatism and Social Policy within the European Union: Croatia,Hungary and Poland

Exploring political and social policy developments in Croatia, Hungary and Poland, three EU member states, this article addresses the hegemonic position of authoritarianism, populism, conservatism and neoliberalism, albeit articulated differently in each state. All three countries are marked by modes of governmentality that combine heteronormative familialism, repatriarchialization, nationalism, ethnicized demographic renewal and anti-immigrant sentiments. In each, a kind of layered social divestment is occurring, delivering a radical new vision of social reproduction and fundamental differentiations in terms of access to social citizenship between those seen as ‘deserving’ of support and those who are not, who are increasingly subjected to disciplinary measures. Although the degree of welfare retrenchment varies across the cases, the radical nature of restructuring, breaking down traditional notions of left and right on welfare, is suggestive of longer-term restructurings not reliant on individual politicians or parties.     

The secessionist spectre: the influence of authoritarianism,nativism and populism on support for Quebec independence

In recent years, Quebec has been undergoing a re‐evaluation of immigration and integration policies. The secessionist Parti Québécois had become the leader of this debate, which also coincided with a rise of right‐wing nativist, populist and sometimes authoritarian movements in other Western societies. This paper aims to evaluate the similarity or dissimilarity of Quebec's nationalism to these other nationalisms. We use the 2015 Canadian Election Study data to explore the influence of authoritarianism, nativism and populism directly on support for secession and also, indirectly, on voting intentions. We find that authoritarianism has a negative influence on support for Quebec independence and independentist parties, while the pattern is the opposite, and the effects somewhat weaker, for nativism and populism. Hence, we argue that Quebec nationalism does not seem to correlate with the right‐wing populist movement extending throughout many Western societies. Thus, Quebec nationalism was shown to be a distinct form of nationalism.     

Brown Britain: post‐colonial politics and grand strategy

How do we approach the subject of British grand strategy today? This article seeks a new approach to this question. It argues that there is a gap of grand strategic significance between actually‐existing Britain and the Britain its political elites tend to imagine. The colonial and imperial histories that helped constitute and still shape the contemporary United Kingdom have fallen through this gap. One consequence is a grand strategic vision limited to a choice of partner in decline—Europe or the US. Overlooked are the power political potentialities of post‐colonial generations situated in multiple sites at home and abroad. In search of this potential, we lay the conceptual basis for a strategic project in which the British ‘island subject’ is replaced by a globally networked community of fate: ‘Brown Britain’. This entails reimagining the referent object of British strategy through diaspora economies, diverse histories and pluralized systems of agency. What might such a post‐colonial strategy entail for British policy? We offer initial thoughts and reflect on the often occluded social and political theoretic content of strategic thought.     

Connections between populism and nationalism: Evidence from Jair Bolsonaro's speeches

Recent studies have warned about the close relationship between populism and nationalism. This article offers an empirical contribution to the examination of this relationship by analysing the presence of populist and nationalist elements in the official speeches of the outgoing Brazilian president Jair Bolsonaro. We make two contributions to this expanding literature. First, we show that the supposed ambiguity between populism and nationalism can be resolved by an approach that clearly separates the two concepts. Second, we find that Bolsonaro is more populist than nationalist. His populism has elements in common with other European populist leaders (attacking political parties and the political class), but he distances himself from them by presenting authoritarian traits. Nativism is completely absent (unlike in Europe), but ‘sovereignism’ (‘us’ vs. ‘other nations or institutions’) and ‘civilisationism’ (‘us’ vs. ‘minorities’) sometimes overlap with populism. We conclude that a tension exists between populism and nationalism that can endanger the ‘good’ relationship between the populist leader and their supporters. This is something that future research on populism should consider.     

Translating the Word: Dialogism and Debate in Two Gikuyu Dictionaries

Much of the literature on missionaries and translation in colonial Africa has tended to view missionary or colonial authored texts (Bibles, dictionaries, and grammars in particular) as instruments through which foreign ways of thinking were imposed upon unsuspecting Africans. In a detailed comparison of two Gikuyu dictionaries—one authored by an Anglican missionary and the other by a Presbyterian missionary some ten years later—this article locates significant contradictions in meanings, particularly in words associated with religion and authority. By situating these contradictions within the social history of early twentieth-century Gikuyuland, the author is able to demonstrate that these contradictions are not "mistakes"; rather, such inconsistencies evidence the complex ontological and political debates provoked out of early evangelistic activity. For the author, who draws theoretical insight from Homi Bhabha and M. M. Bakhtin, mission texts like dictionaries are fundamentally dialogical, the product of sustained and contentious conversations between missionaries and African interlocutors. Thus, they not only shaped Gikuyu life, as earlier scholarship contended, but were profoundly shaped bycontemporary Gikuyu debates over religion, power, and authority.     

European Values and the Asylum Crisis

This article examines the threat to European liberal democratic values posed by the current asylum crisis. Drawing on a historical analysis of European asylum policies, it examines the origins of the post-Second World War refugee regime and the sources of the current challenge to its liberal universalist premises. The argument discerns two dominant forms of critique of the liberal model in twentieth-century debates on refugee policy: welfare protectionist nationalism, and ethno-centric or racist nationalism. Both of these justifications for restricting asylum have resurfaced in contemporary debates, used by—respectively—centre-left and far right parties. Having considered why these arguments have resurfaced, the article suggests three scenarios for future European responses to the asylum crisis and their implications for liberal universalist values. It argues that the liberal approach can only be sustained through more effective EU burden-sharing and the reorientation of EU external policies to incorporate refugee and migration issues.     

The historical dynamics of ethnic conflicts: confrontational nationalisms,democracy and the Basques in contemporary Spain*

ABSTRACT. All the historical moments in which the Basque debate reached political protagonism in contemporary Spain coincided with political contexts of institutional democratisation. The debate on patriotism in the Basque Country is connected with a uniform narrative regarding the Basques and their moral distance from the Spanish nation: the ‘Basque problem’. This narrative has fostered a confrontational discourse between Spanish and Basque nationalism. It has also promoted recourse to specific stereotypical images of the Basques, which bind ethnicity to collective identity. Such representations reveal that the invention of the Basque country as a uniform ethnic collective had much more to do with the internal contradictions of Spanish national identity – and later of Basque identity – than with the existence of a secular conflict between Basques and Spaniards. The Basque case shows that every ‘ethnic conflict’ requires adequate contextualisation in order to avoid simplifying its origins and past pathways to make it conform to present uses.     

Populism and nationalism

Few social science categories have been more heatedly contested in recent years than ‘populism’. One focus of debate concerns the relation between populism and nationalism. Criticising the tendency to conflate populism and nationalism, De Cleen and Stavrakakis argue for a sharp conceptual distinction between the two. They situate populist discourse on a vertical, and nationalist discourse on a horizontal axis. I argue that this strict conceptual separation cannot capture the productive ambiguity of populist appeals to ‘the people’, evoking at once plebs, sovereign demos and bounded community. The frame of reference for populist discourse is most fruitfully understood as a two‐dimensional space, at once a space of inequality and a space of difference. Vertical opposition to those on top (and often those on the bottom) and horizontal opposition to those outside are tightly interwoven, generally in such a way that economic, political and cultural elites are represented as being ‘outside’ as well as ‘on top’. The ambiguity and two‐dimensionality of appeals to ‘the people’ do not result from the conflation of populism and nationalism; they are a constitutive feature of populism itself, a practical resource that can be exploited in constructing political identities and defining lines of political opposition and conflict.     

实事求是是唯物史观的基本原则——以“五种社会形态理论”为中心的探讨

是否遵循实事求是的方法论原则,是判定唯物史观还是唯心史观的根本标志,也是二者判然有别的分水岭。唯物史观不以任何先验的东西为前提,唯心史观则相反。凡是不遵循实事求是方法论原则乃至有意违反这一原则的历史观,毫无疑问一定是唯心史观,而绝非唯物史观。根据实事求是原则去考察历史,符合过去人们所理解的五种社会形态理论本来所规定的意义和内涵,因生产力不断发展而导致五种社会形态依次演进更替的例子,在人类历史上并不存在。     

The world of medieval learning

Karl Kautsky's writings on the French Revolution were crucial to the construction not only of the Marxist interpretation of the Revolution, which was perhaps the most important reference point for the historiography of that event during the 20th century, but even of Marxism itself as a comprehensive, systematic theory partly based on historical studies. However, these writings have been neglected and practically forgotten for decades, mainly because of the general rejection of Kautsky's theories after the October Revolution of 1917, in Marxist as well as non-Marxist circles.

Studying these writings, spanning roughly four decades from 1889 till 1930, we may see dynamic interrelations between historical study, theory construction and contemporary political intervention. Kautsky's approach to such key Marxist concepts as class and state prove to be much more subtle and nuanced than what has commonly been assumed, incorporating the results of historical study rather than pure social theory. Yet, his account does contain important internal tensions and contradictions between agency and objective conditions and between the historical material and the normative and political perspective of the historiographer. Several of these internal tensions were carried on into mainstream Marxist accounts of the Revolution, with important historiographical as well as political consequences.     

The persistence of the rural idyll: peasant imagery,social change and nationalism in Spain 1939–1978

In this article the authors propose a historical analysis of the role of romantic rural imagery in the Spanish (state and peripheral) re-nationalization processes during the Franco dictatorship through the scope of the political and identity meanings assigned to it. Their goal is to better comprehend twentieth-century Spain by examining the use (and abuse) of the rural imaginary by Spanish, Basque and Galician nationalisms, particularly during the time of the totalitarian regime of General Franco, giving special attention to the cultural loans between the ideological (and national) blocs traditionally interpreted as monolithic and irreconcilable: Francoism (1936–1975) and its political opposition.     

The Secret History of TANU: Rumor,Historiography and Muslim Unrest in Contemporary Dar Es Salaam

This article explores historical rumors and narratives told by Muslims of Dar es Salaam, contending that Julius Nyerere, TANU founder and first president of independent Tanzania, was an inexperienced schoolteacher thrust into the role of political activist through sponsorship of the Muslim community. This history was allegedly hidden by the current government to cover up not only Nyerere’s meteoric rise to a position of leadership, but also subsequent actions that wrested the movement from Muslims and other early TANU leaders to monopolize power for himself and upcountry elites. Just as academic historians critique the teleological trajectory of many nationalist histories, these rumors critique Tanzanian nationalist history through appropriating its historiographic form to forefront postcolonial grievances. The discursive nature of such rumors articulates the discontent permeating the postcolonial Muslim community of Dar es Salaam. And as political speech in action, rumors are instrumental in mobilizing new postcolonial political configurations.     

Ann-Cathrin Jarl,In Justice: Women and Global Economics

Abstract

The dialectical relationship between religious and political extremism is one of the most powerful forces in the history of the Christian tradition. Two specific moments have seen a combination of the political and the religious in ways that completely transformed the religion, and the contexts in which it grew and transformed: the sixteenth-century Protestant reformation and the twentieth-century women's movement in the United States were simultaneously products and producers of political theology. A focused study of these eras leads to a proposal about two of the leading figures in the movements: Martin Luther and Mary Daly are political theologians. This label allows a comparative study of the two that leads to significant conclusions for scholars of either era, and of either theologian. We find in this unlikely comparison two reformations that shape part of the tradition that they challenge.     

Party Interests,Public Opinion and Institutional Preferences: Electoral System Change in New Zealand

Explanations of the origins of electoral systems tend to rely heavily on rational choice assumptions: essentially the common sense inference that political parties prefer electoral arrangements that promote their interests. Accounts of electoral system change in New Zealand support either a partisan interest interpretation on the basis of survey evidence from voters, or point to other deeper causes in historical, institutional and cultural phenomena. Using survey data from the 1993 referendum, covering both voters and political party elites, we seek to reconcile these approaches by establishing the limits of the party interest approach. We construct an argument which also stresses the effects of cultural and institutional variables-most notably, many New Zealanders' frustrated expectations that governments be accountable between elections as well as on election day, and their hopes that multi-party government may facilitate such accountability.