bluuebunny/crossref_metadata_2025 huggingface dataset:
Money and Family Relationships
Authors: Singh Supriya
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on how transnational money is imbued with meaning, morals, and emotion, drawing on the case of Indian migrants to Australia. Specifically, it points out how migrant remittances serve as a medium of communication and care. Exploring both their market and family dimensions, it shows how these flows of money are influenced by moral expectations of reciprocity in parent–child relationships as well as by different politics of migration, life stages, and communication patterns. It shows that, facilitated by new information and communication technologies, the give-and-take of money and gifts within the immediate transnational family increases with frequent communication on everyday matters.
Geopolitics and Regional Order
Authors: Rosenboim Or
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers how cartographic representations, geographic knowledge, and geopolitical concepts shaped 1940s visions of globalism as a response to the post-imperial age. In particular, it examines the notion of “dynamic geopolitics” in the writings of two leading American geopoliticians, Nicholas J. Spykman and Owen Lattimore. The chapter begins with biographical notes of Lattimore and Spykman, along with a historical overview of the development of American geopolitics in the first half of the twentieth century. It then explores the geopolitical worldviews of Spykman and Lattimore as well as their ideas about democracy in the global sphere. It also discusses the possible reasons for the marginalization of the global visions of Lattimore and Spykman within the American discipline of International Relations. Finally, it shows how cartography and maps helped Spykman and Lattimore give their abstract ideas about empire and democracy a practical, visual foundation.
Conclusion: Noah’s Kin
Authors: Parrish Susan Scott
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers the question of what made the recent disaster called Katrina in 2005, and its mediation, distinct from its 1927 forerunner. It argues that what was most different about the two events is that artists and commentators in 2005 could be more openly critical of the racial and class dimensions of their disaster before a multiracial mass audience. The chapter also considers a poem that appeared in print in April 1927, which must have seemed a providential coincidence to many readers. The poem, called “Noah Built the Ark,” moves from the halcyon days in Eden to the point at which “God got sorry that he ever made man.” Like other works of the Harlem Renaissance, the poem called upon the currency of folk form to create a public awareness of traditions within African American culture.
From Shirkets to Bankas
Authors: Nucho Joanne Randa
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that in Lebanon, economic networks of credit and lending can further contribute to the production of sectarianism as well as the narrowing of the definition of who can be an adequate member of the sectarian “community.” It discusses women's rotating credit associations or shirkets and the rise of a microlending facility that sought to formalize and contain these practices under the more centralized control of an official, Armenian-run organization. The desire to control or replace the shirket practices can be traced back to political actors' long-standing fear of women's informal networks as a potential site of crosscutting relationships that defy narrow sectarian logics of social relations and are therefore threatening to the sectarian social order.
The Advent of Modern Liberty (1795)
Authors: Fontana Biancamaria
Published: January 2018

This chapter looks at how Staël claimed that, in order to unify the nation under a republican government, it was necessary to identify the durable interests and aspirations of the majority of the French people. Now, the question of what the majority wanted was defined with greater clarity than in the past. The unity of the nation under the republic must be founded upon the general demand for liberty. Not, however, the patriotic, participative liberty—inspired by the model of ancient republics—that had been revived by the Jacobins with such destructive consequences, but a new kind of liberty, based on the modern needs for security, prosperity, and peace.
The Consolidation of the Scandinavian Kingdoms, c. 1050–1350
Authors: Bagge Sverre
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the consolidation of the Scandinavian kingdoms during the period 1050–1350. It begins with a discussion of dynastic continuity and the rules of succession in Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, focusing in particular on how the formation of a dynasty, combined with rules about individual succession, gave the monarchy a legal foundation. The chapter proceeds by analyzing the rise of the Scandinavian kingdoms as an example of the export of some central features of the civilization that was forming at the time in Western Christendom, notably a royal and an ecclesiastical organization, which entailed the centralization of important social functions such as religion, law, and warfare. It also considers changes in the administration of justice in the three kingdoms through courts of law and the development of royal legislation parallel to the expansion of royal justice. Finally, it describes the Scandinavian military organization known as leding.
The Later Middle Ages: Agrarian Crisis, Constitutional Conflicts, and Scandinavian Unions
Authors: Bagge Sverre
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the socioeconomic and political consequences of the agrarian crisis triggered by the Black Death and how the Black Death was related to the dynastic unions during the later Middle Ages. It first considers the origins of the union by focusing on the dynastic and political aspects of the Black Death, and in particular the renewed Scandinavian integration during the period 1261–1397. It then discusses the Kalmar Union and the conflicts over it between monarchy and aristocracy in 1434–1523, as well as the reasons for the collapse of the union of the three Scandinavian kingdoms. It also explores state formation in Scandinavia in the later Middle Ages before concluding with an analysis of the Reformation and its consequences during the years 1523–1537.
Family Ambivalence: The Contested Terrain of Intercountry Adoption
Authors: Bhabha Jacqueline
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines intercountry adoption and how it affects children moved from the “majority” to the “developed” world each year to become part of a new family. The assumption that children belong within a nurturing family environment forms a bedrock of international human rights law. It is also a key feature of immigration and citizenship law. The chapter explains how intercountry adoption gives rise to heated public controversy over what constitutes the “best interests of children.” It considers several causes for skepticism about the value of intercountry adoption, including increased uncertainty about the unqualified benefits of “plenary adoption.” It also shows how increasing commercialization and the lack of adequate safeguards are resulting in criminal abuses including child trafficking, abduction, and sale. Finally, it discusses intercountry adoption as a form of child migration and argues the need to improve the current system of intercountry adoption.
I Pencil Revisited
Authors: Colander David , Kupers Roland
Published: January 2018

People who believe in the free market are generally much closer to a complexity frame than are those who primarily put their faith in governmental planning and control. In fact, complexity may well often be loosely equated with pure laissez-faire, but complexity includes government, seeing it not as planner or controller, but as a natural partner with existing institutions in a search for useful parameters of action. This joint search is called an “activist laissez-faire” policy. While the terms “activist laissez-faire” and “laissez-faire” may look similar in the standard policy frame, they are quite different in terms of how one envisions the role of government. Hence, we need to distinguish our complexity frame from the free market frame espoused by supporters of unadulterated laissez-faire policy. This chapter illustrates this distinction by revisiting a well-known market story. It is the ode to the market told by I Pencil to Leonard Reed, a free-market newspaper columnist.
Defining Arab Nationalism
Authors: Dawisha Adeed
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter provides an overview of Arab nationalism. Throughout his numerous writings on Arab nationalism, Sati‘ al-Husri—the foremost theoretician of Arab nationalism—never lost sight of the ultimate goal of the ideology he so vigorously propagated, namely the political unity of the Arabic-speaking people. He wrote that the happiest of nations were the ones in which political and national boundaries were fused into one another. In another one of his writings, Husri says that he is constantly asked how was it that the Arabs lost the 1948–1949 war over Palestine when they were seven states and Israel was only one? His answer is unequivocal: the Arabs lost the war precisely because they were seven states. Thus, to avoid losing future wars, the Arabs had to unite into one Arab state.
The Path to Nationalist Ascent: From the Palestinian Revolt to the Egyptian Revolution
Authors: Dawisha Adeed
Published: January 2018

This chapter describes the popular support for Palestinians in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt, and the consequent policies and pronouncements of the respective governments. In Iraq, widespread demonstrations erupted in support of the 1936 Palestinian general strike, which became so widespread that the Iraqi government hastened to impose a ban on all demonstrations. Popular support for the Palestinian cause was no less fierce in Syria. Strikes and demonstrations occurred frequently, accompanied by violently anti-Zionist and anti-British pamphlets and petitions. In its popular reaction to the Palestinian revolt, Egypt was not different from Iraq or Syria. The convening of the Congress in Cairo, and the anti-British undercurrents which it displayed at a time when the British held an unquestionable position of influence in the country, is a testimony to the strength of the pro-Palestinian sentiments sweeping Egypt in the wake of the Arab revolt.
Arab Nationalism on the March, 1955–1957
Authors: Dawisha Adeed
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that if specific events were to be picked as signposts in the spectacular forward march of Arab nationalism during the 1950s, the three that stand out are the 1955 Baghdad Pact, the 1956 Suez Crisis, and the birth of the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1958. While Egypt’s perceived victory in the Suez Crisis and the merger of Egypt and Syria into the UAR constituted perhaps the two singular events that truly galvanized Arab public opinion behind the ideas and symbols of Arab nationalism, it was the Baghdad Pact which was the defining event that triggered a chain of political initiatives and responses that ultimately were to mark the period as the nationalist era. It was in this era that large segments of the educated populace came to believe passionately in the unquestionable and inevitable triumph of Arab nationalism.
Arab Nationalism’s Downward Slide, 1958–1967
Authors: Dawisha Adeed
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses Arab nationalism’s downward slide. The Syrians had imagined the United Arab Republic (UAR) as a union of equals under the leadership of Gamal ‘Abd al-Nasir. However, Syria had little choice but to follow in Egypt’s shadow, and to do things the way Egyptians did them. This created backlash from the Syrian business and army circles, resulting in the Syrian coup and the end of the UAR. Momentous as it was, the Syrian secession did not mean the end of the Arab nationalist movement. However, Arab nationalism still did suffer a very serious setback. If Iraq’s refusal to join the UAR was the first dent in Arab nationalism’s seemingly impregnable armor, the dissolution of the UAR was a significant fracture.
Political Field Alignments
Authors: Paschel Tianna S.
Published: January 2018

This chapter first sets out the book's purpose, which is to analyze the process through which blackness became legitimated as a category of political contestation in the eyes of the state and other powerful political actors in Latin America, specifically Colombia and Brazil. The author does this by examining archives and conducting ethnographic fieldwork over nearly eight years in the style of what scholars across disciplines have called “political ethnography.” The discussions then turn to a comparison of race relations in Latin America and the United States in the twentieth century; the adoption of specific policies for black populations in Latin America; ethno-racial policy in Latin America; and why Colombia and Brazil are obvious choices for an analysis of black rights in Latin America. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.
The Racial Equality Alignment
Authors: Paschel Tianna S.
Published: January 2018

This chapter analyzes the new laws passed by Brazilian and Colombian states in the wake of the 2001 Third World Conference against Racism in Durban, South Africa. Unlike the cultural and territorial rights granted to subsets of the black populations in the 1990s, these new policies were broader and wrapped in the language of racial equality and inclusion. The categories of political contestation also seemed to change in this period from “black” to hyphenated national categories such as “Afro-Brazilian,” “Afro-Colombian,” and “Afro-Peruvian.” In this way, the new wave of reforms represented a considerable departure from the multicultural policies adopted throughout Latin America just a decade before.
Rethinking Race, Rethinking Movements
Authors: Paschel Tianna S.
Published: January 2018

This chapter moves toward a broader discussion of the contributions this book offers to the study social movements and to scholars of race and ethnicity. The book developed a political fields approach in order to make three substantive arguments about the causes and consequences of the shift to ethno-racial legislation in Colombia and Brazil over the last three decades. The first argument is that the interplay between global factors and national political developments—paired with the strategic action of small black movements—best explains why Colombia and Brazil adopted these historic reforms. The second argument is that black rights and policies in Colombia and Brazil unfolded in two distinct moments of alignment, each of which corresponded with a different notion of blackness. The third and final empirical argument is that while there is no doubt that black movements in Colombia and Brazil have both been successful in pressuring the state to make both symbolic and substantive reforms, their struggles have led to only partial victories.
Iamblichus on Divine Divination and Human Intuition
Authors: Struck Peter T.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the thoughts of Neoplatonist Iamblichus on divination. Neoplatonists take the discussions of the master as an invitation to understand a newly reconfigured idea of divination as much more than a comparandum, but as itself a vehicle to reveal philosophical knowledge on large questions. Iamblichus speaks about a new, “true” kind of divination, through assimilation to the divine, which yields sweeping knowledge of the philosophical underpinnings of the universe as a whole, and which is possible only through the most thorough eschewing of any bodily connection. In the school's most robust discussion, Iamblichus defines this new kind, consistently, in contrast to the tentative knowledge available by traditional divinatory practice.
Reconsidering Penelope
Authors: Struck Peter T.
Published: January 2018

This chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The account in this book has been of philosophical schools trying to make sense of a puzzling phenomenon. As is always the case in looking at an intellectual history from this perspective, one may rightly raise the question of whether it has pertinence outside these rarified circles. Do the perspectives apparent in those texts allow us to gain new insights in other domains of culture? The remainder of the chapter offers a slightly closer look at a case study which provides an example for the kinds of insights that may be available. The vantage provided here gives new purchase on the divine signs in the culminating books of Homer's Odyssey, which are sending us a slightly richer message about Penelope than we have yet fully appreciated.
Good Neighbor Nation
Authors: Rosenblum Nancy L.
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter discusses the meaning of a good neighbor—people who live nearby and contribute to, or do not derange, the quality of life at home. It explores the phenomenology of everyday encounters: ordinary good turns and ordinary vices, the give and take of greetings, favors, and offenses in this place whose meaning for people is different from any other. Extreme conditions and frightful degradation of everyday life at home are common enough, however, and then neighbors' responses are immensely important, life-altering. Neighbors may hold other people's lives in their hands. A common thread in survivors' accounts of natural disasters is the assistance only neighbors provide. They stimulate awakening and orientation, and then they improvise rescue and aid, resisting the chaos and fury of decivilization.
Who Is My Neighbor?
Authors: Rosenblum Nancy L.
Published: January 2018

This chapter poses the foundational question, “who is my neighbor?” Proximity to home is essential, but one can count neighbors as those who affect the quality of life at home, with whom people have repeated encounters. Neighbors should not be confused with strangers or with intimates and friends. Commonplace references to globalization, the valorization of cosmopolitanism, universal moral norms that often seem to float high off the surface of everyday relations, media that bring images and voices from across the world, tempt people to understate the significance of place. However, a pair of facts—physical proximity and proximity to home—has a bearing on all the interactions and makes encounters among neighbors a different animal than social interactions in other settings, and certainly different than relations among friends or citizens.
Narrative Threads
Authors: Rosenblum Nancy L.
Published: January 2018

This chapter introduces accounts of good neighbor and the democracy of everyday life in American literature. Settler, immigrant, and suburban portrayals demonstrate the centrality of this regulative ideal in people's moral imagination and in Americans' self-representation. Good neighbor as a facet of moral identity and as a collective American self-representation are rich composites created from an unprecedented and ever-increasing wealth of fiction, poetry, and memoir. The significance of these narratives is that they make particular places and moments in time vivid; they endow the subject with dimension. Like “thick” cultural ethnography, these narratives document what, in this place, anyone would do. Neighbors in literature as in life are driven to think about the ethics of their situation, but in fiction they think aloud.
Taking Offense, Speaking Out
Authors: Rosenblum Nancy L.
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores ordinary vices and how reciprocity works, or fails to work, when one is faced with a neighbor who gives offense. It asks whether people withdraw, elect detachment, or if they speak out, rally, and recruit others to the cause. Neighbor relations operate in the shadow of the law, and, in some circumstances, dealing with offenses involves appealing to authorities. When people believe their neighbor has violated local ordinances, when their fence encroaches on one's yard or blight fouls the area, people report to police, zoning boards, and housing authorities. People hope for enforcement and compliance and often compensation for the nuisance or emotional distress. So, neighbors file complaints and notify official agencies, such as the Development Review Board, or invoke the General Unsightliness Ordinance.
Betrayal
Authors: Rosenblum Nancy L.
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on neighbors turned informers. An abnormal Panoptical society, a “world without walls,” replaces the ordinary boundaries and neutral ground among good neighbors. It becomes a punishable offense to see and hear yet refuse to report, and neighbors become active agents in this system of control. The chapter cites the mass Japanese evacuation and internment at the start of World War II as an example: a story of public betrayal by government and personal betrayal by white neighbors before “relocation” and again after resettlement at the end of the war. It is also a story of brittle, fractionated relations among Japanese families living side by side in the camps.
Priestly Couples
Authors: DiLuzio Meghan J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter argues that priestly couples had a larger role in the Roman ritual system than modern scholars have realized. The rex sacrorum and the flamen Martialis certainly shared their offices with the regina sacrorum and the flaminica Martialis respectively. It seems very likely that the wives of the thirteen remaining flamines were flaminicae as well. Priestly couples are best understood in relation to the patterns of worship in the household, where husbands and wives fulfilled complementary religious roles. Indeed, priestly couples exemplified traditionally asymmetrical gender constructions and relationships. It is clear, however, that the structure of Roman society included a robust ritual role for both sexes. Wives and priestesses offered sacrifices at domestic hearths and public altars because the religious system was thought to function properly only when men and women served their gods together.
The Vestal Virgins in Roman Politics
Authors: DiLuzio Meghan J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the relationship between individual Vestals and their families. Vestals were legally isolated from their birth families and set apart from the traditional structures of Roman society. Their unique legal status ensured that they belonged, above all, to the Roman people, whose hearth they guarded on a daily basis. However, while the order as a whole maintained its reputation as an isolated and apolitical body at the heart of Rome's religious community, individual Vestals often forged vibrant public careers for themselves and for their family members. The chapter then considers the Vestals as independent actors who more or less successfully negotiated between their identity as public priestesses and their identity as daughters, sisters, and kinswomen. It also argues that they played an important role in political life at Rome by investing in the careers of their male relatives.
A Society of Orders
Authors: Dauber Noah
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines Sir Thomas Smith's account of political development in the form of a description of the Elizabethan state in his De Republica Anglorum. More specifically, it considers Smith's suggestion that England was a society of orders of the sort that Carlo Sigonio had described with reference to Rome. It shows how Smith situated the “republic of the English” in a scheme of political development, drawing on Sigonio and the humanist lawyer Ulrich Zasius for background. It also discusses Smith's comparison of the English constitution to a moment of balance during the Roman republic after the curial institutions of the tyrants had faded away, but before the popular party gained the upper hand. Finally, it highlights the difference between Smith's understanding of the commonwealth (respublica) and the Marian exiles' understanding of the state.
The Private and the Public
Authors: Dauber Noah
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines Sir Francis Bacon's notion of the public and the private by offering a reading of his Essays and Aphorismi de Jure Gentium Maiore Sive de Fontibus Justiciae et Juris. Bacon was skeptical that a vision of state and commonwealth that placed its hopes in social distance and an exemplary class could really deliver the public-minded service and broader contentment needed. What he saw was envy, competitive behavior of the wrong sort, emulation, and idleness. His theory of the commonwealth was a reflection on how social and political organization could transform and channel these competitive behaviors. The chapter also considers Bacon's argument that the ideal type of behavior required true talent and the capacity to actually accomplish things; those who sought office to serve others, even if not from the nobility, were no less public-minded and their motivations no more private.
Turning and Burning: Sentimental Criticism, Casabiancas, and the Click of the Cliché
Authors: Lootens Tricia
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the relationship between suspended spheres and interdisciplinary poetic reading, drawing on popular and pedagogical writing that invites reflection on patriotic fantasies' relations to post-Victorian processes of reading—and unreading—sentimental poetic texts. It first analyzes Virginia Woolf's “The Works of Mrs. Hemans,” which not only presents learning to unread sentimental poetry as an educational rite of passage, but encourages the cultivation of part comic, part courtly, part anxious visions of naïve and sentimental readers. It then considers Felicia Dorothea Hemans's “Casabianca” and compares it to Elizabeth Bishop's “Casabianca,” arguing that consent to the patriotic Poetess terrors of Hemans may well serve as prerequisite for rendering the terrifying critical and political as well as poetic achievement of Bishop's modernist elegy fully legible. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the New York Times' volume Portraits: 9/11/01; The Collected “Portraits of Grief”.
Predicting the Presidency
Authors: Edwards George C., III
Published: January 2018

Millions of Americans—including many experienced politicians—viewed Barack Obama through a prism of high expectations, based on a belief in the power of presidential persuasion. Yet many who were inspired by candidate Obama were disappointed in what he was able to accomplish once in the White House. They could not understand why he often was unable to leverage his position and political skills to move the public and Congress to support his initiatives. This book explains why Obama had such difficulty bringing about the change he promised, and challenges the conventional wisdom about presidential leadership. The book shows how we can ask a few fundamental questions about the context of a presidency—the president’s strategic position or opportunity structure—and use the answers to predict a president’s success in winning support for his initiatives. If presidential success is largely determined by a president’s strategic position, what role does persuasion play? Almost every president finds that a significant segment of the public and his fellow partisans in Congress are predisposed to follow his lead. Others may support the White House out of self-interest. The book explores the possibilities of the president exploiting such support, providing a more realistic view of the potential of presidential persuasion. The book sheds new light on the limitations and opportunities of presidential leadership.
Strategic Position with the Public
Authors: Edwards George C.
Published: January 2018

This chapter illustrates the advantages of focusing on the president’s existing opportunity structure by analyzing Barack Obama’s strategic position with the public to explain why he faced such difficulties in obtaining the public’s support. It argues that all presidents wishing to make important changes in public policy should seek to answer the following questions about their strategic position with public opinion: Did the public provide the president an electoral mandate for his policies? Does the public support the general direction of the president’s policies? How polarized is public opinion? How malleable is public opinion? By answering these questions, we are in a strong position to understand the potential of presidential leadership of the public and more importantly, to predict the likelihood of the president obtaining the public’s support for his programs.
Different Questions, Different Answers
Authors: Edwards George C.
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the relative utility of the strategic position and persuasion perspectives in explaining the potential of presidential leadership by focusing on several prominent issues arising since Barack Obama’s reelection. In discussions of presidential success, we want to know the contribution of persuasion and whether other factors offer more powerful explanations. For his failures, we want to investigate whether a dependency on persuasion contributed to them, whether aspects of his strategic position were critical to the outcome, and whether we can gain analytical leverage by asking if the president understood and effectively exploited his strategic position. The chapter considers issues that share some key aspects of the president’s opportunity structure, including taxation policy, sequestration, gun control, and government shutdown. It shows that the strategic position perspective leads us to ask different questions regarding presidential leadership—and encourages us to arrive at different, and better, answers.
Modern Power Analysis
Authors: Baldwin David A.
Published: January 2018

This chapter introduces the social power perspective with a principal focus on the work of Robert Dahl and his critics. It provides the conceptual foundation for much of the thinking about power during the last half century. The thrust of the argument is that Dahl's approach to the study of power has been mischaracterized by many of his critics. The chapter begins with an overview of the Dahl's works and the ensuing “debate” between Dahl and his critics, which continued into the 1970s. Since Dahl continued to write about power for the rest of the twentieth century, the continuities and changes in his thoughts on the subject are examined. The chapter concludes with an examination of a number of misinterpretations of Dahl's concept of power and an evaluation of his concept for research in political science.
Neoliberalism
Authors: Baldwin David A.
Published: January 2018

Neoliberalism is not a logically coherent theory but rather a loosely related set of ideas criticizing the neorealist (and realist) treatment of actor designation, institutions, cooperation, international anarchy, the hierarchy of state goals, the role of power in international politics, and/or some combination of these topics. A bewildering assortment of terms has been used in this context, including liberalism, neoliberalism, neoliberal institutionalism, institutionalism, and interdependence theory. This chapter focuses on the foundational book in this approach—Power and Interdependence (1977) by Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye Jr.—and the concept of “soft power” explicated by Nye between 1990 and 2011. This is a useful concept for policy analysis but also one in need of further clarification in order to become a useful social science concept.
Conclusion
Authors: Baldwin David A.
Published: January 2018

The preceding chapters examined power analysis as a tool of social science and the concept of power in international relations theory from both historical and analytic perspectives. This chapter reviews the evolving role of the concept of power in international relations theories, summarizes the case for the contemporary relevance of a Dahlian approach to power analysis, and suggests guidelines for future research on the role of military power in international relations. It concludes with a consideration of the overall value of power analysis, including the clarification of policy options, understanding success and failure, understanding the role of power in the international system, and accountability.
After the Rent Boycotts
Authors: von Schnitzler Antina
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the “rent boycotts” of the 1980s to show how infrastructure, the provision of basic services and payments to the state have intersected with larger questions about citizenship and forms of political expression that developed in the context of the late-apartheid period. Focusing on Operation Gcin'amanzi and the ways it became an object of large-scale protests, the chapter considers how nonpayment became politicized during the antiapartheid struggle beginning in the 1980s and how, from the 1990s onwards, it was “reframed” as a technical rather than a political problem. It describes Operation Gcin'amanzi and the prepaid meter as attempts to sever the historic link between nonpayment, infrastructure, and claims to citizenship and belonging.
Measuring Life
Authors: von Schnitzler Antina
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores the ways in which numbers and measurement became central both to the planning and implementation of Operation Gcin'amanzi and to its opposition. In particular, it examines the multiple forms of intervention attending the corporatization of water provision and the semiotic-material work of making water calculable. It also discusses the “countermeasures” produced by activists from Phiri, as they took up numerical practices to make claims on the state, along with the larger techno-political terrain within which such numerical activism takes shape. Finally, it considers how the prepaid meter became part of a larger set of neoliberal reforms at the heart of which was the introduction of new epistemologies and targets for intervention and reform.
Conclusion
Authors: von Schnitzler Antina
Published: January 2018

This chapter concludes that the book has explored the political terrain in postapartheid South Africa, where infrastructure and administration had for decades been central political arenas in which much of the urban struggle unfolded. In particular, it has examined how producing liberal democracy, including the constitutive splits between the public and the private and the political and the administrative, became a central task of the postapartheid state, one that has always been prone to failure and contestation from multiple directions. The book has outlined the contours of this techno-political terrain beginning in the late-apartheid period when infrastructure and action on the administrative terrain became a central feature of the antiapartheid struggle. In conclusion, it considers how, in the postapartheid period, many of the questions that animated the liberation struggle are often continually being negotiated and re-articulated in a variety of spaces.
A Constraints-Based Philosophy of Mathematical Practice
Authors: Wagner Roi
Published: January 2018

This chapter describes a constraints-based philosophy of mathematical practice and shows that mathematics can be so many different things, even if we look at a particular branch of mathematics in a particular time and place. It introduces a philosophical approach to mathematics that can serve as an integrative framework for the insights of the various philosophies of mathematics and demonstrates what kind of plurality the philosophy of mathematics must embrace, if it is to be faithful to the phenomenon that it seeks to explicate. The chapter reflects on the function of mathematical statements, consensus in mathematics, and mathematical interpretation and semiosis. It also considers various constraints that apply to mathematical practice and how they are negotiated by different mathematical cultures. Finally, it examines more mainstream notions of reality and truth of mathematical entities and statements and suggests how a takeoff on Hilary Putnam's notion of relevance might relativize them.
Competition and Stability in Banking
Authors: Vives Xavier
Published: January 2018

Does too much competition in the banking sector hurt society? What policies can best protect and stabilize banking without stifling it? Institutional responses to such questions have evolved over time, from interventionist regulatory control after the Great Depression to the liberalization policies that started in the United States in the 1970s. The 2007–2009 crisis, which originated from an oversupply of credit, once again raised questions about excessive banking competition and what should be done about it. This book addresses the critical relationships between competition, regulation, and stability, and the implications of coordinating banking regulations with competition policies. The book argues that while competition is not responsible for fragility in banking, there are trade-offs between competition and stability. Well-designed regulations would alleviate these trade-offs but not eliminate them, and the specificity of competition in banking should be accounted for. It also asserts that regulation and competition policy should be coordinated, with tighter prudential requirements in more competitive situations, but it also shows that supervisory and competition authorities should stand separate from each other, each pursuing its own objective. The book reviews the theory and empirics of banking competition, drawing on up-to-date analysis that incorporates the characteristics of modern market-based banking, and he looks at regulation, competition policies, and crisis interventions in Europe and the United States, as well as in emerging and developing economies. Focusing on why banking competition policies are necessary, the book examines regulation's impact on the industry's efficiency and effectiveness.
Competition, Regulation, and Stability in Banking: Theory and Evidence
Authors: Vives Xavier
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the relationship between competition and stability in the banking sector both from a theoretical and from an empirical perspective. It considers the competition–stability link from the standpoint of fragility both because of runs and because of excessive risk taking, along with the available evidence assessing how competition relates to systemic risk and how deregulation is associated with risk taking. It also explores the connection between market structure, consolidation, and internationalization and how it affects stability. Lessons from the subprime crisis are derived. The result of the analysis is to characterize the competition–stability trade-off, how regulation can alleviate it, and the need to coordinate competition policy and prudential regulation. The chapter concludes with a discussion of the regulatory reform process in the banking industry after the 2007–2009 crisis.
The Sacred Squareness of Cities
Authors: Lewis Michael J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter discusses the squareness of the ideal city in the Bible. The Bible describes a model city or settlement on four separate occasions, and in each instance it has the form of a square. The ultimate square city is the New Jerusalem, described by both John of Patmos and the prophet Ezekiel as a twelve-gated, walled square The forty-eight Levitical cities described in Numbers 35 were likewise square. And even that archetypal of all biblical settlements, the encampment of the twelve tribes of Israel during their wanderings, was itself arranged as a square. Thus, anyone looking to the Bible for guidance on how to build a community must come to the conclusion that a godly city should be square.
The Lord’s Grove
Authors: Lewis Michael J.
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on Herrnhaag, “the Lord's Grove,” the refugee settlement founded by Count Nicholas Zinzendorf in 1738. It flourished for only a dozen years, and its population never exceeded a thousand, yet it was the prototype for almost every city of refuge that would follow. This is not because it consolidated ideas about community, economy, and geometry in an unusually forceful way but because it was carried by a religion with a worldwide reach. This is the Unitas Fratrum (Unity of the Brethren), known in German as die Brüdergemeine and in English as the Moravian Church. The Moravians' settlements were the first examples of villages designed and built by a vibrant religious community that made them a formal instrument of theology.
Introduction
Authors: Kriner Douglas L. , Schickler Eric
Published: January 2018

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book’s main themes. It begins with a discussion of why Congress can investigate when it cannot legislate. It then explains how Congressional investigations of the executive branch have shaped American politics and the origins and evolution of Congress’s investigative power. The chapters that follow identify the conditions under which Congress uses its investigative power, and to demonstrate that the real or anticipated exercise of this power significantly constrains the president and produces tangible changes in policy outcomes. As a result, investigations offer Congress a check on presidential aggrandizement that is often more effective than that provided by its legislative function.
The Indirect Influence of Congressional Investigations on Policy Outcomes
Authors: Kriner Douglas L. , Schickler Eric
Published: January 2018

This chapter explores a third pathway of investigative influence: investigations in one policy area may affect presidential actions in unrelated policy areas by raising the threat of new investigative actions should the president stray too far from congressional preferences. It focuses on several important characteristics of military policy making—particularly the plausible assumption that most international crises arise independently of the domestic political environment in the United States—to assess the concrete impact of even unrelated investigations in the recent past on future policy outcomes. The analysis suggests that the scope of investigative influence may be even greater than it superficially appears. Even when Congress does not investigate, the threat of an investigation and the political costs it generates may well affect the administration’s political calculus and its implementation of policy accordingly.
A Specter of Nationalism
Authors: Shoshan Nitzan
Published: January 2018

This book examines the affective management of German nationalism, or what it calls “the management of hate,” in Germany after reunification, taking as its point of departure the daily realities of young right-wing extremist groups in the East Berlin district of Treptow-Köpenick. It explores the governance of right-wing extremism within a project of German nationhood and how the troubled enterprise of the country's national question proceeds under the sign of broader contemporary processes. Topics include the ways that young right-wing extremists articulate their relations to cultural and ethnicized difference; the juridical production of the so-called “political delinquency”; how the management of hate seeks to inoculate and fortify broader affective publics against illicit forms of nationalism; and “national vision.” This chapter reviews the relevant historical background and provides an overview of some of the crucial theoretical frameworks that guide the study as well as the fieldwork and research methods.
The Kebab and the Wurst
Authors: Shoshan Nitzan
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines how young right-wing extremists in Berlin articulate their relations to immigrants and ethnic alterity and how they negotiate layers of otherness in order to trace, in their own voices, their rendering of dominant imaginations of the social and political landscape. It explains how the rise of ethnicity and of a corresponding notion of culture as standard markers of difference has gone hand in hand with the public celebration of diversity, its active interpellation, and new modes of visualization that it has acquired in Berlin. It also shows how the resonances between ethnic otherness, urban landscape, and political contrasts come into sharp focus around food, noting that political subjectivity unfolds between the Wurst (sausage) as proper German nutrition and the Döner (kebab) as the seductive sensuality of otherness.
The State Inside
Authors: Shoshan Nitzan
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the enforcement of law in Germany, and particularly how the state scrutinizes its political margins. It explores police and policing, the police's mechanisms of surveillance, and public debates about the use of police informants by state agencies to collect information covertly about young right-wing extremists. It explains how the encounter between young right-wing extremists and the penal regime of political delinquency disturbs the ordinary disavowal of the violence of Law. It considers how the figure of the police informant betrays the so-called (dis)organized state mimesis, while haunting the most intimate relationships of young right-wing extremist acquaintances. It also discusses the reciprocal nature of the sorts of contamination anxieties to which the police informant gives expression as well as the occult battle between the ghost of the police and the ghost of National Socialism—a constitutive contradiction between the fetish of the state and the fetish of the nation.
Advances in the Sciences of Exorcism
Authors: Shoshan Nitzan
Published: January 2018

This chapter examines the elaboration of and experimentation with diverse therapeutic and reformative procedures on which the governance of hate in Germany relies, with the aim of highlighting their sometimes desperate, sometimes bizarre struggles to exorcize the right-wing extremist malaise from bodies, minds, and souls. It shows how the excesses that present themselves in such efforts bear witness to the troubled place reserved for right-wing extremism in contemporary Germany. The chapter considers three interventionist modalities designed to reform political delinquents, each of which locates the right-wing extremists in a different site: states of resentment within the affective self, cognitive incoherencies within the rational individual, and corporeal deviance within the physical body. It explains how the affective subject, the rational subject, and the corporeal subject emerged as particularly salient domains for the management of hate.
Inoculating the National Public
Authors: Shoshan Nitzan
Published: January 2018

This chapter focuses on campaigns for the production of positive affective orientations to cultural difference at the neighborhood level. In the wake of reunification, the national crusade against right-wing extremism has supplied one key answer to the national question. The post-reunification resignification of the national community has proceeded under the slogans of tolerance, democracy, open-mindedness, and civil society, which have been promoted as the banners of the war against the peril posed by right-wing extremists. The chapter examines how efforts to mobilize forces to the cause of tolerance and love of multicultural diversity intertwine with the capacity of affective governance to effectively recruit social actors, just as much as they betray its limits. It shows how the fabrication and rebranding of German nationalism has held a fundamental stake in the management of hate.
National Visions
Authors: Shoshan Nitzan
Published: January 2018

This chapter considers what it calls the “national vision,” or the political regimes that define how the nation is to be rendered in visual form, by focusing on the national irruption of panic surrounding the Stars of David saga that inundated Berlin in the fall of 2005. At stake in this event is the so-called “regimes of visibility”: discourses and practices that govern the politics of visualization. The chapter examines the tactical operations on which the young right-wing extremists draw to manage their own political visibility and to confront dominant visibility regimes, and the ways that they contest dominant visual idioms of commemoration and mourning. Finally, it discusses the sixtieth anniversary of the Reich's surrender to the Allies, an event that illustrated not only the paradoxical logic of visualization that marks the governance of the national vision but also the dimensions of the panic triggered by attempts to challenge it.