Political Arena (political + arena)

Distribution by Scientific Domains
Distribution within Humanities and Social Sciences


Selected Abstracts


Differentiating and Linking Politics and Adjudication,The Example of European Electricity Policy

EUROPEAN LAW JOURNAL, Issue 3 2002
Adrienne Héritier
The paper analyses how politics and adjudication answer similar questions in the context of policy-making. It contrasts how societal problems are selected, defined, solved and legitimised by both disciplines. We raise these questions in regard to the liberalization of the European Electricity markets. We reconstruct the decision-making process at the political and adjudicative arena taking place in this policy area. By so doing, we elaborate the differences and establish the links between politics and adjudication. We argue that what differentiates these two disciplines constitutes their very links; that is, the adjudicative and political arena are linked precisely because they are different at various level. [source]


GEOGRAPHERS AND THE TENNESSEE VALLEY AUTHORITY,

GEOGRAPHICAL REVIEW, Issue 1 2004
RONALD REED BOYCE
ABSTRACT. The Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA) was the largest, most comprehensive, and most controversial regional development and planning project in U.S. history. Geographers were involved from its inception and made impressive contributions. Aside from the unit area method of data gathering and mapping, little is known about their contributions, some of which were truly ahead of their time. Although their work and recommendations were often discarded and unheeded because of political turbulence, the geographers rarely complained or entered into the political arena. Their work in the TVA has generally gone unheralded and even unappreciated within the geography profession. The primary purpose of this article is to document their contributions. [source]


Globalization, the knowledge society, and the Network State: Poulantzas at the millennium

GLOBAL NETWORKS, Issue 1 2001
Martin Carnoy
In State, Power, Socialism, Nicos Poulantzas conceptualized a state that materializes and concentrates power and displaces the class struggle from the economic to the political arena. In the past twenty years, much has changed. We argue that economic relations have been transformed by economic globalization, work reorganization, and the compression of space, time, and knowledge transmission through an information and communications revolution. Knowledge is far more central to production, and the locus of the relation between power and knowledge has moved out of the nation state that was so fundamental to Poulantzas' analysis. [source]


Community-based Security and Justice: Arbakai in Afghanistan

IDS BULLETIN, Issue 2 2009
Mohammad Osman Tariq
This article discusses the successful bottom-up justice and security institutions in south-east Afghanistan that are delivering justice and security to the people in a complex atmosphere characterised by a weak and contested state, high levels of corruption, massive international and regional intervention, internal conflict based on ideology and ethnicity, and exclusion of one ethnic group and overrepresentation of others in the political arena. These local-level institutions are called Jirga and Arbakai. They have their own conceptual and contextual principles, which differentiate the Arbakai from private security companies, militias, or warlord-related armed groups. In effect, the Arbakai serves as an alternative system to the state security sector, delivering physical security to individual members of a tribe and community. [source]


Global Religious Transformations, Political Vision and Christian Witness,

INTERNATIONAL REVIEW OF MISSION, Issue 375 2005
Vinoth Ramachandra
From the nineteenth-century onwards religion has been, and continues to be, an important resource for nationalist, modernizing movements. What was true of Protestant Christianity in the world of Victorian Britain also holds for the nationalist transformations of Hindu Neo-Vedanta, Theravada Buddhism, Shintoism and Shi'ite Islam in the non-Western world. Globalizing practises both corrode inherited cultural and personal identities and, at the same time, stimulate the revitalisation of particular identities as a way of gaining more influence in the new global order. However, it would be a gross distortion to identify the global transformations of Islam, and indeed of other world religions, with their more violent and fanatical forms. The globalization of local conflicts serves powerful propaganda purposes on all sides. If global Christian witness in the political arena is to carry integrity, this essay argues for the following responses, wherever we may happen to live: (a) Learning the history behind the stories of ,religious violence' reported in the secular media; (b) Identifying and building relationships with the more self-critical voices within the other religious traditions and communities, so avoiding simplistic generalizations and stereotyping of others; (c) Actively engaging in the political quest for truly participatory democracies that honour cultural and religious differences. In a hegemonic secular culture, as in the liberal democracies of the West, authentic cross-cultural engagement is circumvented. There is a militant secularist ,orthodoxy' that is as destructive of authentic pluralism as its fundamentalist religious counterpart. The credibility of the global Church will depend on whether Christians can resist the totalising identities imposed on them by their nation-states and/or their ethnic communities, and grasp that their primary allegiance is to Jesus Christ and his universal reign. [source]


Law, Struggle, and Political Transformation in Northern Ireland

JOURNAL OF LAW AND SOCIETY, Issue 4 2000
Kieran McEvoy
This article analyses the role of law as an element of the Republican Movement's violent and political struggle during the Northern Ireland conflict. The trials and legal hearings of paramilitary defendants, the use of judicial reviews in the prisons, and the use of law in the political arena are chosen as three interconnected sites which highlight the complex interaction between law and other forms of struggle. The author argues that these three sites illustrate a number of themes in understanding the role of law in processes of struggle and political transformation. These include: law as a series of dialogical processes both inside and outside a political movement; law as an instrumental process of struggle designed to materially and symbolically ,resist'; and the constitutive effects of legal struggle upon a social and political movement. The article concludes with a discussion as to whether or not Republicans' emphasis upon ,rights and equality' and an end to armed struggle represents a ,sell out' of traditional Republican objectives. [source]


The four Ps of corporate political activity: a framework for environmental analysis and corporate action

JOURNAL OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS, Issue 2 2009
Nicolas M. Dahan
In this paper, I propose a new integrated framework which may be used to conduct a thorough analysis of a firm's political environment. The four steps of the methodology include the problem (how a political problem emerges and can be shaped by actors), the procedure (the public decision-making procedure), the policies (relevant public policies currently implemented) and the players (including policy-makers as well as participants in the political debate). Together, they form what I call the ,Four Ps of corporate political activity'. This framework can serve not only for environmental analysis and monitoring, but also to improve the effectiveness of a firm's attempts in the field of political influence, through actions such as arena selection, issue framing, the use of procedural opportunities, proactive negotiation of a compromise or gate-keeping the political arena. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd. [source]


The Soviet Sausage Renaissance

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2010
Neringa Klumbyt
ABSTRACT, In Lithuania, the first country to secede from the Soviet Union, the term Soviet has been used in public space to refer to the vanished Soviet empire and to experiences of colonization and resistance. However, in 1998, the "Soviet" symbol was successfully revived in the Lithuanian consumer food market as a brand name for meat products,primarily sausages. In this article, I argue that the market is a political arena in which values, ideologies, identities, and history are being shaped. The marketing and consumption of "Soviet" sausages is a form of political engagement that negotiates current power relations and inequalities. The meanings and practices surrounding "Soviet" sausages tell an intriguing story about broader processes of change. The "Soviet" sausage renaissance in Lithuania implies a critique of the postsocialist neoliberal state and constitutes an attempt to create an alternative modernity that is both post-Soviet and European. [source]


Reciprocity and Realpolitik: Image, Career, and Factional Genealogies in Provincial Bolivia

AMERICAN ETHNOLOGIST, Issue 1 2001
Robert Albro
In this article, I analyze the persuasiveness of ritual libations in provincial Bolivia as populist spectacles. During an era of extensive national reform, these libations are prototypical definitional performances within a changing regional political arena. I argue for an approach to the contextualization of factional politics that resituates both performance based theories of rhetoric and ethnographic treatments of life histories in a more comprehensively synthetic public interpretive frame. I treat libations as part of a local political process attuned to the perceived truthfulness of personal indexical references in performative frames. The plausibility of sponsors' self-images turns on the potentially conflictual shadings of their public careers, shades often unintentionally generated by such spectacles, [political ritual, popular identity, life histories, indexicals, Bolivia] [source]


Interrogating Security: A Life Story in History

PEACE & CHANGE, Issue 3 2000
Geoffrey S. Smith
This essay seeks to synthesize personal memoir and history by focusing on the author's life experiences during his first thirteen years. Interrogating security suggests the ways in which big issues,war, peace, the threatof nuclear annihilation, security and secrecy, and youthful masculinity,hit home close to home as well as in the larger political arena. The essay also indicates important continuities between hot and cold war and,in microcosm,some of the costs of developments during the late 1940s and early 1950s. In sum, it proposes some reasons why a young boynurtured in a patriotic ambience became a ,subversive' adult. [source]


Critical Discourse Analysis in Political Studies: An Illustrative Analysis of the ,Empowerment' Agenda

POLITICS, Issue 2 2010
Michael Farrelly
In the first sections of this article I give a simple and general account of critical discourse analysis (CDA) and how it might contribute to the theoretical and methodological repertoire of political studies through its discourse-dialectical theory of how discourse figures as an aspect of social practices without reducing those practices to discourse. In the final section I give a short illustrative example of how a CDA approach to detailed textual analysis might also be applied to specific texts (or groups of texts) in the political arena: in the example I take the press release in which the national UK government heralded its recent ,empowerment' White Paper, ,Communities in Control'. [source]


The Impact of Devolution on Women's Political Representation Levels in Northern Ireland

POLITICS, Issue 1 2004
Tahnya Barnett Donaghy
Historically, Northern Ireland women have been severely under-represented in the formal political arena. Despite the main parties having failed to address this issue, women have notably increased their presence in elected positions since the establishment of the Northern Ireland Assembly in 1998. In the absence of any initiatives undertaken specifically to improve women's political status, it appears that the opportunities of devolution have facilitated these recent achievements. Specifically, the new political landscape has become more open and conducive to promoting women into positions of political power, and it is the impact of these developments that this article explores. [source]


Democratization and State Feminism: Gender Politics in Africa and Latin America

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 3 2002
Ihejirika, Philomina E. Okeke
This article addresses the link between state feminism and democratization in the global South. The authors use the contrasting cases of Chile and Nigeria to show some of the factors that encourage women to exploit the opportunities presented by transitions to democracy, and link the outcome of state feminism to the strategies and discourses available to women during democratization. Based on evidence from the cases analysed, the authors propose that the strategic options available to women are shaped by at least three factors: (1) the existence of a unified women's movement capable of making political demands; (2) existing patterns of gender relations, which influence women's access to arenas of political influence and power; and (3) the content of existing gender ideologies, and whether women can creatively deploy them to further their own interests. State feminism emerged in Chile out of the demands of a broad,based women's movement in a context of democratic transition that provided feminists with access to political institutions. In Nigeria, attempts at creating state feminism have consistently failed due to a political transition from military to civilian rule that has not provided feminists with access to political arenas of influence, and the absence of a powerful women's movement. [source]


Women's Movements and Challenges to Neopatrimonial Rule: Preliminary Observations from Africa

DEVELOPMENT AND CHANGE, Issue 1 2001
Aili Tripp
Women's movements in Africa represent one of the key societal forces challenging state clientelistic practices, the politicization of communal differences, and personalized rule. In the 1980s and 1990s we have witnessed not only the demise of patronage-based women's wings that were tied to ruling parties, but also the concurrent growth of independent women's organizations with more far-reaching agendas. The emergence of such autonomous organizations has been a consequence of the loss of state legitimacy, the opening-up of political space, economic crisis, and the shrinking of state resources. Drawing on examples from Africa, this article shows why independent women's organizations and movements have often been well situated to challenge clientelistic practices tied to the state. Gendered divisions of labour, gendered organizational modes and the general exclusion of women from both formal and informal political arenas have defined women's relationship to the state, to power, and to patronage. These characteristics have, on occasion, put women's movements in a position to challenge various state-linked patronage practices. The article explores some of the implications of these challenges. [source]


Local Governance as Government,Business Cooperation in Western Democracies: Analysing Local and Intergovernmental Effects by Multi-Level Comparison

INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF URBAN AND REGIONAL RESEARCH, Issue 3 2008
CLEMENTE J. NAVARRO YÁÑEZ
Abstract The internationalization of economics and politics has forced local governments to develop new context-appropriate strategies; these strategies, characterized by a greater degree of interaction with non-governmental key actors and with the business world in particular, have been termed local or urban governance. This article is intended to illustrate the impact of three factors , local leadership, local political arenas and intergovernmental relationships , on the formation of cooperative networks between local governments and business organizations as one of the basic types of urban governance model. To achieve this, a comparative multi-level analysis presenting the CEO's perpective on such issues was conducted. The results show how local and intergovernmental opportunity costs and leadership are the factors that largely determine the degree of collaboration between local government and business. Résumé L'internationalisation de l'économie et de la politique a forcé les gouvernements locaux àélaborer de nouvelles stratégies en fonction des contextes ; caractérisées par une interaction plus forte avec des acteurs-clés non gouvernementaux et avec le monde de l'entreprise en particulier, ces stratégies ont reçu l'appellation de gouvernance locale ou urbaine. L'impact de trois facteurs , autorité locale, arènes politiques locales et relations intergouvernementales , sur la formation des réseaux de coopération entre gouvernements locaux et entreprises est présenté comme l'un des types essentiels de modèle de gouvernance urbaine. Pour ce faire, une analyse comparative multi-niveaux a été menée sur la vision des directions générales d'entreprises concernant ces questions. Les résultats montrent la manière dont les autorités et les coûts d'opportunité locaux et intergouvernementaux déterminent en grande partie le degré de collaboration entre les gouvernements locaux et le monde des affaires. [source]


Articulated Knowledges: Environmental Forms after Universality's Demise

AMERICAN ANTHROPOLOGIST, Issue 1 2005
TIMOTHY K. CHOY
Critiques of universalism require rethinking when confronted with environmental political arenas, in which the very concepts of "universality" and "particularity" are in a constant process of self-conscious deployment. In this article, I attend to the analytic and political implications of such deployments in a recent incinerator controversy in Hong Kong. I suggest that an aesthetic of local appropriateness and its formal requirement of simultaneous universal and particular truth value normalize the politics of environmental expertise such that the only legible form for counterknowledge is one of articulated knowledges. To understand how the knowledges emergent in an NGO,village collaboration were scaled, linked, and mobilized, I analyze a translation of expert knowledge and the event's metapragmatic effects. A subsequent account of unarticulated knowledges emphasizes the political-economic conditions that limit whose knowledges can count as particular in articulations of counterexpertise. [source]


"Adversarial legalism" in the German system of industrial relations?

REGULATION & GOVERNANCE, Issue 3 2009
Britta Rehder
Abstract The US has a distinctive legal style, which Robert Kagan has called "adversarial legalism." It is marked by a pattern of political decisionmaking and conflict resolution in which the courtrooms and the law are systematically exploited as political arenas for making and implementing political settlements and policy outlines. In this article it is argued that a "German way" of adversarial legalism is about to emerge in the German industrial relations system. Economic liberalization, the fragmentation and decentralization of lawmaking authority in the political sphere, and the common-law-like nature of German labor law have contributed to the appearance of a judicialized pattern of governance. Nonetheless, Germany is not converging on the "American way of law" and major differences are expected to persist in the years to come. [source]