Scaling just transitions: Legitimation strategies in coal phase-out commissions in Canada and Germany

Climate change mitigation triggers both spatial and moral complexities, as demonstrated by the contentious issue of phasing out coal power. The success of the Paris Agreement depends on, among other things, the acceptability of climate policy measures and thus, from a moral perspective, on the ability to organize transition processes in ways that do not damage the livelihoods of workers, communities, and entire regions. Spatially, the unequal distributions of burdens and advantages of both climate change and respective mitigation measures provoke struggles over their legitimacy in contexts ranging from local to global. Phasing out coal mining and the respective power generation capacity thus triggers processes of structural transformation that cut across geographic scales, vertical levels of policy and politics, as well as sectoral boundaries.In light of the urgency of the climate crisis, countries such as Canada and Germany have established stakeholder-driven commissions to develop proposals for just transition pathways for phasing out coal production and consumption. We argue that these commissions are arenas in which spatial, moral, and sectoral (re-)negotiations materialize. Comparing the Canadian and German stakeholder commissions through expert interviews with their members, the article traces how governments use commissions to legitimize their transition policies. Expectations at different levels and from different actors in turn place commission members under pressure to justify their involvement and the outputs of the commissions. We find that the Canadian task force showed greater commitment to collecting and reflecting the needs of communities in its coal regions, and to communicating these to the federal government. In the German coal commission, legitimation strategies focused mainly on a broad representation of interests, and on government spending for affected regions, workers, and industries. In that case, a compromise was reached that satisfied most, but not all, of the diverse requirements.     

Sovereign Bodies: Ancestor Cult and State Legitimacy among the Incas

The worship of dead Inca kings, because it aimed at preserving the deceased's bodily integrity, reveals constituent aspects of royal personhood. Underpinning these practices was the conception that the dead's agency was conveyed through corporeal substances, which therefore required constant acts of sustenance. This paper examines the bodily practices and material substances that shaped the king's physical person during his lifetime, as well as after his death. These data show that the royal body was made conspicuous through a series of ritual and symbolic actions devised to display the king's faculty to infuse vital force to all living creatures under his rule he thus stood as the source of prosperity for his subjects with which he was engaged in reciprocal obligations of life sustenance. I argue that these “embodied technologies of power” shaped a system of representations that legitimated the king's appropriation of state resources.     

《晋书·载记》的正统观及其成因

《晋书》以"载记"之体记述十六国史,融伪史入正史,蕴涵着史家对十六国历史的肯定。它以东晋为正统,这一书法的形成,与其史料来源大有关系。唐初所存的十六国史,不少出于南北朝史官之手,尤其是《十六国春秋》和《三十国春秋》,皆黜十六国为僭伪,但同时又在书法上肯定其历史地位,其褒贬对《晋书·载记》正统观的形成都产生了重大影响。另外,《晋书》不以前凉、西凉二政权入"载记",其理据颇可怀疑,但它打破了正统与僭伪的界限,折射出南北统一、民族融合后的历史心理。     

The debate on the principle of legitimacy of power in France and Italy between 1815 and 1821

After the revolutionary storm, which had exported Jacobin democracy on the tips of its bayonets and after the epic deeds of the Napoleonic era, which, in the midst of remarkable contradictions, had asserted a number of principles and values of the French Revolution, the moderate or conservative liberal thinkers who wished for the introduction of a representative government and of personal freedom in France and in Italy were faced with the return of the old regime and with attempts of the Restoration to eradicate the reforms of the previous period. The only way these thinkers could save or restore parliamentary institutions and civil rights was to link their efforts to the destinies of the ruling dynasties. In both countries, this move was fiercely opposed, especially by reactionary writers. Hence, this essay will deal with the structure and contours of a debate which set two alignments in opposition, from the time of the Congress of Vienna to the Revolutions of 1820-21 and hinged on the principle of monarchic legitimacy and on the foundations of political authority which, for the first time, were being openly questioned in the midst of the American and the French revolutions.     

血腥中现温情 自制中求合法——电影《教父》三部曲中的“黑帮哲学”

好莱坞青年导演科波拉执导的《教父》三部曲,以黑帮为题材,描述了黑手党产生、发展的全过程,体现了他们在行为、处世上的法则,带有一定的哲学意味,我们称之为“黑帮哲学”。在血腥的争斗中,他们更渴望“温情”,企图通过家族亲情、群体友情来笼络人心;在非法买卖中,他们追求“合法”。然而,走上正道的梦想对他们来说只是一场空幻。     

Pluralising political legitimacy

Does the Australian state exercise legitimate power over the indigenous peoples within its borders? To say that the state’s political decisions are legitimate is to say that it has the right to impose those decisions on indigenous peoples and that they have a (at least a prima facie) duty to obey. In this paper, I consider the general normative frameworks within which these questions are often grasped in contemporary political theory. Two dominant modes of dealing with political legitimacy are through the politics of ‘recognition’ and ‘justification’. I argue that in order to address the fundamental challenges posed by indigenous peoples to liberal settler states today we need to pluralise our conceptions of political legitimacy.     

The limits of control: Technological agency,urban terrain,strategy and the state in the 2014 Gaza War

This article reassesses of the role of military technologies both in normative strategic thought and in the critical geopolitics literature by problematising their shared tendency towards representing the power of military technologies in a binary and sometimes hyperbolic way in relation to the complexity of terrain and the emergent intensity of war. In order to do so, it borrows theoretically from Object-Oriented-Ontology, using Harman's concept of “duomining” in dialogue with other understandings of material agency from assemblage theory and Actor-Network-Theory. This interstitial epistemology is applied to analyse the political implications for the State of Israel of its military's decisions on the use of weapons in urban warfare during the 2014 Gaza War. Through this framing, the paper argues that technological agency is ambivalent to the project of state stabilisation, and can act across spatial and temporal boundaries in ways unanticipated by political and strategic decisionmakers. It also demonstrates, counterintuitively, that technological objects can exercise agency as much by their absence as their presence in an event. These findings foreground the need for a more accurate accounting of what technological objects are, not just what they do, alongside a more nuanced consideration of the contingency of their power to shape politics in relation to the complex milieu of human and non-human factors that comprise geopolitical phenomena.     

The politics of time during the Napoleonic Consulate, 1799–1804

ABSTRACT

The French Revolution generated an acceleration of political time that disrupted old assumptions about the legitimacy and durability of political authority. Following the coup of 18 Brumaire, Napoleon and his counsellors had to confront the challenge of erecting a legitimate regime that would endure in a political environment where regimes that endured very often appeared illegitimate. This article examines how the French Consulate (1799–1804) sought to manage revolutionary time by practising a politics of temporal dilation. The embryonic institutions of the Consulate – from the Légion d’honneur to the lycées – were designed to decompress popular perceptions of time, at least as they related to political life, by charting a verifiable pathway for the nascent regime to develop steadily and incrementally through history. The collective perception of the present was made to expand, re-validating the notion of historical experience and slowing the unruly onset of the political future. Time would cease to be the medium of rupture. This article examines how the temporal assumptions embedded within the regime discourses and political practices of the Napoleonic Consulate were central to the construction of its own legitimacy.