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1. Negotiating Boundaries of Belonging
Stanka Radović's work explores space and urban environments in contemporary dystopian fiction, postcolonial literatures and diasporic/migrant literatures, focusing on the interplay between social space and spatial imagination. Marxist, psychogeographic and heterotopian approaches to space inform Radovic's understanding of dystopian, weird and neo-gothic literatures, which are at the center of her current research. Radovic's training and long-standing interest in postcolonial studies (primarily of the Anglophone and Francophone Caribbean) permeate her approach to spatial theory by directing her attention to questions of social normativity, class structures and mechanisms of marginalization. Radovic’s first monograph, Locating the Destitute: Space and Identity in Caribbean Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2014) examined narratives of postcolonial spatial dispossession and the contemporary legacies of colonial history in the work of V.S. Naipaul, Patrick Chamoiseau, Baryl Gilroy and Raphael Confiant.
Democracy can be very broadly defined as rule by the people – but who is included in ‘the people’? This problem has become particularly acute in an era of globalization, wherein political boundaries often seem to arbitrarily exclude many individuals from participating in political decisions in which they are deeply invested. Can this exclusion be democratically justified?
This question refers to what is often called the ‘boundary problem’ in democratic theory. The intuition among theorists is that the principles which justify democracy might also shed light on the question of who ought to be included in the collective decision-making. In this paper, I will look at two of these principles: Robert Goodin’s all-affected interest principle and Arash Abizadeh’s coercion principle.
The problem with these accounts is that they lead to a radically inclusionary conclusion (e.g. a world demos) which fails to take into account the conditions necessary for a properly functioning democracy. This critique seems, however, to suggest that there is an irreconcilable tension at the heart of democratic theory: boundaries are required for democracy to function, but boundaries violate principles internal to democracy. I will argue that this tension is not irreconcilable. Goodin and Abizadeh’s principles misidentify what is undemocratic about boundaries. I contend that boundaries are undemocratic, not because they exclude affected interests, or that they are coercive, but because they violate a principle of political equality. That is, our current system of boundary formation (i.e. border controls) allows for applicants to be discriminated against on the basis of personal attributes. I will argue that this violates a principle of political equality. However, political equality does not require that boundaries be eliminated (thereby violating the conditions necessary for democracy). Rather, the principle of political equality is satisfied if the state uses random selection to determine who from the pool of applicants will be admitted.
Mary Jo MacDonald completed a BA in political science and philosophy at McGill University in 2017 and is currently finishing an MA in philosophy at Queen's University. Mary’s research focuses on questions about nationalism and political boundaries in democratic theory.
Much of the discussion in political philosophy has assumed that citizenship in a political community depends upon requisite linguistic and cognitive capacities. Meeting this threshold of cognitive capacity (i.e. the capacity contract) has been a longstanding marker of political inclusion throughout the history of political philosophy. However, the membership model of citizenship has emerged as an alternative to the capacity contract. This model presents a more expansive notion of citizenship and is able to include the historically disenfranchised – namely, children and the cognitively impaired – into the political sphere since the model does not require a threshold of capacities to be met for political inclusion. I will first spell out some of the traditional claims of the capacity contract model. I will then introduce the social membership model, highlighting its more inclusive conception of moral agency. Next, I will offer a way of extending the social membership model to include another non-human species lurking amongst us – namely, robots. I will spend some time showing how robots have been socially integrated into human life and will then examine some different ways that the social membership model might be extended to treat robots as moral agents within human environments. Finally, I will conclude by using the concepts of ‘rights’ and ‘duties,’ which are typically associated with citizenship, to evaluate the presence of robots under these definitions. I will conclude that while robots may have the potential to eventually become right-holders and duty-bearers under both the capacity contract and social membership models of moral agency, we need to safeguard human life from the threat of tyranny that accompanies robot presence by excluding them from our political community.
Arjun Sawhney is pursuing his MA in philosophy at Queen’s University and is writing his thesis on robot citizenship. He did he is BA here at the University of Toronto, earning a Specialist in Philosophy.
Global climate change has already begun displacing communities and making refugees of individuals and families, but in the near future, the world is likely to be confronted by climate refugees of a new sort: those whose states are literally flooded into nonexistence by rising sea levels. These “submerged states” would be a new and tragic nexus of a global problem with local consequences—that of erasing the locality altogether. This problem creates special problems for its victims, who I call “climate refugee peoples”—that are irreducibly non-individualistic and cannot be effectively addressed by the individualistic solutions standard in current debates about the human rights of refugees. Moreover, though local self-determination is the crucial issue, it can only be protected through coordinated global action.
I focus on climate refugee peoples’ potential claims to stay together, and to stay self-determining. I begin by outlining the problems faced by states vulnerable to submersion and the proportional responsibility of the large, wealthy, polluting states to address these claims. Next, I argue that the Arendtian “right to have rights” may be extended from the individual’s right to belong to some political community to individuals’ right to remain with their own political community when possible, and furthermore to the community’s right to remain intact. I then examine the nature of a people and argue that both shared environment and shared politics form and sustain a people, even after territory loss. Finally, I examine four ways states may attempt to discharge duties owed refugee peoples: resettlement en masse, land cession, semi-autonomous admission, and land reclamation. All four represent great burdens on the discharging states and imperfection solutions for refugee communities, underscoring the need for global coordination to prevent and mitigate the circumstances that will force peoples into refugee status.
Alex R. Steers-McCrum is a PhD student at The Graduate Center, CUNY. He works on social and political philosophy and critical race theory, with emphases on environmental and indigenous issues.
This essay discusses immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. I begin by delineating Joseph Carens’ argument for open borders and his view that democratic policies ought to reflect the values of freedom and equality.
Next, I discuss arguments that defend nation-states’ rights to practice immigration exclusion. Miller and Walzer, for instance, both agree that exclusion allows for collective self-determination and the preservation of collective national identity. Furthermore, Stilz’ harm calculus contends that nation-states have a conditional right to immigration exclusion if evidence suggests the potential for political, economic, and social harms to the nation-state and its inhabitants.
I proceed to argue against Walzer’s and Miller’s anxieties about cultural preservation, since both physical and virtual travel render true cultural preservation impossible, thereby delegitimating their defenses of immigration exclusion. I also suggest that Walzer’s and Miller’s attachment to the preservation of “national consciousness” may unintentionally support virtual censorship, and that their notions of cultural preservation raise concerns about essentialism. I use Denmark as a case study to show that cultural preservation is not merely a concern about preserving a political culture, but rather that it can also be an anxiety about preserving ethnic culture. I also briefly discuss the ties between cultural preservation, fascism, and nativist ideology.
Turning to Stilz’s anxieties about harm, I distinguish between political, economic, and social harms in her calculus. I agree that immigration exclusion on the basis of political and economic harms is legitimate, but argue that the anxiety about social harms suffers from similar pitfalls as cultural preservation. Not only does Stilz wrongly assume that “homogenous” societies hold a single, harmonious conception of “the good”; her harm calculus is also insufficiently robust to distinguish between real and perceived harms. The latter, for instance, are often invisible and deeply rooted in negative stereotypes, but can nonetheless shape important social policy decisions, as seen in the “Muslim Ban” and neo-nativism in the US.
Finally, I argue that some cultures are justified in immigration exclusion on the grounds of cultural preservation. These cultures must have been victims of historical, systemic, and systematic marginalization and cultural imperialism, such as indigenous populations and communities of color. I condone a position that is between Carens’ open borders and Stilz anxiety about political and economic harms. In other words, migrants should be protected in their freedom of movement between nation-states, provided nation-states will not suffer from significant political or economic harms. Ultimately, immigration exclusion – i.e. rejecting migrants on the grounds that they are culturally disparate – is not justified on the basis of the anxiety about cultural preservation or the anxiety about social harm.
Hilda Loury is a master's student, instructor, and Sally Casanova Pre-Doctoral Scholar in the Department of Philosophy at San Francisco State University. She completed her bachelor's degree in philosophy, with a minor in cognitive science, at the University of California, Los Angeles. She works primarily in aesthetics, cognitive science, and feminist philosophy.
Negotiating Boundaries of Belonging
2. Redistributive Justice and the Global Economy
Kanta Murali is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science. Her research interests include comparative political economy of development, Indian politics, politics of growth and economic policy, state-business relations, state capacity, ethnicity and economic development, inequality, and labor policy. Her current focus is on the political and social drivers of economic policy in developing countries. Her book, Caste, Class and Capital: The Social and Political Origins of Economic Policy in India was published by Cambridge University Press in 2017 and a co-edited volume (with Atul Kohli and Christophe Jaffrelot), Business and Politics in India, is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. She received a Ph.D. in Politics from Princeton University and a M.Sc in Development Studies from the London School of Economics and Political Science.To add a new question go to app settings and press "Manage Questions" button.
In today’s globalized world, the scene is dominated by competition between countries, where governments offer lower taxes to attract foreign capital and investments. As taxes represent the principal means for governments to allocate resources, the decrease in tax revenues directly affects the ability of states to provide citizens with services and benefits. Tax competition results in more regressive national tax systems, decreased capacity for redistribution of wealth, and reduced ability of developing countries to achieve development goals.
Important initiatives have been taken to tackle tax competition. A prominent example is OECD’s project on base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS), which consists of a comprehensive package of measures to facilitate convergence of national tax rules and practices. However, OECD’s work has been highly criticized for favouring richer nations and neglecting distributional and informational issues afflicting developing countries.
This paper suggests the need for a guiding normative principle for international tax cooperation. A normative framework for tax competition should consider the existing differences among countries to determine rights and duties of states in the international tax regime. In the present era of the global competition, governments have different sets of advantages and disadvantages in the search for international competitiveness. Moreover, the current design of the international tax order poses significant constraints on the policy choices available to the least developed countries.
The paper’s main claim is that corrective measures to tackle tax competition
should entail differentiated responsibilities to countries with different needs and
capabilities.
Ivan Ozai is a doctoral candidate in Law at McGill University. His current research focuses on international taxation, political philosophy, and international inequality. He previously served as a tax court judge in Brazil and was the head of the Advance Tax Rulings Directorate of the State of Sao Paulo Department of Treasury.
This paper explores the relationship between the shifting political economies of postindustrial democracies and popular support for redistribution between 1990 and 2012. The results of three-level multilevel models that simultaneously estimate both cross-sectional and longitudinal effects of a given explanatory factor suggest that the impact of a range of macrolevel determinants—including economic inequality, GDP per capita, and economic globalization—will have different consequences across and within countries. The paper argues that two markedly different mechanisms explain this discrepancy. At any given point in time, citizens’ redistributive policy issue positions are affected by characteristics unique to each states' political economy and political institutions, which results in attitudes toward redistribution having a different baseline from one country to the next. But within any particular political and economic context, citizens are more likely to believe in the fairness of redistribution—and hence support it—as globalization processes unfold, unions decline, economic inequality grows, and the wealthy prosper while the less advantaged struggle. As such, macroeconomic factors that effect change in attitudes toward redistribution should be viewed as complementary, rather than competing explanations.
Arecently completed his dissertation in the Department of Political Science at the University of Toronto. His broader research interests include the fields of Canadian and comparative politics, particularly with respect to public opinion, public policy and political economy. In particular, he is interested in explaining differences and changing trends in citizens' outlooks toward redistributive public policies.
Redistributive Justice and the Globa Economy
3. Localizing the Global: Concepts and Practices
Margaret Kohn’s research interests are in the areas of the history of political thought, critical theory, social justice, and urbanism. Her most recent book, The Death and Life of the Urban Commonwealth (Oxford University Press 2016), won two APSA awards: the David Easton Award (for the book that broadens the horizons of contemporary political science by engaging issues of philosophical significance) and the Judd Award for the best book in Urban Politics. She is also the author of Radical Space: Building the House of the People (Cornell University Press 2003), Brave New Neighborhoods: The Privatization of Public Space (Routledge 2004) and Political Theories of Decolonization (with Keally McBride, Oxford University Press, 2011). Her articles have appeared in such journals as Political Theory, Journal of Politics, Polity, Dissent, Constellations, Theory & Event, and Philosophy and Social Criticism.
This paper challenges the notion that the only way to progress to a post-capitalist society is through the wholesale destruction of the capitalist economic system. Instead, I argue that Craft —an existential state and praxis informed by the creation and maintenance of objects of utility—is uniquely situated to effectively reclaim these systems due to its focus on materiality over abstraction and its unique position as a socially aware form of praxis. This argument focuses not on competition, but on hyper-abstraction as the key driver of capitalist exploitation and its most glaring ethical flaw.
Karl Marx’s work on commodity fetishism is key to understanding this misguided form of abstraction which displaces commodities so far from their functional form that they feed into what Martin Heidegger termed gestell, or enframing. Postmodern attempts to destabilize capitalist influence in the fine arts, like the de-objectification of the 1960s described by Ursula Meyer, often fell victim to the same fetishistic mindset and simply increased the hold of capitalism within the arts. The enframing worldview that Heidegger warns us about is fed by hyper-abstraction, and while he directly offers up art as the remedy to this situation via poiēsis, key moments in his writings on the related notion of geschick support this new notion of Craft, rather than the fine arts, as a more capable system for the rehabilitation of modern society.
Jonathan Morgan is a college educator, independent scholar, and PhD Student at the Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts (IDSVA). He specializes in Craft Theory, Aesthetics, Speculative Realism, and Cultural Studies while drawing from both continental and analytic traditions. His current work focuses on a radical rethinking of craft theory as rooted in an novel form of existential praxis that has been overlooked due to the hegemonic application of art theoretical methodologies to the study of craft. Much of this work centers on the lived experience of craftspeople more so than the objects they make.
The advent of short food circuits is an important aspect of industrialized societies’ recent evolution. They are characterized by a rapprochement between consumers and producers belonging to the same space. Political theory has to focus on the political idea lying in defending food relocalization: the local. My research is built on the belief that the first signs of a relocalized society crystallize into the local as a political concept. A whole theoretical universe is emerging around this political concept, mobilizing the following notions: place, size of a social group, its anchoring in a delineated space, etc. This research investigates how this theoretical universe stemming from the idea of the local weakens the modern theoretical pillars defining what a society is. I seek to understand how the local may intervene as a political concept in the theoretical process turning the representation of a social entity into the representation of a society.
Addressing the local strongly relates to the social as the very fabric of society. Indeed, the local as it emerges from local food production and consumption points to nothing else than practices, interactions and beliefs being contained in a limited space. Thus examining the local demands an anchoring in the durkhemian tradition as the social is the first and most important discovery of sociology. For Emile Durkheim, the social constituting the modern society is characterized by its overthrowing spatial limits and local scale as a result of the accentuation of the division of labour. The first part of my research in political theory consists in the building of a durkhemian framework grounded on a critical appropriation of the sociologist’s analysis of the social. Stressing the normative assumptions underlying Durkheim’s characterization of the modern society and proposing different ones form the purpose of this communication.
I intend to argue that the local should not have been cast out from modernity and wish to outline a possible reintroduction of place in the – never ending – understanding of what a society is and how it remains.
Clémence Nasr is a PhD student both at the Université Libre de Bruxelles and at
Sciences Po Paris. She is at the middle of her thesis, which is about the idea of a relocalized society. Her reflection is based on the advent of short food circuits, i.e. on the blossoming of food relocalization. However, she does not intend to engage in a practical thinking but rather to bring out the theoretical milestones necessary to open the reflection about what a relocalized society would mean.
In the last quarter century, a steadily increasing number of North Americans, when asked their religious affiliation, have self-identified as “spiritual but not religious” (SBNR). This paper examines the socio-political implications of this cultural sea change, especially as it relates to issues of globalization. Drawing from qualitative research consisting of in-depth interviews conducted with Canadian millennials who self-identify as SBNR, I argue the popularity of what scholars have called “self-spirituality” (Houtman and Aupers 2010), is a byproduct of what Charles Taylor calls our age of authenticity—characterized by an expressive individualism—which has been significantly shaped by the counter culture of the 1960s. Conservative commentators have denounced this form of spirituality as superficial, suggesting that its rejection of religious institutions amounts to a soft relativism that is antithetical to a moral life. What this criticism is blind to is the distinct ethical imaginary at work; one finds propounded among these young people an ethic of authenticity, an ethic of freedom, and an ethic of mutual respect. Canadian SBNR millennials exhibit a strong cosmopolitanism, rooted in an ethical liberalism. Their self spirituality places epistemological authority in the “self”; therefore although predominantly progressive in their political views, these millennials value individual freedom of choice above all else. Yet, at the same time, their profound suspicion of institutions works against the cultivation of community—be it cultural or political. Thus while self-spirituality privileges the rights and freedoms of the individual—to the point of sacralizing the self within—its inherent disdain of conformity not only fuels a rabid rejection of any attempt to explicitly unite individuals’ around a shared cause or commitment, but can also engender a feeling of profound existential and social isolation within the SBNR themself. In turn, investigating the SBNR discourse helps to illuminate the social implications of liberal cosmopolitanism and the antinomies that attend it.
Galen Watts is a PhD Candidate in the Cultural Studies Graduate Program at Queen’s University. He researches contemporary spirituality in order to discern its social and political implications, broadly understood.
Localizing the Global: Concepts and Practice
Limitis of the Liberal Imagination
4. Limits of Liberal Imagination
Professor Rob Vipond is the Director of the Centre for the Study of the United States and American Studies program, and a Professor in the Department of Political Science. He is interested in political development, especially in Canada and the U.S. This approach spans a variety of subject areas: federalism (Liberty and Community); constitutional theory (“Rights Talk in Canada in the Late Nineteenth Century”); ideational diffusion (“The Civil Rights Movement Comes to Winnipeg”); healthcare (“The Virus of Consumerism”); and the discipline of political science (The Comparative Turn). Vipond’s new book, Making a Global City: Diversity, Community, and Ideas of Citizenship in a Toronto School, 1920-1990, explores changing ideas of citizenship through the history of a Toronto public school.
The Alt-Right is most known for their actions during and after the 2016 election, yet there is a substantial history stretching back before 2008 that is under discussed. The history of the Alt-Right can be subdivided into three distinct periods: the precursor period (1968 to 2008), the intellectual incubation (2008 to 2014) and the contemporary period (2014 onwards). The first period covers the pre-history of the movement, focusing on the conditions that made the Alt-Right possible. The historical events and movements that created an opening for the Alt-Right prior to 2008 include: the decline of the materialist left due to the failures of the Soviet Union, the rise of the intersectional left, the rise of globalization and the decline in American hegemony after 9/11. The second period is dominated by both the American responses to the 2008 financial crisis established cultural and political conditions for the emergence of the Alt-Right on the international scene in 2014. This period is also known for the publication and English translations of the foundational texts of the Alt-Right, which gained a small but dedicated following during the Obama presidency. The contemporary period is the most publicized era of the Alt-Right, despite the movement becoming popular in 2016, two years earlier in 2014 the contemporary Alt-Right movement emerged within public discourse. In 2014 we saw the attempted coalescing of the Alt-Right in Budapest and the prominence of Alt-Right internet trolls during Gamergate entering mainstream media discourse. The election of Donald Trump, Brexit and the subsequent dominance of sensationalist political coverage since 2015 has propelled the Alt-Right into the public imagination.
Andrew Jones is a doctoral candidate at York University in Toronto. His dissertation research focuses on the emergent political ideology of the Alt-Right. His research interests include critical political theory, Hegel, American politics, and global politics.
This paper examines a missing link in Judith Shklar’s innovative idea, the liberalism of fear. In a recent study of Shklar’s political thought, Katrina Forrester writes that “it is never entirely clear precisely why Shklar thought that a historical outlook necessarily entailed an enhanced sensitivity to cruelty, but her broadly realist historical epistemology twinned with her belief in the ubiquity of cruelty was sufficient for her to claim a direct link between the historical awareness of cruelty and ethical insight.” In other words, a crucial step in her theory concerns the way in which we can effectively move from a combination of historical awareness and psychological effects that are common to all to a vital political project that belongs to the tradition of liberalism. Shklar herself, however, provided few illuminating insights on this very step. In this paper I argue that the memory of past cruelty and the fear of cruelty do not automatically result in a liberal politics that fits Shklar’s political vision. On the one hand, fear is a powerful political emotion which provides an emotional ground for different ways of social mobilization. It has many variations, and some of these variations could boost nonliberal or antiliberal political projects. On the other hand, public memory of cruelties is not a direct reflection of events that happened in the past. On the contrary, public memory is a highly politicized concept that is usually manipulated and exploited by the state. As a result, memorizing the ordinary cruelties in our political life does not necessarily leads to a shared vigilance of power of the state. The overall purpose of this paper is not to reject the liberalism of fear either as a theoretical argument or as a practical project. By closely examining the obstacles that the liberalism of fear would have to face, the paper intends to point out the limits of the liberalism of fear. Shklar’s political theory has been widely recognized for its realistic and dystopian understanding of the political and the social. It is only with a realistic recognition of the limits of the liberalism of fear that Shklar’s realism can be rightly understood and utilized as a practical guidance for our political actions.
Simon Sihang Luo is a PhD student in political theory at Indiana University. His research interests include political memory, political emotion, Marxism, critical theory, and radical theory. His dissertation investigates the many uses of political fear in contemporary China.
How does Twitter impact democratic institutions? This paper suggests that a political leader’s tweets are a form of official discourse that reflects a normative assessment of the legitimacy of the political system. Like other official communications, tweets can also prompt, justify, and respond to a particular strategy for amassing power in order to defend the politician’s interpretation of the common good. As social media provides a direct connection between the speaker and mass audiences, it offers political leaders a unique and powerful platform to mobilize support across frontiers, and is therefore, increasingly at the heart of the institutional development of a country.
The relationship between the tweets of political elites and the legitimacy of institutions is especially important in hybrid systems like Venezuela, where opposition and incumbent politicians compete for power, and over the rules of the game itself. A content analysis of the tweets of the opposition and incumbent leaders in Venezuela during three electoral periods revealed that their communications reflect fundamentally different normative stances. The incumbent’s discourse is predominantly populist – the understanding of politics as a zero-sum game, part of a global struggle between a conspiring elite and the people, which prompts a polarizing strategy for competition, and an “anything goes attitude”. Meanwhile, the opposition’s discourse is predominantly pluralist – the belief in a heterogeneous society in which the various interests and goals are to be resolved through electoral competition. The authoritarian shift in Venezuela, together with the opposition’s continued democratic strategies, support the notion that a populist discourse is compatible with undemocratic practices, while a pluralist discourse is compatible with electoral strategies. Moreover, this study prompts the question about the extent to which a similar relationship may exist in more stable democracies.
Adriana Farias is a Venezuelan-American who pursued undergraduate and graduate studies in Economics and Political Science. Her research interests include development issues, public policy, and political discourse within the context of U.S. and Latin American politics. She recently finished her MA in Political Science at McGill University, and currently works at the Center for Democracy and Development in the Americas in Washington DC.
5. The Local & the Global: Frameworks and Practices of Resistance
Neil ten Kortenaar teaches African, Caribbean, and South Asian literature. He has published a book on Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children (McGill-Queen's 2004) and another on Images of Reading and Writing in African and Caribbean Literature (Cambridge 2011). His current research focuses on imagining state formation in postcolonial literature from India, Africa, and the Americas. This is a longstanding interest that has informed many publications, including an article on "Fictive States and the State of Fiction in Africa" in Comparative Literature 2000 and "Oedipus, Ogbanje, and the Sons of Independence" in Research in African Literatures (2007). He wrote the chapter on "Multiculturalism and Globalization" for The Cambridge History of Canadian Literature (2009).
Originally conceived of by such scholars as Goethe (1882) and Auerbach (1952) as a genre of literature that could finally escape the confines of nation-based criticism, world literature has become a label both widely-used in bookstores and widely-criticised in the academy. Whereas Goethe envisioned a transnational “conception of man unified in his multiplicity” (1882), modern critics more often condemn world literature as “an empty vessel for the occasional self-gratification of the global elite” (“World Lite” 2013). As a result, the label of world literature has itself become fraught with complicity in what is “an essentially compromised global culture industry” (Brouillette 2007). Authors who have found themselves categorised under the label of world literature are thus subject to a curious double-bind, their integrity always criticised, either for pandering to western audiences and spreading misinformation, or for exploiting real cultures and communities for personal fame and profit.
Rather than attempt to ignore or evade these accusations, some works of world literature have tackled them head-on: Salvador Plascencia’s The People of Paper is a post-modern account of a small community of Latin American immigrants living in California, wherein the author himself serves as the primary antagonist. My paper explores both how this novel succeeds in manifesting its author within the text, and how that act of self-insertion problematises the usual schemas of power inherent in the acts of writing and reading. I subsequently assert that Plascencia’s presence within the novel is an embrace of his complicity in the global literary marketplace’s exploitation of other cultures, and actually serves to expand that complicity to include us, as readers and customers of his text.
Alexander Sarra-Davis is a second year PhD student from the University of Toronto’s English Department, with a BA from UBC and an MPhil from Cambridge. His past projects have included work on modern rhetoric, digital media, and experimental forms of writing. He is currently beginning research on a project at the intersections of authorial presence, ethics of readership, and Global Anglophone literatures.
Kurdish experiences of and responses to empire and colonial domination under contemporary Turkish state hegemony are often overlooked in contemporary Western discourses of colonialism and postcolonialism. With Kurdish cultural and political expression severely restricted both historically and under the modern Turkish state, Kurds in Turkey have often exercised their cultural autonomy and agency through coded, negotiated forms of cultural resistance. This study investigates the political, social, and cultural meanings ascribed by Kurds in Turkey to the Kurdish group dances known as govend as an instrument of political resistance in Turkey. Further, this study investigates the political and practical functions of govend in terms of organizing, synchronizing, and empowering cultural resistance in Turkey. This study then analyzes the cultural activity of govend from a postcolonial lens, demonstrating the ways in which it is negotiated across diverse cultural and political spaces in contemporary Turkey, as Kurds negotiate and contest Turkish hegemony from the diasporic communities in imperial centers like Istanbul to the peripheries of historic Kurdistan. Drawing from observational fieldwork in various sites in Turkey along with interviews conducted with Kurds from Turkey, this thesis offers a conceptualization of the “architecture of the collective body,” or, the ways in which collective bodies constitute their own kind of spatial sovereignty and autonomy in a colonial landscape characterized by domination, demolition, destruction, and suppression.
Benjamin Bilgen recently graduated with an MA in Development Studies from York University. Before his graduate studies, he worked as a journalist for Research Turkey, reporting primarily on Kurdish issues and human rights in Turkey. His research interests include the intersections of culture and politics, postcolonialism, and cultural resistance.
This paper problematizes Critical Studies of Men and Masculinities (CSMM) literature as it engages with masculinities of post-colonial societies such as Lebanon and Egypt. Drawing on the works of Raewyn Connell (2014) and Judith Butler (1990) and extending this work through the lens of the coloniality of gender (Lugones, 2008, 2010), I investigate the problematic assumptions of what is often appealed to in CSMM literature and in Middle Eastern societies as ‘traditional’ masculinities. I read this appeal to ‘tradition’ as an invention of colonial modernity. My aim is to reimagine the performative nature of gender in order to move from a singular conception of hegemonic masculinity to a plurality of hegemonic masculinities (Everett-Penhale and Ratele, 2015).
This paper proceeds in three parts. First, Raewyn Connell’s (2014) work is analyzed in tandem with the coloniality of gender to reveal the ways in which contemporary CSMM literature interprets the concept of ‘traditional’ masculinities. Second, I analyze the emergence of problematic dichotomies of modern vs premodern identities which are constitutive of colonialism in shaping narratives of gender orders (Singerman, 2013). I then use this analysis to contribute to the project of decolonizing the discipline itself, and to reimagine the possibilities of alternative masculinities by taking into account the different legacies of colonial modernity (Lagrange, 2006; Jacob, 2011). The necessity of this work emerges out of a need to trouble the purportedly “traditional” heteronormative gender relations in the Middle East that perpetuate heterosexist attitudes, gender based violence, and discrimination (Beasly, 2012). Simultaneously, this work is helpful in preventing the reproduction of the assumed whiteness of gendered subjects in CSMM literature that prescribes neo-colonial interventions.
David Semaan is an MA student in the department of political science at the University of Alberta. His research currently focuses on queerness and masculinity, particularly concerning LGBT social movements and their relationship to hegemonic whiteness.
The Local and the Global
Techniques of Global Governance
6. Techniques of Global Governance
Mara Marin is the author of Connected by Commitment: Oppression and Our Responsibility to Undermine It (Oxford University Press, 2017) and of “Racial Structural Solidarity” (Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy, 2018). She is a Postdoctoral Associate at the University of Toronto’s Centre for Ethics and will start a position as Assistant Professor in the Department of Political Science at the University of Victoria in July 2018.
This paper is going to explore Mencius’s thought on Tianxia (All-under-heaven) which reveals a just world order, and its implications for the current discussion of global justice. Living during the Warring State periods (475 BC-221 BC) in Chinese history when numerous states in mainland China competed for unity, Mencius was anxious about the anarchic circumstances and tried to persuade rulers to practice Confucianism as a way of ruling. For Mencius, a just “global” order is only built on the practice of benevolent governance, and states (peoples) which choose this just way of ruling will become the model of a just world order.
For Mencius, benevolence and power are two core factors for states. Therefore, there are four kinds of states: (1) States that are benevolent and powerful; (2) States that are benevolent but not powerful; (3) States that are powerful but not benevolent; (4) States that are neither benevolent nor powerful. Mencius argues that although states practicing different ways or ruling might coexist, only the first category of states will remain influential because of the attractiveness of benevolence, and lead the global order to become just. The second kind of states will certainly be able to deal with the threat from the third kind of states, and might be able to develop into the first kind depending on fortune. The other two kinds of states might be aggressive and temporarily stable, but without benevolence, the hatred from people including their citizens will become barriers to their further development, and even threaten their survival if they practice bad rule or invade other benevolent states. To sum up, Mencius argues that a just global order should and will be based on benevolence, and can defeat the realistic logic of powerful domination.
Binfan Wang is a Ph.D. candidate in the Department of Political Science, University of Toronto. His research interest includes the comparison between Chinese thought and contemporary Western political theory, especially on global justice, meritocracy and nationalism. He is currently writing a dissertation titled “All-Under-Heaven: A Confucian Theory of Global Justice.”
The Eurozone crisis has been marked by economic devastation in Greece and the phenomenon of BREXIT. These turbulent events have spawned a normative debate about the tension between democratically-enacted law and the imperatives of financial markets. The most vocal contributors to this debate have been two eminent German intellectuals, Jürgen Habermas and Wolfgang Streeck, who have offered competing proposals for either reforming or dissolving the European Monetary Union (EMU). Streeck has been critical of the EMU and the transfer of democratic sovereignty to capital-friendly officials in Brussels, prompting his proposal for dissolving the supranational union. Habermas, for his part, has observed that the crisis of the European Union is one in which technocrats lack sufficient pressure for taming financial markets in accordance with popular demands for social justice. Rejecting Streeck’s yearning for a strong nation state, Habermas has called for constitutional reform at the supranational level. Habermas’s plea for an enlarged Europe has been met by a scathing critique on the part of Streeck, who contends that technocracy belies the asymmetrical power relations imbricated in the governing structure of the EMU. In this presentation, I will explore the following questions: are democracy and capitalism drifting apart and thwarting the pursuit of social justice within the EMU, as Streeck contends? Can the balance between democratic constitutionalism and markets be reinstated in the transnational vision suggested by Habermas? Is there an appealing alternative to welfare nationalism and liberal transnationalism in the era of global financialized capitalism? Renewed anxiety about the rise of various forms of nationalism and populism cannot be examined in abstraction from the economic debts and burdens confronting individuals and states. My presentation aims to illuminate the normative stakes of the Habermas-Streeck debate in the context of economic precariousness and resurgent nationalism.
Dr. Igor Shoikhedbrod (PhD, University of Toronto) specializes in political theory and political economy. Igor’s research interests cut across themes in critical political thought, legal theory, and political economy. His research project is concerned with the problems of economic inequality and domination in liberal democratic societies and their implications for discourses surrounding rights, distributive justice, and emancipation. Igor has parallel research interests in the social and political thought of Hegel, Marx, and Lukacs.
This paper uses an eclectic approach to examine the realists’ proposition of weak states’ behavior towards a sub-systemic major power rivalry in the age of economic globalization. Based on the case of Bangladesh, it defies the realists’ argument by arguing that a particular brand of weak states are capable of maintaining an equal partnership with both strategic rivals in a regional balancing game. This is what I call “dexterity” strategy that implies a better autonomy of these states in accommodating the power politics. Evidence support that Bangladesh is a “dexterous” state that maintains economic relations, diplomatic initiatives, and utilizes its geostrategic location in a similar manner towards the India-China rivalry in South Asia. This is an interplay of the reshaped balancing strategies of India and China due to the economic globalization, and geostrategic location of Bangladesh and its domestic political environment. By using a mixed-method strategy, this paper makes two contributions in International Relations scholarship. First, it invents a new sort of state that is weak in terms of material capabilities but capable of leveraging a major power rivalry through utilizing their strategic assets. This categorization helps to distinguish between active and passive weak states in a regional power politics. Second, it contributes to the regional security studies by challenging the received wisdom that depicted weak states in the 21st century as a passive actor as they were in the Cold War period. This paper found that the forces of economic globalization have made dexterous states a reasonably active player in maintaining regional security in South Asia. Therefore, the inclusion of these states in the study of regional security offers a comprehensive model of regional security order in the current age.
Mohammad Nur Nabi is pursuing his Master of Arts (M.A.) degree in Political Science at McGill University, Canada. He is specializing in International Relations under the supervision of Professor T.V. Paul. Moreover, he is a Fellow in the McGill’s Centre for International Peace and Security Studies (CIPSS). His major research interests include international security and political economy, and weak states.
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