Ian Hunter's Civil Philosophy

Summary

Ian Hunter's normative commitment is to civil philosophy. His sustained critique of metaphysical philosophy is to be understood in the context of his proposition that civil and moral philosophy are at war. Since civil philosophy is the only guarantor of social peace, the stakes are high.     

State Response to Contemporary Urban Movements in Turkey: A Critical Overview of State Entrepreneurialism and Authoritarian Interventions

This paper grapples with the state's response to contemporary urban movements. In light of recent debates on the changing nature of urban movements, it presents an overview of the responses of states in different modes of regulation, ranging from a Keynesian regime to sequential stages of neoliberalisation. Examples of authoritarianism and the entrepreneurial roles of the state are drawn from the Turkish experience to show how economic liberalism can be combined with increasing social control, restrictions, penalisation and exclusion. Reviewing Turkish urban policies and practice, the urban mobilisations against them, and the varying positions of the state will shed light not only on what is happening in Turkey but also on the transformative nature of neoliberalisation. © 2013 The Author Antipode© 2013 Antipode Foundation Ltd.     

The Hollowing Out of Brazilian Metropolitan Governance As We Know It: Restructuring and Rescaling the Developmental State in Metropolitan Space

Despite regulatory and financial rollout of the state at a number of scales, and a strengthening of the institutional framework that guides territorial planning and management, Brazilian metropolitan governance continues to be characterized by fragmented and relatively competitive organizational structures. Likewise, the Brazilian metropolis is marked by economic dynamism and intense socio‐spatial and environmental contradictions. Much of the mainstream literature on metropolitan governance has emphasized a natural “optimum” scale for planning and management in city‐regions, articulated by public and private stakeholders aimed at the coordinated delivery of economic, social and environmental services. Combining the literature on new state spaces and critical Brazilian urban‐regional studies, this paper provides an alternative framework to understand the impasse of Brazilian metropolitan areas, which is grounded within a geo‐historic reading of the contradictory projects and strategies of the developmental state and the contested nature of metropolitan scale itself.     

How Finance Penetrates its Other: A Cautionary Tale on the Financialization of a Dutch University

If any organization ought to be immune to the forces of financialization, it is a publicly funded university in corporatist Europe. Shielded from the intrusion by financial metrics, values and professionals through a strong historically rooted tradition of self‐management by powerful professional guilds, continental universities should largely have avoided the marketization and managerialization of Anglophone universities. Not so, this case study of a Dutch public university suggests. From 1995 onwards, a shift in real estate management—devolving responsibilities from the Dutch state to universities—served as a Trojan horse for financialization, triggering changes in organizational culture and a power shift from teaching and research professionals to accountants, real‐estate developers, financiers and their ilk. This case suggests that the power of finance is such that no societal domain is immune. The paper ends with a call for more non‐metropolitan case studies of financialization and argues that the only hope for salvation is a more self‐conscious defense of traditional academic values by the guardians of higher learning themselves.     

Making and Breaking the Aboriginal Remote: Realities,Languages, Tomorrows (A Commentary)

The concept of ‘remote’ has intensified a fundamental misunderstanding of widespread rural Aboriginal situations. More, it has served to mask the causality for current problems, which will remain intractable until causality is effectively addressed. This commentary re‐examines how ‘remote’ is produced, both by and within the dominant state and society and, by means of a reconsideration of demand sharing and long‐distance travel, from and within Aboriginal communities. On that basis new kinds of confrontational engagements with the production of remote are suggested.     

Standardizing the state while integrating the frontier: the Chilean telegraph system in the Araucanía, 1870–1900

Beginning in 1870, the Chilean government built a telegraph network to support its conquest of the Mapuche people of the Araucanía, a region on its southern frontier. The telegraph not only facilitated military domination of the Mapuche, but also served to bring, first, army commanders and, later, civilian regional governors under more direct control from the capital. As this new technology was introduced, army commanders and telegraph officials each fought to control the frontier telegraph lines. This conflict, and a rapid but partial victory by the civilian telegraph specialists, demonstrates the role of the telegraph in making state services run by expert civilian professionals into an important part of and defining characteristic of the Chilean state by 1900.     

《金史》“篡改开国史”辨北大核心CSSCI

《金史》记载的金朝开国史是信史。“都勃极烈”不是金建国后女真国主的称号,而是生女真进入高级酋邦阶段后大酋长的称号。阿骨打建国之初只求民族自立,并没有灭辽的宏图,宋人文献称阿骨打是接受了杨朴“图霸天下,谋为万乘之国”的建议,才称帝建国的说法,既不符合金建国前后女真人的政治生态,也不符合杨朴的身份,当是宋人的演绎。在金向辽请求册封过程中杨朴的事迹是真实的,《金史》对此并未隐匿。宋晁公迈《历代纪年》成书早于《太祖实录》,明确记载金初存在“收国”年号。《太祖实录》没有虚构和编造金朝建国时间、国号、年号,据此撰写的《金史》没有篡改开国史。     

Floods,communal conflict and the role of local state institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa

Does the occurrence of flood disaster increase the risk of communal conflict and if so, does trust in state political institutions mitigate the adverse effect? This study addresses these questions by studying the intervening effect of trust in local governmental institutions at a sub-national level. The effect of flood disasters on the risk of communal violence is expected to be contingent on peoples’ trust that local political structures are able to address potential disputes between groups. Violent conflicts, in that sense, are neither inevitable nor directly determined by the occurrence of disasters. They largely depend on the context of a given society and political response to these external shocks. To test this expectation, the study uses survey data on trust in local state institutions in Sub-Saharan Africa from the Afrobarometer (2005–2018), combined with geo-referenced communal conflict and flood data. In line with theoretical expectations, results suggest that flood disasters are associated with communal violence only for administrative districts that are governed by distrusted local state institutions. Conversely, flood disasters tend to be negatively associated with the risk of communal clashes in the presence of highly trusted local government councils and (especially) trusted judicial courts. Changing model specifications and estimation techniques produces similar results. An out-of-sample cross-validation also shows that accounting for political variables, in addition to flood disasters, improves the predictive performance of the model.     

非政府组织如何影响中国在柬埔寨投资项目？——基于地缘社会的解析

随着中国对外交流的日益频繁和“一带一路”倡议对“民心相通”的强调,针对地缘社会中各种行为体的研究需求愈发迫切。柬埔寨被认为是“一带一路”国际合作的新样板,但中国在此的项目也并非一帆风顺,地缘社会因素在其中发挥着重要作用,而非政府组织是当地地缘社会中的一个关键行为体和核心要素。因此,本文以柬埔寨的非政府组织为例,基于实地调研获取的观察和访谈以及二手文献资料和数据,考察中国在柬埔寨的柴阿润水电站项目中当地非政府组织的影响及其得以形成的机制因素。解析地缘社会环境可以帮助识别中国行为体在“走出去”过程中可能面临的社会风险因素,推动海外项目在当地社会顺利落地和融入。     

The Uses and Abuses of Amity in Mid-Tudor Diplomacy, 1542–1560

Abstract

Amity, an affective as well as pragmatic political relationship, was the primary mechanism of mid-Tudor foreign policy. It was often the first step toward a formal alliance, but it did not constitute a binding agreement in itself. In fact, political friendship’s inherent legal ambiguity allowed the Tudors to work around the strictures of existing international treaties when diplomatic circumstances changed and it became necessary to reevaluate relationships abroad. Amity’s flexibility could also limit its effectiveness as a collaborative partnership. This was especially the case if two parties challenged a consensus in the international community. In negotiating amity diplomats appealed to moral, affective, and contractual obligations simultaneously. They did not acknowledge any categorical difference between emotive personal friendship and utilitarian public amity. Rather, they asserted that loving friends at once promoted each other’s strategic advantage and growth in virtue. Friendship was ultimately grounded in mutual trust, which was established by personal encounters and reinforced through law and ritual. This essay considers the application of amity in Anglo-Imperial, Anglo-Schmalkalden, and Anglo-Scottish contexts in 1542–1560 as a basis for comparative analysis.