Civic Governmentality: The Politics of Inclusion in Beirut and Mumbai

Abstract:  This article is concerned with the politics of inclusion. It analyzes the institutionalization of participatory citizenship as the formation of regimes of "civic governmentality". Through the study of key civil society organizations such as SPARC and Hezbollah, it studies three dimensions of civic governmentality: an infrastructure of populist mediation; technologies of governing (for example, knowledge production); and norms of self-rule (for example, concepts of civility and civicness). However, such regimes of civic governmentality operate within frontiers of urban renewal and indeed often facilitate and manage such types of development. The article examines the limits and contradictions of the politics of inclusion in the context of the bourgeois city and also studies radical forms of citizenship that emerge to challenge these limits.     

Regionalism, Regional Structures and Security Management in Central Asia

The security dimension of regionalism and regional structures in Central Asia and Azerbaijan has been limited by Russia's influence as a regional hegemon, aswell as by various other constraints specific to the region and the local states. Moreover, as a peripheral zone in the world system, Central Eurasia has not shown much evidence of regionalization as a process. But in response to the proximity of hegemonic power the smaller states have tried to adopt bandwagoning and balancing strategies in regional formats. Although their fixation on 'regime security' has encouraged them to accommodate Russia through CIS structures, this is changing as new bilateral security relationships develop with the United States. The Russian-sponsored Collective Security Treaty Organization is unable to address the most serious challenges for regional security management in Central Asia. Yet the local states have been unable on their own to establish a regional security consensus and to institutionalize cooperation on that basis. The diffuse GUUAM grouping (Georgia, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan and Moldova) has not offered a basis for selfsustaining regional security cooperation. The Shanghai Cooperation Organization has created a venue to engage China in the security dialogue on Central Asia, particularly over counterterrorism, but has otherwise failed to tackle security challenges among and within the Central Asian states. Overall, the current focus of these states and their sponsors on bilateral relations to provide security assistance continues to displace security-related regionalism.     

Nationalism,primitivism and the golden age in Othon Friesz's Autumn Work (1908)*

Abstract. This paper focuses on a detailed analysis of the Fauve artist Othon Friesz's painting Autumn Work (1908) within the contextual juncture of nationalism and primitivism. The painting occupies a unique position within this framework as it elucidates a point a convergence between nationalist ideologies and the primitivist turn towards peasant cultures as a repository of the past. This interpretation also identifies how Friesz's fusion of the Virgilian golden age with the contemporary, rural myth disrupts the Self/Other framework of primitivism via the lens of national identity. Friesz's employment of classically influenced and avant‐grade aesthetics further underscores the ways in which the painting references not only his personal artistic negotiation between tradition and modernity, but also the significance of ancestral myths and temporal oppositions in both nationalist and primitivist discourse.     

The New South Wales Labor Party's 1927 Rules: A case study of democracy and oligarchy within political parties

Scholars have long recognised a propensity towards oligarchy within political parties. I explore this tendency through an examination of the New South Wales (NSW) Labor Party's 1927 Rules. These reforms are important because, by significantly decentralising power within the party, they demonstrate how the inclination towards oligarchy can be resisted. The adoption of the 1927 Rules, however, also coincided with the increasing centralisation of power in the hands of NSW Labor leader Jack Lang and his allies. This occurred largely in spite of the new rules, not because of them. It was able to happen, however, because the reforms sustained a crucial democratic flaw in the party constitution in that they continued to give excessive power to the leaders of affiliated trade unions.

学者们很早就注意到政党内的寡头化倾向。本文通过对新南威尔士1927年规则的研究,探讨了这种倾向。改革之所以重要,就在于它在党内分散了权力,在于改革表明了寡头化的倾向可以得到遏制。不过,1927规则通过的同时,权力也越发向新南威尔士工党首领杰克郎及其支持者的手里集中。1927规则没能阻止集权,而不是导致了集权。集权之所以发生,是因为改革在党章中保留了一个至关重要的民主弊端,即给予相关工会领导人过大的权力。