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Bill Brydon

Post-Secular Turkey - GÖLE - 2012 - New Perspectives Quarterly - 0 views

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    "For 500 years the West was on the rise, culminating in Globalizaiton 1.0-the open system of trade, information flows and the spread of technology on the terms and in the image of the West. The benefits of that system over the last 30 years have led to the rise of the emerging economies. As a result we are entering the new era of Globalization 2.0 characterized by new forms of non-Western modernity and the interdependence of plural identities. The advent of this new era has been hastened by the fiscal and financial crisis in Europe and the United States. Turkey, with its Islamic-oriented democracy that has become a template for the liberated peoples of the Arab Spring, and China, with its effective neo-Confucian form of governance, are the most sharply defined new players in this multi-polar and multi-dimensional world. In this section, one of Turkey's most insightful sociologists examines the post-secular transformation of that nation. One of China's more provocative philosophers proposes a hybrid model that combines what has been learned from the experience of Western and Chinese governance in a way that "enhances democracy" in both systems."
Bill Brydon

Democracy, cosmopolitanism and national identity in a 'globalising' world - National Id... - 0 views

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    Broadly globalising processes have been in train for centuries, but contemporary discourse about globalisation is here located within a specific historical context, particularly characterised by new forms of communications and the pressures on states produced by the decline of Keynesianism and the end of the Cold War. Coincident changes also led to a growing interest in national identities, marked not least by the founding of this journal in 1999. Globalisation, a series of processes rather than a single force, has a range of effects on states, nations and national identities, including accommodation and adaptation as well as resistance. Indeed, globalising forces, such as democratisation, are shown to require nation-building. Attempts to impose order on international society through cosmopolitan devices are arguably more inimical to national identities. As with nations, cosmopolitanism involves an imagined community. Because this necessarily exists outside time, the building of a sense of trust and commonality across people and territory is however more challenging. Without popular ownership, it is argued, cosmopolitanism is often more likely to appear a threat than a boon. Building a global civil society, or indeed local democracies, is also unlikely when so many societies still lack local versions anchored in some form of national identity.
Bill Brydon

Mediterranean Quarterly - Maastricht and the Death of Social Democracy: The Creation of... - 0 views

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    The global financial crisis of 2009-2010 has further underscored the demise of social democracy as a legitimate political alternative, for example, due to an absence of a clearly articulated alternative approach to the crisis offered by Social Democratic parties, even though neoliberal deregulated markets have proven to be vulnerable to the corrupt and opaque practices that created a massive crisis of systemic confidence. The author contends that the Maastricht process has transformed the Western European party system away from parties based on ideology and toward catchall issue-oriented parties. For Socialist and Social Democratic parties, this has meant the end of the centrality of the welfare state in their ideological domain. However, other trends have been equally damaging. Unionization, which has been in decline since the 1980s, primarily because of the changing nature of the labor force in postindustrial societies, has been further affected by the Maastricht criteria, which sought to enhance the competitiveness through increasing productivity, reducing wage costs, and significantly restructuring the labor relations that organized labor had achieved. For Social Democratic parties, the changing demographic of its support base, the ideological collapse of the Soviet Union, the adoption of the Maastricht convergence agenda, and the rise of a debt-infused consumer culture has meant death.
Bill Brydon

The Muslim imaginary - Social Identities: Journal for the Study of Race, Nation and Cul... - 0 views

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    The current 'winds of change' sweeping through North Africa and the Middle East are reminiscent of earlier transformational moments that changed the very political order. As we write this editorial, monumental changes are taking place within Tunisia, Egypt, Yemen, Bahrain and Libya. Indeed, it appears that virtually none of the societies within the region are immune from a new-found 'people power' that demands reformation of the political, economic and social order. The winds of change in the Middle East are long overdue and one must ask the question why they did not sweep though after the collapse of communism in 1989, a time of great political change in many parts of the world including sub-Saharan Africa, that subsequently witnessed the end of apartheid. Why did the 'Third Wave of Democracy' as Samuel Huntington (1991) called it, not sweep the Middle East or North Africa?
Bill Brydon

When the State Says "Sorry": State Apologies as Exemplary Political Judgments* - MIHAI ... - 0 views

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    "Earlier versions of this article were presented in 2010 at the annual meeting of the Canadian Political Science Association; the annual meeting of the American Political Science Association; the joint meeting of the Centre for Ethics, University of Toronto and the Centre for Research in Ethics, the University of Montreal; and the international conference "Democracy Today," organized at the University of Minho. I would like to thank John Francis Burke, Daniel Weinstock, Melissa Williams, and Joe Heath for their insightful suggestions. Serdar Tekin, Leah Soroko, Alex Livingston, Amit Ron, Michael Cunningham, and Inder Marwah charitably commented on the article at various points in time. Alessandro Ferrara led me to some crucial insights for which I am particularly grateful. I would also like to warmly thank Mathias Thaler, who read several versions of the article and who provided constructive criticism and encouragement. Last but not least, the recommendations by Robert Goodin and the three anonymous reviewers of the Journal of Political Philosophy helped improve the manuscript, and for this I thank them. Research for this article benefitted from the financial support of the Foundation for Science and Technology, Portugal; and the European Social Fund. The usual disclaimers apply."
Bill Brydon

Minority nationalism and immigrant integration in Canada - Banting - 2011 - Nations and... - 0 views

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    "Immigrant integration is currently a prominent issue in virtually all contemporary democracies, but countries in which the historic population itself is deeply divided - particularly those with substate nations and multiple political identities - present some interesting questions where integration is concerned. The existence of multiple and potentially competing political identities may complicate the integration process, particularly if the central government and the substate nation promote different conceptions of citizenship and different nation-building projects. What, then, are the implications of minority nationalism for immigrant integration? Are the added complexities a barrier to integration? Or do overlapping identities generate more points of contact between immigrants and their new home? This article addresses this question by probing immigrant and non-immigrant 'sense of belonging' in Canada, both inside and outside Quebec. Data come from Statistics Canada's Ethnic Diversity Study. Our results suggest that competing nation-building projects make the integration of newcomers more, rather than less, challenging."
Bill Brydon

Managing public outrage: Power, scandal, and new media in contemporary Russia - 1 views

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    "Over the past three decades, scholars studying the phenomenon of political scandal have mostly based their works on the premise that scandals can only occur in liberal democracies. Contradictory to this assumption, however, some of the most heavily discussed phenomena in contemporary semi-authoritarian Russia are scandals emanating from the new, vibrant sphere of social media thriving on a largely unfiltered internet. How are these 'internet scandals' impacting politics in the semi-authoritarian political environment? To address this and related questions, I juxtapose two case studies of police corruption scandals that erupted in the social media sphere in 2009/2010. Drawing on the findings, I argue that Russia's ruling elites are presently very much capable of managing these outbursts of public outrage. Mainly with the help of the powerful state-controlled television, public anger is very swiftly redirected towards lower-level authorities and foreign, supposedly hostile powers."
Bill Brydon

Discursive democracy and the challenge of state building in divided societies: reckonin... - 0 views

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    Current approaches to democratic state building place serious conceptual limits on policy options. A democratic future for Bosnia's people will require far more searching engagement with identity formation and its politicization than reform efforts have s
Bill Brydon

Journal of Democracy - The Rise of "State-Nations" India - 0 views

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    Must every state be a nation and every nation a state? Or should we look instead to the example of countries such as India, where one state holds together a congeries of "national" groups and cultures in a single and wisely conceived federal republic?
Bill Brydon

Liberal nationalism, nationalist liberalization, and democracy: the cases of post-Sovie... - 0 views

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    The bulk of scholarly literature views nationalism as harmful to democratic transition. Yet Juan Linz and Alfred Stepan indirectly suggest that nationalism may benefit democratization. This study shows that under the right conditions nationalism can benef
Bill Brydon

Governments and Movements: Autonomy or New Forms of Domination? - Socialism and Democracy - 0 views

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    this change at the top level arose from years of steady electoral growth (notably, in Brazil and Uruguay), while in other countries it was the fruit of social movements capable of overthrowing neoliberal parties and governments (Bolivia, Ecuador, Venezuel
Bill Brydon

Polanyi and Post-neoliberalism in the Global South: Dilemmas of Re-embedding the Econom... - 0 views

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    Although Karl Polanyi Studied a different epoch and focused on Europe, his ideas have inspired an outpouring of studies on contemporary problems and prospects in the neoliberal era. The bulk of these studies pertain to industrial countries or global economic issues. However, the human, environmental and financial impact of market deregulation is arguably more devastating in the 'developing' countries than in the core. A question thus arises: do Polanyi's reflections on progressive alternatives to liberalism clarify contemporary debates on development alternatives in the Global South? I contend that democratic socialism - Polanyi's preferred remedy to the 'demolition' of society and nature occasioned by market civilisation - is problematical in light of what we have learned from the twentieth century, but his framework for evaluating alternatives - featuring the re-embedding of economy in society - remains as powerful as ever, I support this argument with an exploration of socialism and social democracy - as well as community - based alternatives arising from 'reciprocity'. Each possibility raises distinctive dilemmas, as an analysis of cases reveals.
Bill Brydon

Hearing the Voice of the People: Human Rights as if People Mattered * - New Political S... - 0 views

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    When we study human rights empirically, what do we mean to study? The existence of institutions that enable the realization of rights or the enjoyment of those rights? The absence of flagrant violations of some of the basic individual rights or the sense that one's rights will not be flagrantly violated? What theory of human rights should we use? Most positive theory of human rights-for example, empirical theories about the correlation between political institutions or economic conditions on human rights recognition-are based on the first kind of normative human rights theory, the one that defines rights outside of the struggle for them. This article puts forward a methodology for the empirical study of human rights from the inside: do people enjoy their human rights? Using the Latin American Public Opinion Project democracy survey database, the authors propose a new way to measure human rights.
Bill Brydon

Hearing the Voice of the People: Human Rights as if People Mattered * - New Political S... - 0 views

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    When we study human rights empirically, what do we mean to study? The existence of institutions that enable the realization of rights or the enjoyment of those rights? The absence of flagrant violations of some of the basic individual rights or the sense that one's rights will not be flagrantly violated? What theory of human rights should we use? Most positive theory of human rights-for example, empirical theories about the correlation between political institutions or economic conditions on human rights recognition-are based on the first kind of normative human rights theory, the one that defines rights outside of the struggle for them. This article puts forward a methodology for the empirical study of human rights from the inside: do people enjoy their human rights? Using the Latin American Public Opinion Project democracy survey database, the authors propose a new way to measure human rights.
Bill Brydon

Sub-state Nationalism in the Western World: Explaining Continued Appeal - Ethnopolitics - - 0 views

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    What explains the appeal of sub-state nationalism in developed liberal democracies such as Belgium, Spain, the United Kingdom and Canada? This article suggests six main reasons: the power of the notion of self-determination; the institutionalization of national identity and nationalist politics in decentralized arrangements featuring autonomous government; the presence of powerful nationalist narratives; institutional and constitutional questions that are either unresolved or have been addressed by a shaky compromise, which means they remain on the political agenda; the involvement of nationalist movements in debates of public policy; and processes of continental integration that help nationalist movements make the case for increased autonomy and, in certain circumstances, independence.
Bill Brydon

Kingdoms, republics and people's democracies: legitimacy and national identity in Europ... - 0 views

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    "This article uses constitutional texts to explore the models of national identity which elites in European states have apparently wished to endorse. It analyses three types of constitutions - of constitutional monarchies, democratic republics, and former revolutionary communist states - to establish how the primary principle of legitimacy is identified, and how the concept of 'the people' is understood. It concludes that these issues evoke a different response in the three types of constitution, suggesting a surprising survival of the implications of the monarchical-republican distinction, and a brief flowering of at least the principle of international proletarian solidarity in communist constitutions."
Bill Brydon

Post-colonial states, ethnic minorities and separatist conflicts: case studies from Sou... - 0 views

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    Post-colonial states in the Asian region have frequently been subject to political tensions derived from their multi-ethnic make-up and, what some have argued to be, the failure of states to adequately represent the interests of their ethnic minorities. This article will look at examples of where states in Asia have failed to adequately represent or otherwise incorporate their ethnic minorities as full and equal citizens. It also considers the range of responses to such perceived or actual state failure in adequately incorporating all citizens, including inter-ethnic and racial violence and separatist conflict. The article will conclude by considering conceptual and actual models of state organization intended to resolve racial and ethnic tensions in the Asian region.
Bill Brydon

'Most learn almost nothing': building democratic citizenship by engaging controversial ... - 0 views

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    This article addresses the challenges and pathways of Holocaust education in post-communist countries through two case studies. I first examine historiographical, institutional and cultural obstacles to deep and meaningful treatments of the Holocaust within Latvian and Romanian schools. Drawing upon the unique experiences both countries had with partial or full 'dual occupation' of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union, I present a rationale for constructing inquiry-based Holocaust education experiences. As Latvia, Romania and other countries have entered the European Union, the need for tolerant and open-minded citizens who have the ability to make informed and reasoned decisions for the common good has become more critical. Inquiry-oriented teaching of the Holocaust brings about essential democratic skills and dispositions, while simultaneously positioning students to investigate the complicated, nuanced and contested contours of the Holocaust, competing forms of propaganda and often spurious historiographical traditions. This kind of teaching is also responsive to the challenges these and other societies face when confronting other historical and contemporary controversial topics.
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