A Christian Islamist?

Abstract

In this review, the author discusses Volf’s paradigm from an Islamic perspective, and compares and contrasts some of Volf’s assertions with those of his avowed counterpart: the Muslim fundamentalist Syed Qutb. Some interesting questions are raised, and the differences between these two paradigms, it is claimed, is not as great as what might initially appear.     

THE THERAPEUTIC STATE

State subsidy for the arts in Britain has been determined by a variety of political and social factors over the last two hundred years. This article examines the recent emergence of a therapeutic ethos that has come to shape arts policy in the United Kingdom. It begins with a survey of existing literature describing a shift in Britain’s arts policy since the 1970s. It examines the limitations of existing explanations and suggests another explanatory factor – the growing valorisation of the arts as a therapeutic tool to address social problems. This can be seen in two historically convergent trends: the challenge to cultural authority through the emergence of a therapeutic understanding of creativity, and the reorientation of political activism around issues of culture and wellbeing. Finally, the article considers how and why these ideas became institutionalised in Britain’s main arts policy body – the Arts Council.     

The role of museums of contemporary art in the re‐telling of historical accounts in Lithuania and Latvia

Museums of History and Art provide accounts of the past and the transition of nations into their current situation. They follow a certain line of interpretation of past events which reflect the dominant belief system in a nation. These narratives told in this process leave room for interpretation. Which particular string of the available narratives is followed while neglecting the others, and is influenced by the current self‐understanding of a nation and its political considerations. Latvia and Lithuania, two Baltic Nations, were planning to set up museums of contemporary art in 2009 and in 2011, respectively. Due to the financial crisis at this time, however, both projects have been put on hold. Based on interviews with key personnel and experts, the paper shows how the museums in both countries interpret their Soviet past and align it with the new European master narratives.     

A centralised market orientation: the implicit determinants of Finnish cultural policy in 1990–2010

This article examines the reactions of Finnish cultural policy to the neoliberal turn in its societal environment. The analysis of cultural policy documents in 1990–2010 concentrates on three particular elements of societal change: the reforms in public management, the reorientations in international relations and the paradigm of immaterial production. It is argued here that besides the mythical democratic pluralism of the Nordic welfare states, cultural policy treats newcomers to the political arena selectively. Consequently, the system, constructed originally for protecting free artistic expression and equal distribution of cultural possibilities, has been in the front line of political market orientation in Finland. The orientation is modelled rhetorically after the ideas of cultural pluralism and economic efficiency; in practice, the fight has been a technocratic one between different notions of governmental responsibilities. This mechanism stresses formal procedures at the expense of ad hoc negotiations, leading to a centralised market orientation.     

The Threefold Logic of Papua‐Melanesia: Constitution‐writing in the Margins of the Indonesian Nation‐State

Clashes over the status of West Papua and the political future of the territory proliferated markedly following the end of Indonesia's New Order regime in 1998. Amid a wide variety of demands for justice and independence, and a series of demonstrations, mass gatherings and prayers, only a few Papuans mused on how Papua could become a state and what would constitute its nature as being distinctly Papuan and/or Melanesian. One exception is the work put into the Constitution for West Papua entitled Basic Guidelines, State of West Papua, a document edited by Don A.L. Flassy, a bureaucrat, writer and thinker, with a preface by late Theys H. Eluay, then chairman of the Papuan Council. In this article I analyse this Constitution to show how a combination of Christianity and local customs, and a mimicry of elements of Indonesian nation building and symbols of the Indonesian nation‐state are reshaped to oppose Indonesian nation‐building agendas. The Constitution shows that when Papuans imagine an independent state, forms of vernacular legality play a central role. ‘The state’ has journeyed to Papua and encouraged faith in ‘the law,’ and Basic Guidelines is partly the effect of this growing vernacular legality. My analysis shows that it is essential to see how legal mobilisations and imaginations of the state articulate with other normative systems and practices – in particular Christianity and custom (adat) – and how they mutually allow for and invite strategies.     

Resistance,Symbolism and the Language of Stateness in Timor‐Leste

On gaining independence in 2002 after a protracted struggle against Indonesian occupation, the sovereign Timor‐Leste state began to assert its sovereignty in a range of discursive and expressive media. These assertions developed a distinct ‘language of stateness’ that is the focus of this article. This East Timorese expression of state sovereignty draws heavily on the legacy of the Timorese resistance struggle and on a variety of other sources of symbolic power such as flags, buildings, logos, and uniforms. Yet these efforts have been contested by a range of non‐state actors in Timor‐Leste and the shape that this language of stateness has taken now evokes complaints from martial arts groups (MAGs), ritual arts groups (RAGs), and veterans' organisations that seek to ‘become like the state’ themselves, and who also employ a ‘national language of stateness’ in the form of flags, graffiti, and official buildings. While not challenging the idea of an independent East Timorese state per se, these groups question the prerogative of the state to use and define the language of stateness. In this article I explore the way the state and its challengers use ‘languages of stateness’ and how this shapes their ambivalent stance vis‐à‐vis each other, with both sides often drawing upon a discourse of the fulfilment of the millenarian promises that have for a long time been tied to the achievement of independence.     

Reconceptualizing Resistance: Residuals of the State and Democratic Radical Pluralism

Abstract: Arguing that resistance to the state is too narrow a conceptualization of a political project that challenges neoliberalism, we posit that there are latent, residual apparatuses of the state which can be activated as part of a systematic progressive politics. We examine Massachusetts’“Dover amendment”, a legal framework which governs group home siting throughout the state. Dover offers a powerful tool with which to resist a neoliberal socio‐spatial agenda, though it has been underutilized toward enabling an alternative landscape. We analyze how and why Dover has often remained latent as a tool for socio‐spatial resistance, and consider a provocative case in Framingham, Massachusetts that suggests how residual state apparatuses may be leveraged in support of an explicitly resistive, progressive agenda.     

Neoliberalising the Fordist University: A Tale of Two Campuses in Frankfurt a. M., Germany

Abstract: In 2009, the central building of the new IG Farben Campus of Johann Wolfgang Goethe University (JWGU), Frankfurt, Germany was occupied by students protesting against the neoliberalisation of higher education. While similar occupations at the old Bockenheim Campus were usually tolerated, if not welcomed, by the university management, this time 176 students and members of staff were forcefully evicted after only 3 days, when the university's presidential board called in the police. To better understand this way of ending such protest, a level of oppression almost unheard of at a German university in the last 20 years, we reconstruct the way in which JWGU, as part of the state apparatus university, has produced the two campuses as particular places that are bound up in and expressions of the national and local condensations of forces of Fordism and neoliberalism respectively.     

Recent Books in the Field of Mediaeval Literature

In the Cantigas de Santa María, King Alfonso X unveils an intricate cultural, political, and economic system that defines the relationship between Christian society and religious minorities. This article illustrates that the Cantigas must be understood as an ideological instrument of cultural codification that reaffirms the established Christian social order in relation to three principal groups: heretics, Jews, and Muslims.     

Two AHA Sessions: The Revolutionary Mr. Kuhn and the Evolutionary Mr. Bertalanffy

Abstract

Quantitative methods of content analysis have become established in most subfields of political science, but remain relatively unutilized in studies of political theory, despite the exclusive focus of that subfield on textual sources. This article develops a variation of content analysis—termed usage analysis—and employs it to resolve a standing debate in scholarship on Cicero's political theory regarding the synonymy of the major Latin terms for the state (civitas and res publica). The resulting distinction between these concepts then informs an exposition of Cicero's ideal state not as the Roman Republic itself or the mixed constitution alone, but as a universal, everlasting political society supported by justice, a mixed constitution, and active citizenship.