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Introduction: the politics of public justification
Abstract
Introducing the special issue, this introduction sketches a broad frame for studying public justification. Addressing the relevance of studying this phenomenon, we contend that justificatory processes are very much at the core today’s politics. Defining the concept inclusively, we highlight the relevance of communicative agency and, at the same time, the salience of communicative contexts that enable this agency. Casting our net widely, we show how public justification is related to other, more thoroughly studied concepts, such as legitimacy, authority and power. Encouraging students of public justification to add to our understanding of justificatory processes, we highlight multiple fruitful methodological avenues for studying the concept.
... Policy justification becomes crucial for a legitimisation in cases of military interventions. We consider legitimisation as a process of obtaining legitimacy -people's acceptance of policy, political regime, political order, leader, political actions and decisions (Dahl, 1956;Del Sordi and Dalmasso, 2018;Gelpi, 2010;von Haldenwang, 2017), wherein legitimisation can be obtained by different instruments, one of which is policy justification, which is a communicative instrument of legitimisation (George, 1980;von Haldenwang, 2017), 2017) that involves rhetoric means, interpretation, argumentation of the legitimisation's object as the best among alternatives (Abulof and Kornprobst, 2017). Comparison of the justification of the Russian military operation in Georgia (then RMOG), the Crimea joining Russia (then AC), and the Russian military operation in Syria (then RMOS) allows us to identify the justification strategies used to legitimise the military operations. ...
The article presents the results of an analysis of the strategic narratives of the President of Russia and representatives of the Russian Foreign Ministry in substantiating Russian military operations abroad. The analysis is carried out on the example of the military operation in Georgia (2008), special operation in Crimea (2014), Crimea joining Russia, and the military operation in Syria (since 2015). The justification for military operations was mainly carried out by the president and representatives of the Russian Foreign Ministry. The justification for military operations was intended to legitimize the military actions and decisions of the Russian Federation. Officials used strategic, national and issue narratives. The core of the justification was the interpretation of historical memory and the description of the actions of Western countries as contrary to international law. The author shows that the justification for Russia's military operation in Georgia differed from that of the Crimea joining Russia, and the military operation in Syria. In the first case, Russian officials blamed Western countries for illegitimate actions to a lesser extent than in the case of justifying the Crimea joining Russia, and the military operation in Syria. Moreover, after 2017 Russian actors began to use narratives about the humanitarian mission of Russia.
... To demonstrate the paper's main argument, I parse the legitimation strategies of the main sponsors of policy change: What arguments do conservative politicians put forward to justify controversial policies (Abulof and Kornprobst 2017;Saurugger 2013)? In particular, how is the EU framed in these public justifications? ...
The European Union is often seen as a bulwark of progressive values, including LGBTI rights. By restricting such rights, politicians thus appear to reject the EU’s fundamental principles. This paper argues, however, that anti-gender politics is often a surprisingly pro-European phenomenon. Many of its practitioners rebuff accusations of Euroskepticism. For them, rights restrictions are less an attempt to reject European integration than to redirect its trajectory. They aim to reconnect the EU with Europe’s civilizational roots. The paper illustrates this argument by analyzing the discourse actors have used to justify anti-gender policies in three countries: Hungary, Lithuania, and Slovakia.
... These case studies are illustrative of the broader dimensions that we suggest are missing from the literature on sanctions, namely social sanctions and interinstitutional differences. The method applied is a systematic collection and interpretation of justifications provided by policymakers for their choice of approach (Abulof & Kornprobst, 2017). We engage with two types of justifications: public justifications found in official documents or made by policymakers in a public setting and justifications by policymakers in an interview setting where the interviewees were asked to provide justifications for the EU's choice of actions. ...
This article aims to enrich the literature on EU sanctions in two ways. First, it argues that the absence of material sanctions does not imply a non-response. When faced with human rights violations, policymakers enjoy a third option besides exerting material pressure or refraining from intervening. They may instead employ what constructivist scholars call social sanctions. This option consists of verbally calling out the violators, either publicly, through a naming-and-shaming strategy , or diplomatically via political dialogue and demarches. Social sanctions can be a credible alternative or complement to material sanctions. Second, we argue for the importance of disaggregating the EU as a sender of sanctions. A non-response by executive institutions does not mean that the EU as a whole is standing idly by. Looking at social sanctions alongside material ones more accurately describes the choices policymakers face when designing their response to human rights violations. We demonstrate the value of our arguments by examining the EU's various responses to LGBTI rights violations in Lithuania and Uganda.
This article makes a case for studying the legitimation of emergency politics from the vantage point of securitisation. To that end, it zooms in on politics during the COVID-19 pandemic – a many-sided crisis that generated a heightened insecurity environment. Based on a qualitative content analysis of the French official rhetoric on two COVID-19 emergency measures, it foregrounds how securitising speech acts construing a macro threat and notable shifts in hierarchical ordering of securitisations underpinned justifications for COVID-19 pandemic politics. Conceptually, this research bridges the literature on legitimation and securitisation by synthesising scattered securitising elements in typologies of legitimation and outlining the legitimating function of two securitisation dynamics – macrosecuritisation and securitising dilemma.
Zusammenfassung
Gesetzliche Maßnahmen im Bereich der Auslandsfinanzierung von zivilgesellschaftlichen Organisationen werden inzwischen als zentraler Bestandteil von schrumpfenden zivilgesellschaftlichen Räumen angesehen. Allerdings existiert in der Literatur bisher kein Konsens über die Angemessenheit eines expliziten staatlichen Eingriffs in diesem Bereich. Der Artikel entwickelt deswegen einen konzeptionellen Rahmen, um den einschränkenden Charakter von staatlichen Eingriffen empirisch präziser als bisher bestimmen zu können. Wir plausibilisieren unser konzeptionelles Argument anhand von sechs kurzen Fallstudien zu Deutschland, Österreich, der Türkei, Ungarn, Uruguay und Venezuela. Damit tragen wir in dreifacher Art und Weise zur Debatte über schrumpfende zivilgesellschaftliche Räume bei. Wir zeigen erstens, dass gesetzliche Maßnahmen in Bezug auf die ausländische Finanzierung von Zivilgesellschaft nicht zwangsläufig als Teil eines weltweiten repressiven Trends anzusehen sind. Zweitens schlagen wir eine neue analytische Einordnung vor, die über das bisher dominante binäre Verständnis hinausgeht, welches gerade im Global Süden jeglicher Anpassung gesetzlicher Maßnahmen in diesem Bereich repressive Tendenzen unterstellt. Drittens versuchen wir eine Sicht der internationalen Menschenrechte zur Vereinigungsfreiheit mit einer auf nationalen verfassungsrechtlichen Normen fokussierten Perspektive in Verbindung zu bringen, um damit empirisch-analytisch präziser auf die in vielen Ländern existierenden rechtsnormativen Unterschiede zwischen diesen beiden Ebenen aufmerksam zu machen.
This chapter introduces the subject matter of the book and provides a comprehensive overview of the book’s argument and structure. The book is introduced as the first systematic analysis of national debates on redistributive EU policies and the relevance of European solidarity therein providing important insights into (1) domestic support for redistributive EU policies, (2) the general strength of European solidarity in a society and (3) the conditions under which reference to European solidarity is pronounced. The chapter begins with a discussion of the relevant literature and describes the research gap that is filled by the book. It further presents the theoretical foundations and analytical approach of the book and elaborates on the four cases selected to analyse the relevance of European solidarity: (1) the French debate during the euro crisis, (2) the German debate during the euro crisis, (3) the French debate during the migration crisis and (4) the German debate during the migration crisis. Finally, the chapter concludes with a summary of the main findings of the book and outlines the approach to be taken in the next chapters.
This chapter presents the theoretical and conceptual foundation of the book. It introduces a working definition of European solidarity and then presents the book’s approach to examine the relevance of European solidarity when redistributive policies are discussed, namely: the analysis of public justifications in parliamentary debates. Building on this, a conceptual framework for mapping public justifications in national debates is introduced. Finally, the chapter presents a theoretical approach for explaining the relevance of European solidarity in a national debate. In this context, five potential influencing factors are introduced: (1) political culture, (2) material benefit, (3) political support, (4) party ideology and (5) policy precision. Based on these influencing factors, five theoretical expectations are formulated to structure the empirical analysis of the four cases. Based on these influencing factors, five theoretical expectations are formulated to structure the empirical analysis of the four cases.
Cambridge Core - International Relations and International Organisations - Co-Managing International Crises - by Markus Kornprobst
The European Union (EU) is one of the world’s most active imposers of foreign policy sanctions. By contrast, the EU has never used formal political sanctions against a member. Why does the EU favour sanctions as an instrument to deal with norm violations abroad, but not at home? The article argues that an understanding of sanctions as ostracism helps illuminate this discrepancy. Far from technical instruments that can be made to ‘work’ through improved design, sanctions are social instruments that operate through selective exclusion. An in-depth scrutiny of public justifications from the European institutions and individual politicians shows that both at home and abroad sanctions are strongly associated with ostracising attributes. However, whereas practical and symbolic distance-taking from the target is core for foreign policy sanctions, at home, the same ostracising properties run against the EU’s traditional insistence on resolving disagreements through rational dialogue.
The political legitimation (or de-legitimation) of the European Union (EU) has been the object of much empirical research. This paper argues that this research holds lessons that can inform debates about the legitimation of global governance more generally. After some conceptual clarifications, the paper presents a critical review of the literature on the EU’s legitimation, focusing on six crucial aspects – (1) the emergence and change of legitimation debates; (2) the arenas where legitimation occurs; (3) the role of the state as a reference point in legitimacy assessments; (4) the difference between various objects of legitimation; (5) the actors that trigger legitimation change; as well as (6) the relationship between legitimation and polity development. In each of these respects, the paper identifies important insights that can be gained from EU Studies, but also conceptual and methodological weaknesses in the EU-related literature that researchers working on other aspects of global governance should avoid. The paper closes by formulating a set of general desiderata for empirical legitimation research in International Relations.
Following the demise of the so-called grand theories offered by luminaries like Sigmund Freud, B. F. Skinner, and Carl Rogers, the field of psychology largely gave up its early aspirations to paint a broad picture of the human condition, and now the discipline focuses primarily on empirical problems that have a relatively narrow scope. The consequence has been a proliferation of interesting findings with no real capacity to answer big questions or to generate a shared general understanding of the human condition. This book seeks to change the status quo and offers up a new unified theory of psychology that redefines the science and the profession and paints a new picture of human nature in the process.
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Praise for
A New Unified Theory of Psychology
“The field of psychology is known for its paradoxical combination of sweeping scope and impressive micro-theories, on the one hand, and fragmentation and internecine squabbling, on the other. To this state of affairs, any serious effort to provide integration and unity within psychological knowledge and understanding is heartily welcomed. And Henriques' effort in this regard is not only serious, but one of the most cogent, scholarly, sophisticated, beautifully reasoned, clearly articulated, and accessibly written presentations of a unified theory in psychology that I have seen in my 50 years in the discipline.”
Daniel B. Fishman, Author of The Case for Pragmatic Psychology,
Professor, Rutgers University
“As the field of psychology has grown, so have the challenges of fragmentation and of misunderstandings. This brave book represents a noble quest to provide a broad, values-based, and scientific framework which holds the power to organize our work and move us forward in strong, new ways.”
Lawrence G. Calhoun, Author of Facilitating Post-Traumatic Growth,
Professor, University of North Carolina-Charlotte
“In this very ambitious book, Henriques makes a strong case for why bold efforts are needed in the fragmented realm of psychological research and theory. Although different readers will likely make different judgments about how well Henriques has succeeded in his aims, it nevertheless is an act of intellectual daring that can perhaps inspire psychologists to look outside the narrow confines of a single laboratory paradigm and open their thinking to how to address the full range of human behavior and experience.”
Paul L. Wachtel, Author of Therapeutic Communication,
Distinguished Professor, CUNY
“Concise, erudite, and practical, this book is a manifesto that challenges psychology to move past fragmented domains of knowledge to a consilient framework, which will allow multi-disciplinary discourse and scientific advances. I suggest all scientists, psychotherapists, and scholars spend some time familiarizing themselves with the concepts and suggestions presented in this seminal volume by a leading scholar.”
Jeffrey Magnavita, Author of Personality Guided Relational Psychotherapy,
Founder of the Unified Psychotherapy Project
The self-determination of peoples is a fundamental legitimating principle of the international system; it justifies the system’s very existence. Through a vast diachronic corpus and pertinent data sets, this article nevertheless reveals a puzzling decline in the public discourse on, and practice of, self-determination over the last 50 years. I identify and assess four structural explanations for this decline: “lexical change” (replacing self-determination with alternative terms); “silent hegemony” (taking the norm for granted); “reactive rhetoric” (echoing conflicts and new state formation post hoc); and “mission accomplished” (rectifying the incongruence between national boundaries and state borders). Complementing these structural causes with agential reasons, I further suggest that powerful state actors and persuasive academics have sought to “tame” self-determination as both principle and practice, retaining the term but altering its meaning from a source of threat into a resource for containing it. Self-determination, however, has not been eliminated, and taming it may yet prove a pyrrhic victory.
This article investigates the misuse of “rationality” in academic and political discourses, focusing on the Iranian nuclear project. The concept of rationality is ubiquitous; scholars, pundits, and practitioners turn to it, sometimes unwittingly, to describe, explain, and predict. When concerning concrete security and foreign policies, however, this praxis borders on malpractice: rationality-based descriptions are largely either false or unfalsifiable; many observers fail to explicate the meaning of “rationality” they employ; and the concept is frequently used politically to distinguish between “us and them.” Empirically, I show that rationality has played an opaque and excessive role in the Western accounts of Iranian nuclear policy. Both “optimists” and “pessimists” have frequently, but faultily, turned to rationality/irrationality to explain Iran’s moderate/belligerent nuclear policy and its susceptibility/resistance to nuclear deterrence. The malpractice of “rationality” in discussing such matters has become a bad habit, which is best uprooted.
As social practices now frequently extend beyond national boundaries, experiences and expectations about fair and legitimate politics have become increasingly fragmented. Our ability to understand and interpret others and to tolerate difference, rather than overcome diversity, is therefore at risk. This book focuses on the contested meanings of norms in a world of increasing international encounters. The author argues that cultural practices are less visible than organisational practices, but are constitutive for politics and need to be understood and empirically 'accounted' for. Comparing four elite groups in Europe, Antje Wiener shows how this invisible constitution of politics matters. By comparing individual interpretations of norms such as democracy and human rights, she shows how they can mean different things, even to frequently travelling elite groups.
David Beetham's book explores the legitimation of power both as an issue in political and social science theory and in relation to the legitimacy of contemporary political systems including its breakdown in revolution. 'An admirable text which is far reaching in its scope and extraordinary in the clarity with which it covers a wide range of material... One can have nothing but the highest regard for this volume.' - David Held, Times Higher Education Supplement ;'Beetham has produced a study bound to revolutionize sociological thinking and teaching... Seminal and profoundly original... Beetham's book should become the obligitory reading for every teacher and practitioner of social science.' - Zygmunt Bauman, Sociology
Long a fruitful area of scrutiny for students of organizations, the study of institutions is undergoing a renaissance in contemporary social science. This volume offers, for the first time, both often-cited foundation works and the latest writings of scholars associated with the "institutional" approach to organization analysis. In their introduction, the editors discuss points of convergence and disagreement with institutionally oriented research in economics and political science, and locate the "institutional" approach in relation to major developments in contemporary sociological theory. Several chapters consolidate the theoretical advances of the past decade, identify and clarify the paradigm's key ambiguities, and push the theoretical agenda in novel ways by developing sophisticated arguments about the linkage between institutional patterns and forms of social structure. The empirical studies that follow--involving such diverse topics as mental health clinics, art museums, large corporations, civil-service systems, and national polities--illustrate the explanatory power of institutional theory in the analysis of organizational change. Required reading for anyone interested in the sociology of organizations, the volume should appeal to scholars concerned with culture, political institutions, and social change.
This book confronts one of the central questions of political science: how people choose to accept or not to accept particular governments. In contrast to the prevailing view that citizens' decisions about the legitimacy of their governments are strongly conditioned by political culture and socialization and are hence largely non-rational, Ronald Rogowski argues that such decisions may indeed be the product of rational choice. The book proceeds both from recent work in the theory of voting and constitutional choice and from the older tradition of contract theory to postulate that decisions about legitimacy are really choices among alternative regimes. The author suggests that members of a society choose among these alternative regimes on the basis of a knowledge of ethnic and occupational divisions in their society. From these postulates a general theory is derived, which finds expression in numerous testable hypotheses.
The political legitimation (or de-legitimation) of the European Union (EU) has been the object of much empirical research. This paper argues that this research holds lessons that can inform debates about the legitimation of global governance more generally. After some conceptual clarifications, the paper presents a critical review of the literature on the EU’s legitimation, focusing on six crucial aspects – (1) the emergence and change of legitimation debates; (2) the arenas where legitimation occurs; (3) the role of the state as a reference point in legitimacy assessments; (4) the difference between various objects of legitimation; (5) the actors that trigger legitimation change; as well as (6) the relationship between legitimation and polity development. In each of these respects, the paper identifies important insights that can be gained from EU Studies, but also conceptual and methodological weaknesses in the EU-related literature that researchers working on other aspects of global governance should avoid. The paper closes by formulating a set of general desiderata for empirical legitimation research in International Relations.
The term ‘legitimacy’ is ubiquitous in the discourse of international politics. Politicians use it, journalists use it, non-governmental organization (NGO) campaigners use it. A Google Internet search combining the terms ‘Kofi Annan’ and ‘legitimacy’ yields an impressive 558,000 hits.1 Yet, even if the world speaks both of, and about, legitimacy, it is not exactly a central topic of international relations (IR) theory. The body of academic literature that systematically discusses legitimacy in IR appears rather slim when compared to the numerous treatises on state power and national interest. What is more, as in other subfields of the social sciences, legitimacy remains a contested concept. International relations scholars do not agree on what precisely the term should mean with reference to international politics, so that there is still great need for conceptual clarification and debate (Schmitter 2001; Bernstein 2004; Kratochwil 2006). One conceptual problem has hardly been discussed at all — traditionally, the disciplines of IR and international law have conceived legitimacy as being an issue among states. This traditional framing stands in stark contrast with much of the more recent literature — in particular, of the normative variant. Since the 1990s, a good deal of the legitimacy debate has focused primarily on the relationship between citizens and international or supranational organizations.
In the age of global politics, nation states have become enmeshed in a web of multiple and interconnected layers of authority, where decision-making powers have been transferred to international and supranational organizations. This shift has led to new debates concerning issues of legitimacy: are Western democracies and their core institutions, primarily parliaments, faced with a legitimacy crisis? How legitimate are emerging international governance structures? And how can legitimacy be measured?
Middle East experts were as surprised as everyone else by the Arab revolts. Focused on explaining the stability of local autocracries in recent decades, they under-estimated the hidden forces driving change. As they wipe the egg off their faces, they need to reconsider long-held assumptions about the Arab world.
The central aim of this work is to test the proposition that normative standards of behavior can influence state actions in security related conflicts. Specifically, I examine the construction of bilateral norms as the settlements of security related disputes and the effects these settlements have on subsequent interactions over the same issue. My argument is drawn from the literature on signaling in game theory and economics. Specifically, I contend that norms act as signals which give meaning to other states' behavior in at least two important ways. First, they demonstrate to each party in a crisis that a solution to their dispute exists which both sides prefer to an escalation of the conflict. Second, security norms define a set of acts which are considered illegitimate by both sides. I test this argument against three prominent alternative models of crisis bargaining behavior: (1) a traditional realist theory of coercion, (2) a psychological model based on attribution theory, and (3) a domestic politics approach. I test the hypotheses derived from these four competing frameworks in two contrasting and complementary ways. First, I use probit analysis to perform a quantitative test on the population of 122 reinitiated international crises between 1929 and 1979. Second, I select four of these crises which I examine through a series of more comprehensive and detailed case studies. I find strong support for the hypothesis that states can and do construct normative standards which guide their behavior in international crises. This result is particularly notable because I conduct my analysis in the area where normative standards should be least likely to influence behavior: security affairs. Realist coercion theory, on the other hand, receives mixed support, while the evidence supporting attribution theory is weak at best. Finally, I do find support for the contention that domestic politics affects crisis bargaining and may influence the effectiveness of international norms.
Bernard Williams is remembered as one of the most brilliant and original philosophers of the past fifty years. Widely respected as a moral philosopher, Williams began to write about politics in a sustained way in the early 1980s. There followed a stream of articles, lectures, and other major contributions to issues of public concern--all complemented by his many works on ethics, which have important implications for political theory. This new collection of essays, most of them previously unpublished, addresses many of the core subjects of political philosophy: justice, liberty, and equality; the nature and meaning of liberalism; toleration; power and the fear of power; democracy; and the nature of political philosophy itself. A central theme throughout is that political philosophers need to engage more directly with the realities of political life, not simply with the theories of other philosophers. Williams makes this argument in part through a searching examination of where political thinking should originate, to whom it might be addressed, and what it should deliver. Williams had intended to weave these essays into a connected narrative on political philosophy with reflections on his own experience of postwar politics. Sadly he did not live to complete it, but this book brings together many of its components. Geoffrey Hawthorn has arranged the material to resemble as closely as possible Williams's original design and vision. He has provided both an introduction to Williams's political philosophy and a bibliography of his formal and informal writings on politics. Those who know the work of Bernard Williams will find here the familiar hallmarks of his writing--originality, clarity, erudition, and wit. Those who are unfamiliar with, or unconvinced by, a philosophical approach to politics, will find this an engaging introduction. Both will encounter a thoroughly original voice in modern political theory and a searching approach to the shape and direction of liberal political thought in the past thirty-five years.
Just what exactly will follow the American century? This is the question Randall L. Schweller explores in his provocative assessment of international politics in the twenty-first century. Schweller considers the future of world politics, correlating our reliance on technology and our multitasking, distracted, disorganized lives with a fragmenting world order. He combines the Greek myth of the Golden Apple of Discord, which explains the start of the Trojan War, with a look at the second law of thermodynamics, or entropy. "In the coming age," Schweller writes, "disorder will reign supreme as the world succumbs to entropy, an irreversible process of disorganization that governs the direction of all physical changes taking place in the universe." Interweaving his theory of global disorder with issues on the world stage-coupled with a disquisition on board games and the cell phone app Angry Birds-Schweller’s thesis yields astonishing insights. Maxwell’s Demon and the Golden Apple will appeal to leaders of multinational corporations and government programs as well as instructors of undergraduate courses in international relations.
The word 'legitimacy' is seldom far from the lips of practitioners of international affairs. The legitimacy of recent events - such as the wars in Kosovo and Iraq, the post-September 11 war on terror, and instances of humanitarian intervention - have been endlessly debated around the globe. And yet the academic discipline of IR has largely neglected this concept. This book asks that legitimacy be taken seriously, both as a facet of international behaviour with practical consequences, and as a theoretical concept necessary for understanding that behaviour. It offers an historical and theoretical account of international legitimacy. It argues that the development of principles of legitimacy lie at the heart of what is meant by an international society, and in so doing fills a notable void in English school accounts of the subject. The book's conclusion, in the end, is that legitimacy matters, but in a complex way. Legitimacy is not to be discovered simply by straightforward application of other norms, such as legality and morality. Instead, legitimacy is an inherently political condition. What determines its attainability or not is as much the general political condition of international society at any one moment, as the conformity of its specific actions to set normative principles.
The politics of legitimacy is central to international relations. When states perceive an international organization as legitimate, they defer to it, associate themselves with it, and invoke its symbols. Examining the United Nations Security Council, Ian Hurd demonstrates how legitimacy is created, used, and contested in international relations. The Council's authority depends on its legitimacy, and therefore its legitimation and delegitimation are of the highest importance to states. Through an examination of the politics of the Security Council, including the Iraq invasion and the negotiating history of the United Nations Charter, Hurd shows that when states use the Council's legitimacy for their own purposes, they reaffirm its stature and find themselves contributing to its authority. Case studies of the Libyan sanctions, peacekeeping efforts, and the symbolic politics of the Council demonstrate how the legitimacy of the Council shapes world politics and how legitimated authority can be transferred from states to international organizations. With authority shared between states and other institutions, the interstate system is not a realm of anarchy. Sovereignty is distributed among institutions that have power because they are perceived as legitimate.
Political scientists have worried about declining levels of citizens’ support for their regimes (legitimacy), but have failed to empirically link this decline to the survival or breakdown of democracy. This apparent paradox is the ‘legitimacy puzzle’, which this book addresses by examining political legitimacy's structure, sources, and effects. With exhaustive empirical analysis of high-quality survey data from eight Latin American nations, it confirms that legitimacy exists as multiple, distinct dimensions. It finds that one’s position in society, education, knowledge, information, and experiences shape legitimacy norms. Contrary to expectations, however, citizens who are unhappy with their government’s performance do not drop out of politics or resort mainly to destabilizing protest. Rather, the disaffected citizens of these Latin American democracies participate at high rates in conventional politics and in such alternative arenas as communal improvement and civil society. and despite regime performance problems, citizen support for democracy remains high. These findings resolve the puzzle - citizen actions and values, even among the disaffected, likely strengthen rather than weaken democratic governments.
Standing at the edge of life's abyss, we seek meaningful order. We commonly find this 'symbolic immortality' in religion, civilization, state and nation. What happens, however, when the nation itself appears mortal? The Mortality and Morality of Nations seeks to answer this question, theoretically and empirically. It argues that mortality makes morality, and right makes might; the nation's sense of a looming abyss informs its quest for a higher moral ground, which, if reached, can bolster its vitality. The book investigates nationalism's promise of moral immortality and its limitations via three case studies: French Canadians, Israeli Jews, and Afrikaners. All three have been insecure about the validity of their identity or the viability of their polity, or both. They have sought partial redress in existential self-legitimation: by the nation, of the nation and for the nation's very existence.
Goes beyond familiar social science models to examine how our distinctive human sense of mortality, morality, liberty, and language shapes politics
Resolves tenacious debates in the literature and clarifies the nature and interplay of nationalism, peoplehood and ethnicity in the matrix of identity politics
Answers why and how nations emerge, evolve and end through the human quest for symbolic immortality and collective morality
Develops a rhetorical field theory that conceptualises the relationship between background ideas and foreground communication Distinguishes between two layers of background ideas ( nomos and topoi) that underpin communicative encounters in a field Conceptualises communicative opportunities and moves through which actors change the nomos of a field Illustrates the added value of a rhetorical field theory by inquiring into nomic change in the nuclear-weapons field
A burgeoning literature in International Relations draws on Bourdieu’s theory of social fields to address the question of how actors make and unmake order in world politics. Inquiring into deeply seated background ideas constituting order, this literature often neglects how communication reproduces and (de)contests background ideas. Our article seeks to remedy this shortcoming by outlining a rhetorical field theory. This theory puts background ideas and foreground communication on an equal footing and conceptualises their relationship in detail. We distinguish between two layers of background ideas ( nomos and topoi) and address the crucial question of how nomic change becomes possible. We introduce a typology of nomic change (destabilisation, adaption, disorientation, shift) and conceptualise the interplay of rhetorical opportunities and rhetorical moves that bring about particular types of nomic change. We probe this theoretical framework by analysing the recent nomic change in the nuclear-weapons field. This empirical analysis provides evidence for our theoretical framework.
This book completes Margaret Archer's trilogy investigating the role of reflexivity in mediating between structure and agency. What do young people want from life? Using analysis of family experiences and life histories, her argument respects the properties and powers of both and presents the 'internal conversation' as the site of their interplay. In unpacking what 'social conditioning' means, Archer demonstrates the usefulness of 'relational realism'. She advances a new theory of relational socialisation, appropriate to the 'mixed messages' conveyed in families that are rarely normatively consensual and thus cannot provide clear guidelines for action. Life-histories are analysed to explain the making and breaking of different modes of reflexivity. Different modalities have been dominant from early societies to the present and the author argues that modernity is slowly ceding place to a 'morphogenetic society' as meta-reflexivity now begins to predominate, at least amongst educated young people.
Arguments have consequences in world politics that are as real as the military forces of states or the balance of power among them. Neta Crawford proposes a theory of argument in world politics which focuses on the role of ethical arguments in fostering changes in long-standing practices. She examines five hundred years of history, analyzing the role of ethical arguments in colonialism, the abolition of slavery and forced labour, and decolonization. Pointing out that decolonization is the biggest change in world politics in the last five hundred years, the author examines ethical arguments from the sixteenth century justifying Spanish conquest of the Americas, and from the twentieth century over the fate of Southern Africa. The book also offers a prescriptive analysis of how ethical arguments could be deployed to deal with the problem of humanitarian intervention. Co-winner of the APSA Jervis-Schroeder Prize for the best book on international history and politics.
Building on Bernstein's concept of recontextualization, Foucault's theory of discourse, Halliday's systemic-functional linguistics and Martin's theory of activity sequences, this book defines discourses as frameworks for the interpretation of reality and presents detailed and explicit methods for reconstructing these frameworks through text analysis. There are methods for analyzing the representation of social action, social actors and the timings and spatial locations of social practices as well as methods for analyzing how the purposes, legitimations and moral evaluations of social practices can be, and are, constructed in discourse. Discourse analytical categories are linked to sociological theories to bring out their relevance for the purpose of critical discourse analysis, and a variety of examples demonstrate how they can be used to this end. The final chapters apply aspects of the book's methodological framework to the analysis of multimodal texts such as visual images and children's toys.
This article engages the French pragmatism of Laurent Thévenot, Luc Boltanski and Bruno Latour in debates on how to forge a moral-political sociology of ecological valuation, justification and critique. Picking up the debate initiated by Thévenot on the possible emergence of a novel 'green' order of worth, the article juxtaposes the sociology of critical capacity of Boltanski and Thévenot with the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour. In doing so, the article suggests that each of these three pragmatic sociologists succeeds, in characteristically different ways, in theoretically articulating an important but partial socio-political grammar of ecological worth. This claim is substantiated by invoking three case studies into environmental critique and compromise, on transnational carbon markets, urban sustainability projects, and Japanese whaling, respectively. Against this backdrop, the article concludes that - when read together as grammarians of the ecological bond - pragmatic sociology provides important insights into the bounded multiplicity of nature's worth in political modernity.
Existing literature in International Relations has firmly established that public justifications matter in world politics. They make it possible for a range of communities - nations, security communities, global advocacy networks and so on - to take political action. This article aims to improve on our understanding of how communities produce such justifications. It seeks to make conceptual and methodological contributions. On the conceptual level, I contend that political judgements generate public justifications and, vice versa, that these justifications shape future judgements. I outline a three-circuit map for studying the communicative processes that link judgements and justifications. On the methodological level, I argue that what I label a structured, focused communication analysis is well suited to put the three-circuit map to use to do empirical research. I tailor the structure and focus of such an analysis to the requirements of research on public justification.