This paper deals with transnational Hindu and Muslim movements. It rejects the common assertion that migrant communities are conservative in religious and social matters by arguing that ‘traditionalism’ requires considerable ideological creativity that transforms previous practices and discourses considerably. It suggests instead that religious movements, active among migrants, develop cosmopolitan projects that can be viewed as alternatives to the cosmopolitanism of the European Enlightenment. This raises a number of challenges concerning citizenship, integration and political loyalty for governmentality in the (...) nation-states in which these cosmopolitan projects are carried out. The paper suggests that instead of looking at religious migrants as at best conservative and at worst terrorist one should perhaps pay some attention to the creative moments in human responses to new challenges and new environments. (shrink)

The concept of transnationalism, despite a variety of earlier uses, has recently been used to describe the sociological phenomenon of cross-border migrants considering more than one place ‘home’. This can be in terms of identity and belonging, cultural expression, family and other social ties, visits, financial flows, organising working life in more than one nation-state or transnational political projects. In this paper I discuss the theory and practice of transnationalism to assess the practical, explanatory and normative strength of the (...) concept. I then introduce three different forms of cosmopolitan approaches and assess whether transnational migrants' practices contribute to a cosmopolitan outlook and active global citizenship. I show that the extent to which transnationalism contributes to various forms of global citizenship varies according to the different conceptualisations of transnationalism and cosmopolitanism. In conclusion I draw out the implications of these differences for the future protection of the rights of migrants. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 58-83 [Access article in PDF] Imagi-Nation: The Imagined Community and the Aesthetics of Mourning Marc Redfield Of the many relics of the Romantic era that continue to shape our (post)modernity, the nation-state surely ranks among the most significant. Two decades ago Benedict Anderson commented that "'the end of the era of nationalism,' so long prophesied, is not remotely in sight" [IC 3], and the (...) intervening years have made it increasingly clear that the developments and processes we summarize as "globalization" operate in mingled synchrony and tension with the political form of the nation-state. 1 That the nation-state should remain the premier vehicle of political and economic legitimation in an era dominated by American imperialism and international capital--forces that, of course, regularly and flagrantly violate the sovereignty of disadvantaged nations--is unsurprising if one accepts the continuing pertinency and power of a Western master-narrative of modernity, according to which the nation represents the emergence of a people into history and prefigures the global achievement of universal human concord. As the proper subject of history, the nation-state can prefigure history's end because, as David Lloyd writes, "the particularism of [nationalism's] contents, potentially in contradiction with the universalism of modernity, is subsumed in the formal congruence between its own narratives of identity, directed at one people, and the narrative of identity that universal history represents for humanity in general" ["Nationalisms" 178]. Lloyd goes on to note that the nation's intermediate status in this narrative--halfway between primitive tribalism and modernity's ever-deferred perpetual peace--accounts for nationalism's irreducibly double association with modernization and atavism. In consequence, the modernist paradigm continues to rule many skeptical or hostile accounts of nationalism, for so long as the nation-state is taken to supersede other political or social formations, the cosmopolitan critique fails to challenge "the fundamental philosophy of universal history that underwrites nationalism's inscription in modernity" ["Nationalisms" 177]. Indeed, both in the corporate media and in mainstream Western political discourse generally, nations and nationalisms are commonly treated as atavistic or progressive depending on the degree to which their behavior harmonizes with globalizing imperatives. That these imperatives emanate quite blatantly from Wall Street in no way seriously troubles the effectiveness of modernity as a narrative paradigm. 2Seeking to discredit universalizing narrative, much cultural criticism in recent years has exchanged cosmopolitanism and the abstract question of "nationalism" for an emphasis [End Page 58] on the contextual construction of national movements or identities. 3 This valuable body of work has sought to recover the particularity of cultural and socioeconomic circumstance, stressed the fundamental role of racism in colonialist contexts, and noted ways in which nationalist movements draw on or unleash forms of resistance that challenge representationalist politics. The pages that follow, however, remain focused on the nationalist fantasy proper to the discourse of modernity. Cultural critique can only profit from knowing as much as possible about the favored turns of the universal-historicist model, particularly since, as Lloyd and others have emphasized, this model is an aesthetic one that grants a world-historical role to "culture." The state, in a tradition that in its main lines runs from Schiller through Hegel and Matthew Arnold and is still very much alive today, represents the community to itself, thereby giving the community form and in a certain sense giving it an ethical imperative and a future: the state represents "our best self" [Arnold 99, passim], "the archetype of a human being" [Schiller 17], because it signifies the formal unification both of the citizen with the community and of the community with universal humanity. Because this unification is ideal rather than actual, it can be projected as the ethical terminus of history (that is, as the ideal of an accomplished modernity). The state's core mission thus becomes pedagogical: its job is to acculturate its subjects into citizens. The production of a docile citizenry thereby obtains an ethical aura and an aesthetic character, insofar as the artwork and the domain of aesthetic or "cultural" experience generally become... (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss globalisation as an empirical reality that is in a complex relation to its corresponding discourse and in a critical distance from the cosmopolitan ideal. I argue that failure to grasp the distinctions between globalisation, globalism, and cosmopolitanism derives from mistaken identifications of the Is with the Ought and leads to naïve and ethnocentric glorifications of the potentialities of globalisation. Conversely, drawing the appropriate distinctions helps us articulate a more critical approach to contemporary cultural phenomena, (...) and reconsider the current place and potential role of education within the context of global affairs. From this perspective, the antagonistic impulses cultivated by globalisation and some globalist discourse are singled out and targeted via a radicalization of educational orientations. The final suggestion of the article concerns the vision of a more cosmopolitically sensitive education. (shrink)

In this paper, I discuss globalisation as an empirical reality that is in a complex relation to its corresponding discourse and in a critical distance from the cosmopolitan ideal. I argue that failure to grasp the distinctions between globalisation, globalism, and cosmopolitanism derives from mistaken identifications of the Is with the Ought and leads to naïve and ethnocentric glorifications of the potentialities of globalisation. Conversely, drawing the appropriate distinctions helps us articulate a more critical approach to contemporary cultural phenomena, (...) and reconsider the current place and potential role of education within the context of global affairs. From this perspective, the antagonistic impulses cultivated by globalisation and some globalist discourse are singled out and targeted via a radicalization of educational orientations. The final suggestion of the article concerns the vision of a more cosmopolitically sensitive education. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Diacritics 29.4 (1999) 150-177 [Access article in PDF] The Desire for the Sovereign and the Logic of Reciprocity in the Family of Nations Lydia H. Liu It may sound like a truism that the modern nation cannot imagine itself except in sovereign terms. But what is this truism saying or, rather, withholding from us? When Benedict Anderson wrote his influential study of nationalism in 1983, he circumscribed the (...) imagining of the nation as "both inherently limited and sovereign" and relied on this basic understanding to explain the global transformation of dynastic empires into nation-states [Imagined Communities 6]. That insight, however, has not drawn to itself as much attention or scrutiny as some of his other concepts, like "print capitalism" or "creole nationalisms." If one were to name a few of the blind spots in the contemporary discussions of nationalism, cosmopolitanism, and diaspora, one of them would be the place and placing of sovereignty and sovereign right. To those of us whose initial purpose has been to historicize the nation and nationalism, this blind spot cannot but raise some serious methodological and interpretive questions. Insofar as sovereignty articulates a major mode of exchange between nation and empire in recent history and moreover figures prominently in the realm of what Anderson calls "quotidian universals" [Spectre of Comparisons 33], the truism of its truth needs to be unpacked carefully.Hence, I would like to raise some tentative questions about desire and sovereignty, not in terms of legal studies, but in light of what we have learned about colonial exchange and its production of difference, fetishism, identity, and the logic of reciprocity. I am going to show that these intellectual and material developments have had significant bearings on the making of international law such that our inquiry into the latter can no longer be confined to the self-explanatory evolution of legal discourse. For sovereign thinking is one of those areas that must be reexamined, to borrow Edward Said's words, "according to a detailed logic governed not simply by empirical reality but by a battery of desires, repressions, investments, and projections" [18].In this essay, I begin with a critical analysis of Benedict Anderson's work, focusing on the interplay of the historical and the universal in his study of the nation. I am particularly interested in examining what Anderson chose to do, or not to do, with sovereignty in his theory of nationalism, and I raise some questions about his idea of the "modular," whereby the universal takes on the role of a migrant figure making histories [End Page 150] here and there. Section two introduces the subject of fetishism and desire into the discussion by linking the display of the thrones of the Emperor Qianlong in British museums to significant moments of sovereign thinking in the reign of Queen Victoria and the Empress Dowager of China at the turn of the century. In section three, I attempt a detailed discussion of the sovereignty complex of Ku Hung-ming, a diasporic subject who grew up in colonial Malaysia, was educated in Europe, and ended up serving China as his adopted sovereign country. My analysis centers on Ku's well-known defense of the Empress Dowager during the popular nationalist uprising of 1900 and his work as a translator and publicist in Anglo-Chinese military confrontations. Finally, I turn to the theories of international law itself and ask how nineteenth-century jurists revised the notion of sovereignty to arrive at a new constitutive theory of recognition in the heyday of imperialist expansion. I argue that any attempt to explain the rise of the modern nation-state must take full account of this significant revision in the early nineteenth century, because the revision signaled a paradigmatic shift from natural law to positivist jurisprudence to the effect that a constitutive understanding of sovereign right would eventually overcome and displace the natural law notion of universal sovereignty. Sovereign Thinking in Migrant Nationalisms In Imagined Communities, Anderson pointed to sovereignty as a necessary condition in thinking about the nation when, for example, he... (shrink)

Globalisation involves both promising potentials and risks. It has the potential – through the spread of human rights, the migration of people and ideas, and the integration of diverse economies – to improve human wellbeing and enhance the protection of human rights worldwide. But globalisation also incurs risks: global environmental risks (such as global warming), the creation of new centres of power with limited legitimacy, a ‘race to the bottom’ regarding workers’ safety and rights, risky journeys of thousands of migrants (...) and not least growing global inequalities. Globalisation, therefore, is a key factor for today’s discussions of justice. -/- As globalisation connects people, it also raises associated responsibilities between them. Until recently, the interest in justice among political philosophers and social ethicists was mainly focused on the nation state. However, this is no longer feasible. Since economic globalisation affects how wealth and power are distributed globally it has become indispensable to discuss social ethics in a global context and to develop principles of global justice. Global justice, therefore, entails an assessment of the benefits and burdens of the structural relations and institutional arrangements that constitute and govern globalisation. -/- The academic discussion of global justice is vibrant and expanding. In my introduction I provide an overview of the discussions on global poverty, justice, cosmopolitanism and statism, migration, the capability approach and different dimensions of global justice. (shrink)

Most theories of nationalism presume a causal link between 'culture' and 'identity' in the analysis of nationalism. This article argues for a more contingent linkage while drawing conclusions for the 'globalization of cultures-national identity' nexus in different theoretical domains. It goes on to review core assumptions about transnational identity formation, arguing that a distinctive phenomenon is a tendency to approach identities as strategic resources. This has significant impact on, for example, perceptions of boundaries and images of belonging. Finally, the article (...) addresses central figurations between identity, globalization and European integration, in the context of the European Union viewed as an instrument for proactively handling transnational problems, and it proposes some salient differences between this 'Euronationalism' and nationalism in more traditional formats. (shrink)

One of the main difficulties facing students today is how to contextualize the post-1990 world. Bringing the Nation Back In: Citizenship, Space, and Culture in Europe and the United States takes as its starting point a series of developments that shaped politics in the U.S. and Europe over the past thirty years: the end of the Cold War, the rise of financial and economic globalization, the creation of the European Union and the development of the postnational. This volume argues (...) we are now witnessing a break with the post-1945 world order and with modern politics. Two competing ideas have arisen--global cosmopolitanism on the one hand, and populist nationalism on the other. The former emerged in the 1990s and is characterized by discourses on globalization, feminism, and postcolonialism, among others. The latter, which emerged after the Great Recession of 2008-2009, consists of a reactionary nationalism that in the years that followed swept to power in the US and several European countries. The present volume argues this polarization of social ethos between cosmopolitanism and nationalism as a sign of a deeper political crisis, which it explores from different perspectives. Rather than taking sides the aim here is to diagnose the origins of the current impasse and to "bring the nation back in" by expanding what we mean by "nation" and national identity and by respecting the localizing processes that have led to national traditions and struggles. (shrink)

India was under British colonial rule for a good number of years with her plural ethno-religious background and identity, which was to become the basis of an unending conflict. Several pre-colonial and post-colonial conditioning antecedents have been marshalled to buttress the premise leading to the conclusion that the British colonial era laid the time bomb along ethno-religious contours which exploded in 1947 thereby giving rise to the balkanisation of India into two separate states, that is India and Pakistan. Two major (...) religious groups that is Hindus and Muslims became the gladiators in India’s partition. The Kashmir region of India, a town of religious confluence, has a history of conflicts that is perceived by different people as politico-religious and socio-economic. This article focuses on religion as a core tenet of every cultural worldview and its significance to both Hindus and Muslims, and how it has become the progressively vital central marker of identity and a smouldering keg of gun powder for conflict in Kashmir. Furthermore, this article contends that religion plays a key role in the conflict between Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir because of its significance and influence on both religions. India that is known as a mother to various religions cannot relegate the primary role of religion in their political and socio-economic affairs. Therefore, it is right to acknowledge politico-religious and socio-economic factors in the Hindu–Muslim conflict in the state of Kashmir. And, it will not be wrong to affirm that religion plays a key role in the conflict between Hindus and Muslims in Kashmir.Contribution: The article is a contribution in religious issues in India. It reveals how political power and sociopolitical antecedents are mostly recognised by religious scholars and historians as the reason for the fracas between Hindus and Muslims. It explains the influence and implication of religion in the Hindu-Muslim relations in Kashmir region. (shrink)

This Article examines how the legal subjectivity of the migrant subject is intimately connected to the construction of the citizenship subject and how both have been products of the colonial encounter. Deploying the lens of postcolonialism, I argue that the migrant is addressed through a spectrum of legal rules based on normative criteria reminiscent of the colonial encounter. These criteria reinscribe citizenship within dominant racial, sexual, and cultural norms as well as claims of civilizational superiority. That which does not fall (...) within the boundaries of citizenship is regarded as outcast, an "Other," and subject to restraint, persecution, censorship, social stigma, incarceration, and even annihilation. The discussion draws examples from recent judicial decisions in the context of postcolonial India, dealing with migrant bar dancers and migrant Muslims, highlighting the deep and lasting impact of the colonial encounter and the imperial imagination on understandings and constructions of citizenship in the contemporary period. The cases further illustrate how notions of "global" or "world" citizen, unbound by territory or the nation-state, are unable to account for the complex and contradictory understandings of citizenship that have emerged from within a postcolonial context. The arguments force us to inquire into the role of citizenship, its relevance or meaninglessness in the lives of the migrant once its exclusionary potential has been exposed. (shrink)

This paper develops a new understanding of hospitality on the basis of an anarchist philosophy of cosmopolitanism. It is argued that anarchism – in its radical critique of the principle of sovereignty and sovereign ipseity – is primarily a philosophy and politics of hospitality. The argument proceeds in five key steps. Firstly, the relationship between ontological anarchism (Schürmann and Levinas) and political anarchism (Bakunin, Kropotkin, Proudhon, Godwin) is explored. Secondly, anarchism’s critique of nation state sovereignty is linked to (...) a radical cosmopolitanism based on cross-border solidarity, mutual aid, and human rights activism, including the defence of the rights of migrants and asylum seekers. Thirdly, I show how the anarchic subject cannot be reduced to a fixed or definable identity with closed borders, but, rather, embodies an attitude of hospitality towards the Other and an openness to being transformed by this encounter. On this basis, I aim to develop an anarchist ethics formulated around the idea of care – for the other, both human and non-human, for the world, for the natural environment (Four) – and an alternative cosmopolitan ethical and political horizon (Five). (shrink)

An interconnected and interdependent world in the age of globalisation invites Christianity to a different understanding of sin, which has been individualistically understood, because individualistic understanding of sin is impotent to address injustice or oppression caused by collective sins, wherein human beings have been collectively involved in. In order to overcome individualistic understanding of sin, this article is critically engaged in the concepts, such as concrete totality, which sees both individuality and socialness as constitutive parts of human beings, tyranny of (...) collective identity through which oppression and injustice is carried out to unspecified others and retreat from truth to omnipotence, which is a concretised example of tyranny of collective identity in a nation-state building of the United States. Retreat from truth to omnipotence means that the United States covers its blamable history with relation to Native Americans and immigrants and justifies the discrimination and exclusion of others using untrue social, political, hygienic and economic reasons. Retreat from truth to omnipotence is not a temporal aberration but a constant repetition in the US history. To address discrimination and exclusion of others necessitates a new understanding of sin, that is, sin of human beings as concrete totality rather than an exclusively individualistic view of sin.Contribution: The article explores a necessity of emphasizing collective dimension of sin to address injustice and oppression caused by tyranny of collective identity in a globalizing world. It provides a theological foundation for building a welcoming political community to immigrants who have been unjustly discriminated or excluded. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern InterpretationIan ReaderImagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation. By Robert N. Bellah. Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. 254.While Robert Bellah is probably best known for his work on religion in America, his earlier work focused on Japanese intellectual history, culture, and religion, and it is to these subjects that he has returned (...) in this latest book, Imagining Japan: The Japanese Tradition and Its Modern Interpretation, almost five decades after publishing his seminal work Tokugawa Religion. In returning to Japan, Bellah brings to this broad overview of dominant themes within Japanese tradition, social structure, and intellectual and cultural history the grasp of a historical sociologist deeply rooted and [End Page 351] well versed in mainstream sociological theory. He also reminds us that although his reputation is as a sociologist of American religion, his intellectual roots are in the study of Japan, and he makes clear in his comments on one of his earlier essays (p. 3) that it was through the study of Japan that his eyes were opened to new possibilities, which he then applied to his study of the sociology of religion in the United States.Imagining Japan is not so much a new book as essentially a collection of essays written in the 1960s and 1970s that are now wedded to a new and extensive Introduction, in which Bellah develops an overarching theoretical framework through which to interpret and analyze Japan and to situate the materials addressed in these essays. That the book can be read without any apparent disjuncture between essays written in the 1960s and an Introduction produced at the start of a new century indicates how consistent Bellah's thinking has been over the last four decades, and how deeply his early understanding of Japanese thought, religion, society, and culture has penetrated and framed his subsequent thinking.Essentially Bellah is concerned with problems that have challenged scholars and Japanese thinkers for decades: how is it that, in Bellah's view, this society more than any other has retained such a strong sense of what is native and what is foreign (p. 188) and managed to preserve and emphasize its own cultural identity while engaging with, absorbing, and utilizing foreign (i.e., external) cultural influences. And, in the final essay of the book, Bellah asks how it is that a nation so economically and technologically advanced has continued, in the twenty-first century, to maintain an archaic, Bronze Age monarchical system (p. 184). Japan may not be quite as unique in some of these aspects as Bellah suggests (Britain, after all, is also modern, complex, and wedded to a monarchical system grounded in archaic notions of heredity, primogeniture, and privilege), but it remains perhaps the most striking case of how archaic notions can persist and form the basic framework of a society even as that society functions within a different framework, namely of modernity. In focusing on such issues, Bellah takes in-especially in the Introduction-the great sweep of Japanese history from the seventh century to the late twentieth, displaying a masterful ability to combine historical insight and sociological analysis.The basis of his framework, expressed overtly in the Introduction but implicit in many of the chapters, is the application of theories that developed initially out of Max Weber's thesis that religion (in Weberian terms, Protestantism), with its focus on a universalizing ethic, is an essential factor in the emergence of modernity and of societies founded on capitalism. Following in this tradition, S. N. Eisenstadt described world religions as "axial" ("world religions"-particularly Buddhism, Christianity, and Islam-being those that have engaged in missionary activities across borders and that have posed a transcendent reality that supersedes or goes beyond the parameters of localized societies and states). Bellah, too, is convinced of the critical importance of the notion of axial religions and asserts that they are the "indispensable precondition" of modernity (p. 6). Yet, for Bellah, as for Eisenstadt (who also was fascinated with and wrote about Japanese society), Japan has been non-axial in that its primary orientation has remained focused on the... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Karl Popper, the Vienna Circle, and Red ViennaMalachi H. Hacohen*A stranger in his homeland even before emigrating in 1937, the philosopher Karl Popper is rarely considered an Austrian. Although he was born in Vienna in 1902 and buried there in 1994, he is known as an Atlantic intellectual and an anti-Communist prophet of postwar liberalism. He first became famous for The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945). 1 He (...) wrote the book during World War II in his New Zealand exile, intending it as a defense of democracy against fascism. The defeat of Austrian socialism and the collapse of Central European democracies were the major experiences informing his analysis. But The Open Society quickly became, with Popper’s full support, a charter of Atlantic Cold War liberalism. His philosophy of science, exemplified best in Logik der Forschung, went through a similar transformation. 2 To be sure, it is commonly debated in the context of logical positivism and the Vienna Circle; but the circle’s emigration and the postwar triumph of analytic philosophy in the Anglo-American academy transformed positivism, too, into an Atlantic philosophy. The “fugue of exile’s disruptions” severed the thread connecting Popper to Austria. 3Yet Popper was the foremost philosopher to carry the progressive Viennese legacy into the postwar era. In his critiques of the Vienna Circle and Red Vienna he confronted the philosophical and political problems of Viennese late enlightenment [End Page 711] and the interwar crises of scientific reason and Central European democracy. Refashioning the fin-de-siècle progressive legacy, he drew novel visions of liberal science and politics, imagining utopian scientific and political communities that were engaged in the pursuit of truth and reform. He made critical debate the acid test of political and scientific rationality, the center of a new liberalism. Establishing a free public sphere as the sine qua non of the Open Society, he innovated on a familiar liberal motif, shared by thinkers as different as Kant, De Staël, Guizot, Mill, and Habermas.In The Open Society Popper also wrote the political platform of the postwar Social-Democratic Consensus that legislated for the welfare state and mobilized against Communism. During World War II he opted for a liberal-socialist alliance that would contain postwar Central European fascism. Instead, his “Popular Front” platform proved adaptable to postwar anti-Communism. He made a few naïve pronouncements on deterrence and the free world during the Cold War. 4 They reflect badly on his political philosophy. Yet disentangled from its Cold War associations, his liberalism contains an abiding cosmopolitan vision for an age that is looking beyond the nation-state. His cosmopolitanism originated as a solution to dilemmas of ethnic identity faced by the assimilated-Jewish Viennese intelligentsia. His Open Society expressed their dream of integration into a community that discounted religion, ethnicity, and nationality. 5 He refused to give up on cosmopolitanism in the bipolar world when Machtpolitik seemed the order of the day. Almost alone among postwar liberals, he retained a belief in an international legal order and challenged national self-determination. His vision has regained relevance today. Cosmopolitanism and critical debate provide a starting-point for renegotiating liberal dilemmas.“My theory of knowledge, my philosophy of science and my political philosophy are original only in their interdependence,” stated Popper in a 1976 interview. 6 His epistemology has major political and scientific significance. Well before cultural studies began deconstructing science, Popper countered philosophers’ and scientists’ claims of expertise. There is no philosophical method. Every person is a problem-solver, and so every person is a philosopher. “Science is nothing but enlightened and responsible common sense—common sense broadened by imaginative critical thinking.” 7 Demystifying science, he never gave up on the growth of knowledge. He conceived of science as an unending quest for uncertain but growing knowledge. A non-foundationist, [End Page 712] he insisted that objectivity meant intersubjectivity. Rationality was a product of critical debate. In today’s intellectual world, devoid of certainty, where systems of knowledge and identities have been thrown into flux, Popper’s unique synthesis of contingency, convention, and change with logical certainty, objectivity, and tradition suggests a promising direction in the... (shrink)

This article conceptualizes the lofty term of cosmopolitanism from people's historical experience. It attempts to find a bridge between theory and life. Many writers now maintain that cosmopolitanism is no longer a dream, but rather the substance of social reality - and that it is increasingly the nation-state and our particular identities that are figments of our imagination, clung to by our memories. The aim of this article is to concretize this argument and demonstrate how some of (...) the Jewish intellectuals who emerged from World War II and the Holocaust argued passionately about the status of their Jewishness and how this related to abstract and universal ideals of modernity and human rights. The article focuses on Hannah Arendt's responses to her critics instead of her vast theoretical work to illustrate this point. In responding to her critics, Arendt came closest to providing a formula for a concept of cosmopolitanism, which attempts to square the circle between the universal and the particular. (shrink)

Cosmopolis A Review of Cosmopolitics -/- 2015/3-4 -/- Editorial Dominique de Courcelles & Paul Ghils -/- This issue addresses the general concept of “spirituality” as it appears in various cultural contexts and timeframes, through contrasting ideological views. Without necessarily going back to artistic and religious remains of primitive men, which unquestionably show pursuits beyond the biophysical dimension and illustrate practices seeking to unveil the hidden significance of life and death, the following papers deal with a number of interpretations covering a (...) wide field extending from belief to theory, from emotions to concepts, from the wisdom of personal experience to the most sophisticated doctrines. Spirit and spirituality are indeed many-faceted notions. They may refer to the intricate world of the interacting spirits which inhabit living beings in animistic traditions, without excluding a “grand force” linking human beings within a dynamic whole on which their very existence rely . They also bear upon more atomistic and either/or approaches of Western philosophy, which have become embodied in Cartesian dualism against a monotheist background, to the point of freezing the essence of individuals and culminating in the extreme individualism that characterizes our contemporaries. However, this equally refers to the opposite conception of materialism, across times and cultures, from ancient India and Greece (Cārvāka, originally known as Lokāyata, or some Buddhist doctrines for the former, Democritus or Lucretius for the latter) to more contemporary materialistic schools, whether modern or postmodern. -/- The following papers look at the contrasting forms of the philosophy and spirit of the human factor set into a whole, with no artificial disjoint between the psychical and the physical levels, as Wittgenstein put it: “And how can a body have a soul?”. This approach is not unrelated to the notion of anthropocene examined in a recent issue of Cosmopolis, with provides another comprehensive framework open to a spiritual life emerging from the very environment that generated it. -/- *** The first section of this issue was edited by Dominique de Courcelles, director at the National French Research Centre (CNRS), whom we wish to thank for collecting relevant studies relating to the religious and political questions, with a view to focusing on the war of ideas inevitably waged behind images, concepts and perceptions, taking an asymmetrical approach. To the extent that they are mindful of global/local interactions and include representations, opinions and beliefs, such disciplines as philosophy, philology, history and social sciences can provide useful studies accounting for new practices in geopolitics and a fair diplomacy. -/- In her introduction, Dominique de Courcelles first poses the question of how the religious and political spheres interrelate, with their corresponding religious demands and humanistic values. She then suggests that the right question today may be breaking with the philosophy of human rights concerned with the defense of human beings against the hazards of arbitrary politics or the instrumental use of religion, in favour of a fair philosophy of humankind, a new humanism. This would consist in recognizing a common loyalty of all towards one interhuman, not only interstate community, to protect it from both the autonomy demanded by individuals and the instrumental use of minorities. -/- Considering the fact of diversity, so important today in terms of both politics and religion, Abdelhai Azarkan looks at the conditions under which tolerance could obtain the double status of right and duty. He revisits to two philosophers, John Locke and Voltaire, who thought about it from the historical reality of religious wars. The former made tolerance into a right, basing his analysis on the political-legal level, while the latter saw tolerance as a duty, from an analysis based on ethical-political criteria. -/- Mathieu Guidère examines what he calls semantic denominationalism, a term which implies religious attributes and identities, whichever national loyalties or personal belonging they may have at the same time. Since the early 2000s, thie phenomenon has expanded tremendously, compounded by the “war on terror” and the over media-oriented terrorist actions. Denominational expressions act as formal names for ordinary and high-profile players in domestic and foreign policies of democratic states. These systems reveal a receding secularization, while the powerful comeback of religious identities signals the failure of nation-states and the weakening of the humanist spirit. -/- Barbara De Poli retraces the history of a contemporary jihadism claiming its Islamic essence and asserting the truth of genuine coranic principles via the war on infidels, with a view to restoring the Caliphate. After defining the term jihad, she shows that even if this contemporary jiadism is spreading in the Muslim world, it radically departs from Islamic law and the received use of the term jihad, in so far as it is rooted in the early radical thinking of Islamic ideologues in the 20th century, starting with with Hassan al-Banna, the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood. This current has been fueled by by international conflicts since the outbreak of the war in Afghanistan, in which the so-called Western countries bear a major responsibility. -/- Abderrazak Sayadi starts from the Tunisian experience to ask the question of humanist values and democracy within the relationships between the religious and political spheres. As a historian of religion, he is brought to demystify certain islamic principles and to paying attention to the reform of law, seeing the separation of religion and politics as a precondition to a successful democratic gamble and the establishment of a renewed humanism. -/- Dominique de Courcelles reminds us that getting a better knowledge of narrations and words makes it possible to better understand how logical and rhetorical thinking works for those who wage an asymetriccal war, re-enchanting and mystifying the world to better take control. As soon as 1932, an exchange of letters between Einstein and Freud made it clear that, in order to free man from fatality and war, education understood as culture was fundamental. Such illustrations as the exécution of Oussama ben Laden and the Caliph’s speech in Mossoul show that a premiminary analysis of images and words is essential to a fair diplomacy conducted by people from civil society, whose culture and wisdom allow justice and force to speak together and better resist war. -/- Marcel Boisard thinks that on the day the guns fall silent, exhausted by war, we will not return to the state borders that have prevailed for a century as an outcome of the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916. It is time to prepare the “day after”, which will be a huge challenge. To this end, a summit of Middle-East nations is urgently needed to globally decide the fate of those peoples. On the condition that we know who the enemy is and accept to name it, to understand the history of the countries, groups and alliances, and to question any false or self-interested sense of certainty. -/- *** In the second section, Paul Schafer provides the author’s experiences to explain how culture, from the artistic to the biological, has the power to to open the doors to spirituality, from the inner self to the global environment. He asks himself whether a relative permanence of spirituality can arise from the specific moments that characterize it. Laurent Ledoux synthesizes the conclusion of a symposium held on 22 January 2015 on the links between philosophy and management, on the basis of the spiritual dimension conceived as “natural” and the answers it may suggest to the issues that face the organizations in a “contemporaniversal” world. Jacques Rifflet makes that question in a secular perspective, based on the wellsprings of personal commitment before it can be caught by any religious creed or scientific theory. In this sense spirituality, in alliance with reason, both inspires human consciousness and illuminates its destiny. Sami Aldeeb asks himself whether Islam can be reconciled with human rights. Caught between the belief in an absolute and final Word descended from the sky, and evidence showing that any religion is the creation of a given culture and a society situated in time and space, the Makkan and … contexts et médinois call for differentiated, if not opposite answers and exegeses. Bernard Carmona provides the outline of a dialogical framework, which is known to be a feature of debates between the various philosophical schools of classical India, exemplified here by the transdisciplinary perspective of debates within a Buddhist context. *** The articles not focused on the previous topic include a study by Landry Signé on China’s strategy, competing with the United States to control African resources. The author deals with the specific case of China’s rapprochement with Southern Sudan since Sudan was broken up. In the last paper, Goran Fejić and Rada Iveković, return to the essential role that women should play, and comments upon the role of some international legal instruments related in particular to the elimination of all forms of discrimination. The perspective is transnational and transethnic and is based on secular criteria, as regards nation-building and more generally society-building. Considering the persistence of widespread violence, whether in times of armed conflict or in times of peace, the question remains whether it is possible to fully implement rights and justice instruments. (shrink)

This book takes up the tension between globalization and community in order to articulate a new theory of global justice. Although the process of globalization is not new, its current manifestation and consequences are. At the same time, there is a growing recognition of the importance of community, identity and belonging. These two facts have generally been understood to be fundamentally in tension, both theoretically and descriptively. This book seeks to resolve this tension, and then draw out the implications for (...) a theory of global justice and an understanding of the value and purpose of community. Importantly, the book argues, not only does an acceptance of the significance of the fact of globalization and the importance of community call for cosmopolitan duties and obligations, but it also calls into question the legitimacy and justification of the traditional nation-state. (shrink)

While universalism is rooted in the very ideology of Islam and is grounded in the Qur’an, especially through the concepts of fiṭra, amr and rūḥ, cosmopolitanism is an essential characteristic of classical Muslim empires: both the Caliphate-Imamate and empires, like the Ottoman or the Mughal ones, were a melting pot of races, languages and customs. The Caliphate-Imamate was by nature supranational and for centuries there was no idea of the nation in Islam. Contemporary nationalism, local or global, have (...) represented a disrupting more than a unifying force and have produced many failed states. In the present situation of crisis of the Muslim world, Puritanism and blind adherence to past tradition have paved the way for the revival of intolerance. Conservative or even extremist Islamist movements have assumed the deformed perspective of retrospective utopia, convinced that it is sufficient to reproduce the conditions of the Prophet’s time to solve all problems of Muslim societies. Hence, the Islamic state and Caliphate’s issues must be re-discussed from new perspectives, by recovering the potentials of universalism and cosmopolitanism in the tradition. It is central today the role of civil society, wherein Islamic universalism and cosmopolitanism could find their natural space, and the same goes for the role of citizenship. Reform requires a re-consideration of classical Islamic juridical and political thought patterns, which this chapter aims to do by, first, focalizing certain paradigms and concepts, and by, second, problematizing the modern meanings given to these paradigms and concepts. At the closure, I contend that it is in civil society that traditional meanings of universalism and cosmopolitanism can flourish again for functional political thought and praxis. (shrink)

This article considers Edward W. Said’s proposals on ‘imaginative geographies’ as suggested in his leading work Orientalism as a tool to analyse the ideological circumstances that shape geographical spaces in the Bible. My purpose is to discuss how these imaginative geographies are present in the patriarchal narratives of Genesis and how they have left their mark on the history of the interpretation of these texts and on the not always easy relations between members of the religious traditions inherited from the (...) Bible (Hebrews, Muslims and Christians). I propose four types of ‘imaginative geographies’: (1) ‘Equalness’ is the way to represent what is considered as sharing the own identity. The geography of ‘Equalness’ defines the spaces of Isaac, Jacob and their families. (2) ‘Otherness’ is the way to represent the ‘Other’ as opposite or juxtaposed to one’s own identity. A common border is shared, thus kinship relationships can be established. It defines the spaces of Ishmael, Esau/Edom, Lot (Ammon and Moab) and Laban. (3) ‘Foreignness’ is the way to define what is strange, odd or exotic considered as external to the own identity, in a space set beyond even the space of the ‘Other’. Egypt is in Genesis a land of ‘Foreignness’. (4) ‘Delendness’ encompasses whatever claims our same space and therefore threatens our survival and must be destroyed ( delendum ). As such, processes of annihilation and dominion of Israel on Canaanites and Sichemites are justified. Contribution: The article applies Said’s ‘imaginative geographies’ as an identity mechanism for the creation of biblical literary spaces. A quadripartite classification (‘Equal’/‘Other’/‘Foreigner’/‘Delendum’) instead of the usual bipartite one (‘Equal’ vs. ‘Other’) is proposed and the consequences for the current coexistence between religious identities inherited from Abraham are shown. (shrink)

The European Union policy is geared towards fostering the diversity of cultural expression in its member states. Globalisation, cosmopolitanism and increasing mobility of the population have been destroying the fundamental values of nation-based states. The preservation of the ethnicity of the nation is becoming an increasing challenge. In Lithuania, where ethnicity has deep roots, many prominent representatives of the Lithuanian national revival, cultural figures, philosophers and pedagogues have emphasised the importance of national culture and the development of (...) national identity in the educational space in order to preserve the foundations of the state and its future sovereignty. This is, therefore, becoming an important educational challenge. In 2009, the Ministry of Education, Science and Sport of the Republic of Lithuania adopted the “Strategy for the Development of Ethnic Culture in Educational Institutions”, which was specified in the action program in 2012. However, the modelling of civic education, especially the practical implementation process, faces challenges in the area of education, one of which is the lack of proper attention from participants in education and media. The empirical research reveals that the interest of Lithuanian youth in the history of the national and ethnic culture remains low. This shows that when implementing reforms in the country’s education system, it is appropriate to impart fundamental provisions of citizenship and nationality to the young generation in a consistent and attractive manner. The aim of the article is to present the expression of citizenship and nationality in the educational space of Lithuania and to provide guidelines for improvement of civic education based on research. (shrink)

From the summer of 2015 onwards the high influx of migrants and its effects have dominated the public debate in Europe. At first this influx posed mainly an administrative challenge in host countries such as Austria, Germany, and Sweden. Yet the seemingly incessant flow of migrants from Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, seeking refuge from war or economic deprivation, soon sparked a heated controversy on the possibility of integrating people from very different cultural and religious backgrounds into European societies. (...) Security concerns following the Paris attacks of November 2015 fuelled support for right-wing parties and extremist movements all over Europe. Meanwhile, one EU member state after another introduced restrictive policies contravening the open border policy introduced by the Schengen Agreement in their attempt to shift the administrative burden of handling the migrant crisis onto neighbouring states. The growing anxiety around questions of identity and security was compounded by growing concerns about the economy and welfare. In this essay I delineate the role played by public intellectuals in the debate about this crisis. Drawing on Richard Posner’s broad definition of a public intellectual as someone who writes knowledgeably about ideas for a popular audience on matters of public concern, I focus on how German public intellectuals debated the questions of national identity and the role of the nation-state in the EU migration crisis. (shrink)

Approaches to legal pluralism vary widely across the spectrum of different disciplines. They comprise normative and descriptive perspectives, focus both on legal pluralist realities as well as public debates, and address legal pluralism in a range of different societies with varying political, institutional and historical conditions. Emphasising an empirical research to contemporary legal pluralist settings in Muslim contexts, the present collected volume contributes to a deepened understanding of legal pluralist issues and realities through comparative examination. This approach reveals some common (...) features, such as the relevance of Islamic law in power struggles and in the construction of (state or national) identities, strategies of coping with coexisting sets of legal norms by the respective agents, or public debates about the risks induced by the recognition of religious institutions in migrant societies. At the same time, the studies contained in this volume reveal that legal pluralist settings often reflect very specific historical and social constellations, which demands caution towards any generalisation. The volume is based on papers presented at a conference in Münster (Germany) in 2016 and comprises contributions by Judith Koschorke, Karen Meeschaut, Yvonne Prief, Ulrike Qubaja, Werner de Saeger, Ido Shahar, Katrin Seidel, Konstantinos Tsitselikis, Vishal Vora and Ihsan Yilmaz. (shrink)

Identity is a concept that evolves over the course of life. Identity develops over time and can evolve, sometimes drastically; depending on what directions we take in our life. In the age of globalization, a human being is more aware than old times regarding his community, social and national affairs. A person who identifies himself as part of a particular political party, of a particular faith, and who sees himself as upper-middle class, might discover that in later age, he's a (...) very different person. Perhaps he's no longer interested in politics, he's changed his religion, and he's living on less money than when he was in his younghood. Any variation is possible during a person's life span. -/- Religious Identity: A person's religious identity is the name of the religion that they identify themselves with. In this society people want to know, "What religion are you?" Generally they expect a one-word answer with the name of a religion that expresses their religious identity. A person might say they are a Buddhist - or a Christian - or a Jew - or a Muslim - or a Hindu. These are examples of religious identities. Recent developments in the field of social sciences in general and sociology in particular suggest a gradual tendency towards revival of interest on the issue of religion and identity. It is plausible that religion and identity may be positively correlated. The link between religion and identity can be contextualized through the exploration of the self. -/- Identity Politics: Identity politics is a political style that focuses on the issues relevant to various groups defined by a wide variety of shared characteristics, including, but not limited to, race, social class, religion, sex, gender, ethnicity, ideology, nationality, sexual orientation, gender expression, culture, currency, shared history, medical conditions, profession, and other of the many ways in which people differ from each other, and into which they may be classified or classify themselves. This concept played an important role in shaping social and national sphere. -/- Social Justice: Social justice denotes the equal treatment of all citizens without any social distinction based on caste, colour, race, religion, sex and so on. It means absence of privileges being extended to any particular section of the society, and improvement in the conditions of backward classes (SCs, STs, and OBCs) and women. Social Justice is the foundation stone of Indian Constitution. Indian Constitution makers were well known to the use and minimality of various principles of justice. Social justice found useful for everyone in its kind and flexible form. -/- Although social justice is not defined anywhere in the constitution but it is an ideal element of feeling which is a goal of constitution. Feeling of social justice is a form of relative concept that is changeable by the time, circumstances, culture and ambitions of the people. Social inequalities of India expect solution equally. Under Indian Constitution the use of social justice is accepted in wider sense, which includes social and economical justice both. -/- The major objective of this paper is to critical analyze all the above mentioned conceptions and see their relation with reference to a national character building as the present scenario of India showed a identity crisis between individual’s religious identity and secular objectives of the constitutions. The negative effect of the identity politics ruin ideal nation’s character and negatively affects the concept of social justice too. For a better nation we should a balanced state of affairs where every citizen has a space to develop him/her self and a motivation to contribute in development of India. -/- Note : This is submitted for a Three-Day Philosophy Teachers' Meet of North-Western Zone sponsored by ICPR, New Delhi to be organized by the Department of Guru Nanak Studies, Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar on 29th to 31st Dec. 2015 with the theme "The Crisis of Multiple Identities in Contemporary World" . (shrink)

continent. 1.4 (2011): 253—278. A Sense of French Politics Politics itself is not the exercise of power or struggle for power. Politics is first of all the configuration of a space as political, the framing of a specific sphere of experience, the setting of objects posed as "common" and of subjects to whom the capacity is recognized to designate these objects and discuss about them.(1) On April 14, 2011, France implemented its controversial ban of the niqab and burqa , commonly (...) referred to as the Islamic veil, in public places. On the coattails of the 2004 prohibition of religious artifacts, including the less concealing hijab or Islamic headscarves, in schools, the veil ban sparked equal outrage across both political and theological spectra, and many on both sides of the debate were quick to inquire about enforcement. As Steven Erlanger reports, “The police do not have the authority under the law to remove full veils, only to fine or require citizenship lessons for those who violate the new law.”(2) While the legal and social implications of this interdiction are ripe for study, the reprisals for breaking the law, notably compulsory citizenship classes, illuminate the strategic governmentality underlying the French government's targeting of the Muslim community, particularly those elements it considers affiliated with fundamentalist factions and/or terrorist organizations, if only through fashion—an integral component of French citizenship. Indeed, in allowing the (fashion) police to mandate instructional courses in citizenship for offenders, France implies that any Muslim choosing to wear the niqab or burqa , perhaps even for those who are already citizens, must not be aware of the subtle nuances of dress indicative of the French citizenry within public space. Furthermore, the degree of instruction requisite to citizenship, which clearly can and must be updated as the state sees fit, cements the imagined relation between citizens and states within the discourses on the veil ban. As Sharma contends, “Concepts of citizenship are the ideological glue that bonds the nation to the state. Citizenship provides the legal framework through which the state performs its role as ruler for the nation.”(3) Speaking for/as the state, French President Nicolas Sarkozy declared in a 2009 presentation before members of the government and other citizens that the burqa “is not welcome on the territory of France.”(4) Although there is nothing unique, especially recently, about a nation-state taking extreme measures to guard itself against what it deems to be threats to its sovereignty, the way in which the ongoing discourses on hijab have (d)evolved, which coincide with recent pronouncements by governmental leaders in Germany, Britain, and France that policies of multiculturalism have “failed,”(5) points toward nationalist reterritorializations, which is also to say physical and ideological re-appropriations, of public space within democratic milieux, which remain predicated upon the mediation of spaces. As Panagia deduces from Rancière, “Democracy […] is not an institutional form of government […], but an appearance whose visibilities and audibilites arise out of the dissonant blur of the everyday.”(6) Ultimately, the veil ban represents a calculated move to regulate the every day, which is to say the micropolitics of, that which is visible and invisible within French society, which makes it nothing short of a struggle to manage (the sensation of) bodies. Re-situating the political within the context of sense, Rancière argues that the fundamental essence of politics lies within the distinction between consensus and dissensus , and whereas most consider politics proper as fundamentally concerned with the fluid operations of the state— consensus , Rancière actually locates the political within events that disrupt the normative sensory order of things— dissensus . He explains, “Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time.”(7) This reformulation of politics centers on agency and, albeit perhaps unintended, representationality and offers a useful formulation for spatializing the discourses surrounding the Islamic veil, which are mired within seemingly senseless policies and practices of objectification. Instituting a normative “regime of visibility,” the French veil ban encapsulates the political economy of agency, now both mediated and representational, under the rule of nationalist governmentalities in increasingly transnational contexts.(8) Adjudicating presence within public space signals a concern with the sensory aspects of agency itself—what Rancière terms the “distribution of the sensible,” which is “a matrix that defines a set of relations between sense and sense: that is, between a form of sensory experience and an interpretation which makes sense of it.”(9) To be concerned with sense is to focus upon the body, and this somatic repositioning of the (fashionable) citizen within the territory of the state augurs the resurgence of nationalist bio-politics within Europe, since, as Hage explicates, “Nationalism, before being an explicit practice or a mode of classification, is a state of the body. It is a way of imagining one's position within the nation and what one can aspire to as a national.”(10) The French government's attempt to make (bodily) sense of public space for its citizens by and through policies aimed against a burqa-clad Muslim minority, which might only apply to “less then 400 to fewer than 2,000” women(11), reveals the necessary, yet mercurial, transmutation of public space into national space through bio-political strategies of sense-making, which, as Hage observes, denotes that “nationalists perceive themselves as spatial managers.”(12) At the center of this concern over public space is the equally contentious dimension of governing female Islamic identity, which has become one of the main critiques levied against Islam from outsiders who view the veil in its various forms as a clear sign of the religion's actual and symbolic violence against women, even if such critiques remain ensconced within nationalist discourses. As Halim and Meyers argue, “Although Western news media may focus their coverage of Muslim women on the debate over whether and the extent to which the veil may by oppressive to the women who wear it, they have exhibited little interest in the physical oppression of violence against women in Islamic countries.”(13) While it falls outside of the scope of this analysis to arbitrate all of the dimensions of this debate, understanding some of the issues related to female identity and hijab within public space are crucial to this study. As these topics are extraordinarily complex, even and perhaps especially within the Muslim community, it is necessary to provide some context concerning the value, purpose, and meaning of the Islamic veil, which has a rich and arduous history. The Art of the Veil At present, there are only two countries, Iran and Saudi Arabia, that require women to wear hijab , which is a decidedly problematic term and concept whose locus is itself caught within a struggle of sensation. Noting the strategic reterritorialization of the term, Berger explains: The choice of the name, hijab , now widely adopted to designate the “Islamic veil,” it itself interesting, although the semantic shift it operates is not directly commented upon by its users. Although the design (both the cut and the symbolic function) of the hijab and the Iranian chador are indeed the same, as opposed, for instance, to the traditional Algerian haik , the word hijab has come to replace the term chador popularized by the Iranian revolution, as a properly Arabic (hence Koranic) designation. This discursive shift points to the successful reclaiming of the national revolution in Iran by a transnational pan-Islamic movement, whose language of reference can only be Koranic Arabic.(14) While the hijab is certainly a point of contention within various countries dealing with immigrant Islamic populations (of which France has the largest in Europe as part of its colonial legacy in Algeria), it is clear that the veil is a historically contextualized artifact of Muslim identity with a variety of manifestations, even as forces outside of and within Islam seek to codify its actual and symbolic value. Ultimately, the varieties of hijab , including the full-faced burqa and niqab , are complex assemblages of meaning that speak to the multitudinous flows of Islamic identities over time and space. As Gökariksel and McLarney observe, “Wearing a certain style of veil may simultaneously be a disciplinary practice crucial to the cultivation of piety (Mahmood 2005; Gokariksel 2009) and a gendered performance of social distinction in terms of class, taste, and urbanity (White 1999; Navaro-Yashin 2002; Gokariksel and Secor 2009) or of ethnicity and race (Dwyer 1999).”(15) The ideological marketplace from which the varieties of hijab ebb and flow serves both as a reflection of the ever-present materiality and dynamic functionality of spiritual economies, which are derivative of the equally ubiquitous flows of transnational capital driving agency and representationality within our historical moment. Keeping these dual, yet deeply interconnected, capital ecologies as the site of exploration for how the veil is represented within public space, one might begin to sense what lurks behind such veiled agendas. Examining the symbolic and representational nature of the Islamic “veil” in its various forms, this project situates the decidedly political contestations of public space at stake in the French ban alongside recent condemnations of multiculturalism as calculated efforts to re-distribute the sensible so as to valorize national identity within increasingly transnational and globalized socio-economic spaces, which collapse exchange values between distinct, yet interwoven, economies of (cultural/material/spiritual) capital. As the discourses on the veil rely upon representational imag(in)ings, it seems fitting to explore the political economy and art of the veil through the phenomenon of street art, which, much like hijab , is a complex assemblage of meaning of sensation mired in representationality and capital exchange. As street artists have taken up hijab in various forms, the movement offers a lens with which to situate critical responses to the veil debate across both spiritual and material economies. Situating this street art both aesthetically and historically, Lewisohn explains, “'Street art' is a sub-genre of graffiti writing and owes much to its predecessor. Though there is a good deal of crossover between the genres, they are distinct and separate in their own right.”(16) Evolving out of the graffiti explosion of the late 1970's and 1980's, street art broke the unspoken rules of the artistic underground by challenging and re-examining one's sensory experience of art in public space by experimenting with both content and form in ways that harken back to the Situationist International, which as a collective challenged one's experience of urban space through various media and experiential phenomena. Again, Lewisohn observes, “It's important to note street art's break with the tradition of the tag, and its focus on visual symbols that embrace a much wider range of media than graffiti writers would use.”(17) From stencils to prints and murals to one-liners, street artists developed a reputation for critical social and political commentary, and while it is certainly the case that not all street art is intentionally political, in challenging the normative “regime of visibility,” as Rancière puts it, of public space, street artists—even if unconsciously—call into question the common sensory experience of the politics underlying the formation of (nationalist) space.(18) Indeed, Rancière refers to the partisan sensory managers as “police,” who ultimately forge “the rules governing the circulation of appearances, of their visibility and audibility, and the proper distribution of bodies therein.”(19) As such, one can sense that street art's relationship with the police is tenous for a variety of reasons. Writing about his own experience as a street artist, Shepard Fairey observes, “With street art, there's no committee deciding whether I can put my work up on the street, there's no censorship, and I have total freedom of expression, and that concept of freedom is expressed just by using the street as a medium.”(20) As Fairey and other street artists demonstrate, the medium, to paraphrase Marshall McLuhan, is the most glaring aspect of street art's message, and even as it now finds itself in galleries and usurped by private collectors, the ethos of the movement remains relavent to politics as it is, first and foremost, concerned with the configuration and experience of space. Just as examining the punishments for breaking the veil ban can map the terrain of French politics, a representational genealogy of street artist's deployment of hijab and female Muslim identity can assist in mining the depths of public space as a site of bio-political control and contestation in light of recent events in France and the rising tide of anti-multiculturalist rhetoric across Europe, even though the Islamic presence there is radically heterogenous. Using the work of Shepard Fairey, Princess Hijab, br1, and Banksy, this paper sets out to answer a number of key questions concerning the deployment of hijab, and female Islamic identity in particular, within street art as a movement now integral to and critical of the economies of exchange underlying global capitalism, which as a force of influence cannot be underestimated as a driver in the resurgence of nationalist biopolitical governmentalities. Although there exists a litany of artists to choose from, the aforementioned quartet of designers integrate hijab into their work in a seminal and critical fashion, and all have been working with the veil in some way prior to the French ban, which grants some additional context to their usage of it as a symbol in regards to the breakdown of multiculturalism across Europe, even if unconsciously. Although each artist depicts various amalgamations of hijab in their respective corpus, they share common tropes that raise significant questions concerning the veil debate, namely: what are the conditions of possibility for hijab to become a marker of Islamic identity within public space? How can we make sense of the representational topologies within street art's utilization of the hijab and female Islamic identity in light of the French ban? How might these aesthetic imag(in)ings simultaneously inhabit and combat normative discourses concerning hijab , multiculturalism, female Islamic identity, and public space? With these considerations as a backdrop, it is first necessary to outline more fully the hijab as a representative marker of female Islamic identity. The (Veiled) Writing on the Wall

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Cosmopolitanism is said by many critics to be arrogant. In emphasizing universal principles and granting no fundamental moral significance to national or other group belonging, it wrongly treats those making non-universalist claims as not authorized to speak, while treating those in non-Western societies as not qualified. This book works to address such objections. It does so in part by engaging the work of B.R. Ambedkar, architect of India's 1950 Constitution and revered champion of the country's Dalits (formerly "untouchables"). Ambedkar (...) cited universal principles of equality and rights in confronting domestic exclusions and the "arrogance" of caste. He sought to advance forms of political humility, or the affirmation of equal standing within political institutions and openness to input and challenge within them. This book examines how an "institutional global citizenship" approach to cosmopolitanism could similarly advance political humility, in supporting the development of input and challenge mechanisms beyond the state. It employs a grounded normative theory method, taking insights for the model from field research among Dalit activists pressing for domestic reforms through the UN human rights regime, and from their critics in the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party. Insights also are taken from Turkish protesters challenging a rising domestic authoritarianism, and from UK Independence Party members demanding "Brexit" from the European Union-in part because of possibilities that predominantly Muslim Turkey will join. Overall, it is shown, an appropriately configured institutional cosmopolitanism should orient fundamentally to political humility rather than arrogance, while holding significant potential for advancing global rights protections and more equitable rights specifications. (shrink)

In Hegel on Political Identity, Lydia Moland provocatively draws on Hegel's political philosophy to engage sometimes contentious contemporary issues such as patriotism, national identity, and cosmopolitanism. Moland argues that patriotism for Hegel indicates an attitude toward the state, whereas national identity is a response to culture. The two combine, Hegel claims, to enable citizens to develop concrete freedom. Moland argues that Hegel's account of political identity extends to his notorious theory of world history; she also proposes that his resistance (...) to cosmopolitanism be reassessed in response to our globalized world. By focusing on Hegel's depiction of political identity as a central part of modern life, Moland shows the potential of Hegel's philosophy to address issues that lie at the heart of ethical and political philosophy. (shrink)

This article explores the experiences of Latina lesbian migrants living in the United States. Drawing on in-depth interviews with 15 Latina lesbian migrants, I argue that Latinas' sexual, racial, and class identities are continuously shifting as the process of migration repositions them in a new system of racial inequality. Their sexual identities are altered as migrants often silence their lesbian existence when negotiating relationships with families of origin. Lesbianas establish borderland spaces for themselves where they gain sexual autonomy but where (...) their identities are in flux. These spaces are “imagined communities” because while lesbianas envision them to provide solidarity, in practice the borderlands are riddled with inequalities and tensions. Despite this, the borderlands allow lesbianas to develop a mestiza consciousness. (shrink)

In United Nations (UN) human rights reporting and analysis, ‘honour’ has been systematically conflated with ‘honour-related violence’ (HRV). However, honour and HRV are not the same thing. In this article I examine contemporary UN human rights discourses around honour. I argue that these discourses are underpinned by racialised and orientalist-colonial imaginaries which falsely categorise people and places as either having or not having honour. This conflation presents honour as a cultural problem attributed to racialised communities mostly associated with the (...) Muslim World. Adopting a critical post- and de-colonial perspective, I undertake a discourse analysis of UN human rights documents to expose orientalist tropes that reproduce epistemic and material violence against honour. There are three strategies employed to commit this violence: first, through the reduction of honour to physical and emotional HRV—a violence predicated upon the logic of coloniality and the orientalist division of the world into modern and pre-modern states; second, by associating honour as violence with Muslims and migrant communities, the discourse furthers structural Islamophobia; third, by reproducing colonial saviour narratives that designate honour as control over women’s sexuality. The human rights discourse on honour forecloses upon alternative ways of understanding what honour is and means for those who live with it. As such, the international human rights discourse on honour extends the coloniality of power and the geopolitics of knowledge. (shrink)

Women’s bodies, states Benhabib (Dignity in adversity: human rights in troubled times, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2011: 168), have become the site of symbolic confrontations between a re-essentialized understanding of religious and cultural differences and the forces of state power, whether in their civic-republican, liberal-democratic or multicultural form. One of the main reasons for the emergence of these confrontations or public debates, says Benhabib (2011: 169), is because of the actual location of ‘political theology’. She asserts that within the context (...) of globalization, the concept of ‘political theology’ is complicated by its unstable location between religion and the public square; between the private and official; and between individual rights to freedom of religion versus state security and public well-being. Ultimately, therefore, the nature of the tension between religion as a political theology and the forces of state power can at best be described as a clash between identities of a collective nature (as envisaged by the nation-state) and identities of an individual nature (as manifested in different religions and cultures). Ongoing attempts to counter the ascendancy of religion, and as will be discussed in this article, specifically the ascendancy and visibility of Islamic identity as practiced by Muslim women, has brought into serious debate the notion of a (post) secular society and its implications for religious rights. What emerges from the state’s insistence that individuals not be allowed to enter the public discourse as religious beings, are, on the one hand, the constraints imposed on Muslim women by liberal democracies, and on the other hand, that Islam, as represented by Muslim women, is not constitutive of democratic citizenship. Will the inclusion and recognition of Muslim women, therefore, necessarily augment a democratic citizenship agenda, and will it lead to an alleviation of the conflict? Then, in exploring a re-articulation of an inclusive citizenship—one which is held accountable by its minimization of social inequality—what ought to be the parameters of inclusion and how should it unfold differently to what is already happening in liberal democracies? (shrink)

Islamism may already be showing signs of meeting a more powerful ideological force: state nationalism. Islamists devote far more energy to attempting to take over existing states than to attacking the West. It is conceivable that, as with Pan-Arabism before it, the grandiose ideals of Islamism will be no match for the economic, military, and media might of the nation-states into which both Arabs and Muslims are separated. These appear to shape people's identity even more than do their potentially (...) revolutionary shared religious tenets. (shrink)

Islamism may already be showing signs of meeting a more powerful ideological force: state nationalism. Islamists devote far more energy to attempting to take over existing states than to attacking the West. It is conceivable that, as with Pan-Arabism before it, the grandiose ideals of Islamism will be no match for the economic, military, and media might of the nation-states into which both Arabs and Muslims are separated. These appear to shape people's identity even more than do their potentially (...) revolutionary shared religious tenets. (shrink)

The concern of this paper is to critique the political conception of nationalism as a theory of the nation-state. The basic point of the critique is that when the interests of the nation and the principles of the state coincide there emerges a fierce sense of national identity which endangers moral indifference to outsiders, the people within and outside the national boundary, without remorse. Here the attempt to uphold national identity is something more than nationhood. Besides involving territorial (...) identity, common language, custom and culture essential to the idea of a “nation,” it also upholds the consciousness of these as determining separate rights and allegiances, the idea of attachment to a nation and its interests. Such a consciousness can emerge only on the adoption of certain populist ideas such as racism, ethnicity and even such popular elusive myths as the “greatness” of a nation, the urge for the maintenance of “national character,” etc. Such “nationalist xenophobia” leads to the intensification of the distinction between the “own” and the “other,” “national” and the “alien,” the “citizen” and the “migrant” leading to “ethnic disharmony,” “colour bias,” hatred and suspicion of persons with whom one has lived closely as neighbours for decades. The most popular is the economic discourse of the “migrants” putting the “nationals” out of work. All this has its toll on multi-culturalism and humanitarian concerns. Many affluent nations have become cold to human misery, suffering and deaths from wars, terrorism, acute poverty, political persecution, environmental degradation, etc. This has created an “existential” crisis for millions of people on earth. (shrink)

Over the last few years, I have attended several political meetings concerned with the refugee crisis, multiculturalism or Indigenous rights in Australia, meetings at which liberal democratic–minded ‘left-wing’ people came together to discuss, or agitate for change in, governmental policies. At these meetings, I always found it difficult to accept the slogans on their placards and in their speeches: ‘Shame Australia! Reconciliation for a united Australia’, ‘Wake up Australia! We welcome refugees!’ or ‘True Australians are tolerant! Let’s celebrate multicultural Australia!’ (...) My uncomfortable feeling came not only from the fact that I was left out because of my Japanese nationality but also because I had never seen or heard words like ‘shame Japan’, ‘wake up Japan’ or ‘true Japanese are...’ at Japanese ‘left-wing’ political gatherings. In Japan, these are words used only by right-wing nationalists. Indeed it is difficult to even imagine liberal-left intellectuals in postwar Japan calling for a ‘true Japanese’ political response, such is the extent to which the idea of ‘good nationalism’ is now regarded as an oxymoron. This is my starting point for an essay in which I want to be attentive to the different roles played by national in the Japanese and Australian political environments. (shrink)

The U.K.'s National Health Service (NHS) is critically reliant on staff from overseas, which means that a sizeable number of U.K. healthcare professionals have received their training at the cost of other states, whose populations are urgently in need of healthcare professionals. At the same time, while healthcare is widely seen as a primary good, many migrants are unable to access the NHS without charge, and anti‐immigration political trends are likely to further reduce that access. Both of these topics have (...) received close attention in the global health ethics literature. In this article, I make the novel move of suggesting that these two seemingly disparate issues should be folded into the same moral narrative. The ‘brain drain’ upon which the NHS and its users depend derives from the same gradient of wealth, security, and opportunity that produces migrants who require the NHS. I endorse moral cosmopolitanism as a lens for understanding patients' right to healthcare regardless of nationality or immigration status. I argue that the NHS in its current formulation effectively enacts a partial cosmopolitanism in its reliance on medical workers from abroad, but could more meaningfully instantiate that cosmopolitanism were it to offer the same healthcare to migrants as it does to citizens. (shrink)

The purpose of the article is to determine the mental space of national identity by analyzing the semantic component of the national anthem. The national anthem can be considered as a social code that forms a citizen and as an ordinary text with its semantic structured levels. The national anthem is a political symbol and therefore forms two meanings: intent and influence. In the study, we combine the theory of mental spaces by G.Fauconnier and Ch.Fillmor’s frames semantics to visualize the (...) conceptual model of Ukrainian national identity. Research results: Designating the national anthem as a patriotic work that describes and symbolizes the history and traditions of the country, we articulate the generation and manifestation of social values by the anthem. Based on this position, the article proposes a conceptual model of the mental space of the Ukrainian national identity, which was initiated by the anthem of Ukraine. The basis of the scheme is a figurative fusion of three macro-worlds: Glory-Ukraine-Freedom, which symbolizes the value component that holds around itself the basic concepts of national identity.The article compares the text of the national anthem «Shche ne vmerla Ukraina…» written by P.Chubinsky and the text edited by M.Verbitsky. The symbolic construction of the text of Chubinsky’s anthem, published in 1963, broadcasts a conceptual model of future actions. The names Zalizniak, Nalyvaiko, Triasylo embody the ideal of Cossack chivalry, past times, which are the basis for future generations to follow. The concept of “national identification borders” includes not only geographical names, the Black Sea, the Carpathians, the Dnipro (in the text «from the Syan to the Don»), but also indexical categories – «inviolability», «integrity of the state», «integrity of the territory», «unitaryness», and as well as symbols embodied in names, for example, Crimea, Odesa, Lviv, Kharkiv. In the context of the semantic analysis of the text of the national anthem, its influence on the mental state of the state is recognized, which is reflected in the global peace index and the global terrorism index. A nation can be presented with ethnic, territorial, cultural, and political components. But there must also be abstract ideas, a mental space that makes it visible. (shrink)

This article discusses the national identity of the Yemenite Jews as portrayed in Majdi Saleh’s novel The Journey of Buried Secrets. The novel, in addition to being a journey to the ancient past of Yemen, is a journey to the secret life of the Yemenite Jews as well. It is an exploration of their customs, traditions, worries, passions and identity. The writer has been able to dive deep into the depths of Yemeni society, both Muslim and Jewish, depicting the beauty (...) of Yemen architecture, ancient inscriptions and living styles of bygone days. Saleh’s novel presents a new perspective of the Yemenite Jew, one who identifies himself with Yemen and feels proud of this attachment to the land of his birth. The article argues that Yemenite Jews have been emotionally and cognitively attached to their motherland and perceived themselves as being Yemenites belonging to the country where they were born and grew up. It asserts that such a sense of belonging is the outcome of religious tolerance and coexistence of the larger Muslim community. (shrink)

The main idea of the article is to define the role of imagination, violence and institutions in the formation of the modern state as well as to show that the important dimension of the state building is the image of the self, creative capacity of the individual to symbolic self-made activity and self-made reproduction. The symbolic world of the imaginary state is the product of the communities united symbolically, contingency and simultaneously the part of the social orders. The Nort conception (...) of the social orders as the structures that limit and control the violence takes the privilege place in the article. The first model of the social organization is defined as the “order of limited access”, and the second one as the “order of free access”. Thus the different state establishments are formed: “the natural state” that is formed in the natural way according to the violence restrain logic by means of limited access, and “the artificial state” by means of free access to the political and economic resources. In particular the impossibility of the automatic transition from the self-sufficient type of the natural state to the modern democratic state is emphasized. Nort conception is extrapolated on the experience of the Ukrainian independent state state-building after the abortive coup d’etat in 1991. The authors develop the tenet about the conservation of the institutional matrix of the soviet empire in the post-communist Ukraine. It deals with the institutional features: such as the authoritarian management, the secondary role of the law regulations, the supervisory instance uncontrolled by society. The transformation crises, accordingly to the authors approach, determined the conditions and the price of transitional countries entering not only the civilizational space of the contemporary Europe but also the system of global economic, political and social interrelations. This crises conditioned also the changes in the network of the international institutions. It determined the distinctive features of the national identity formation, legitimation strategies in the contemporary Nation-State, and primarily in the newest Ukrainian state-building. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Romanian Cultural and Political IdentityDonald R. KelleyThe Journal of the History of Ideas, in collaboration with other institutions, including the Universities of Bucharest and Budapest and the Soros Foundation, recently sponsored the second in a series of international conferences being planned on topics in current intellectual history. (The first, “Interrogating Tradition,” was held at Rutgers University, 13–16 November 1997.) The Romanian conference, which was held in the Elisabeta Palace (...) in Bucharest (27–31 May 1998), was devoted to “Culture and the Politics of National Identity in Modern Romania.” Over forty scholars, mainly from Romania but some also from the U.S., France, Germany, and Hungary, gathered to discuss a variety of questions about Romanian society, past, present, and speculative future; and they were joined by at least as many visitors, especially students, from the local area and beyond.Topics discussed included politics, language, economics, historiography, religion, education, philosophy, ideologies, intelligentsia, particular intellectuals, minorities, and women (though not Gypsies or gays). Under this riot of rubrics a wide range of questions were posed in interdisciplinary fashion, with frequent, sometimes impassioned interventions. What is—was, might have been, can be—Romania? Who is a Romanian (and who not)? What is Romania’s relation to the West and the East? (And what are the “West” and the “East”?) To modernity, to modernism, to modernization? What is—has been, should be—the function of intellectuals, of political and cultural elites, in understanding the Romanian past and in setting a course for the future? What, more generally, is the role of history in answering such questions? Or is history perhaps (as Karl Krause remarked of psychoanalysis) the disease for which it claims to be the cure?Keith Hitchens’s keynote address suggested that rehashing old essentialist debates might not be productive at millennium’s end, but the conference itself could not avoid some excursions down the paths of memory and myth. For historians, Western historians anyway, Romania seems to have too many pasts. Located at the juncture of four previous empires, Romania is a mosaic, or perhaps a pandemonium, of ethnic, religious, economic, and ideological groups that can only imagine, or invent, a nationality. Geographically (and in many ways culturally) remote from the West, Romania for a long time (as Sorin Antohi remarked) lacked both a public sphere and a civil society; and suffering “a Counter-Reformation without a Reformation” (Alexandru Dutu’s phrase), it has not enjoyed a tradition of religious or ethnic toleration. Nor have either the Germans or the Jews (as Glass said) found their own unity within the changing borders of the modern Romanian state. Not until the nineteenth century did Romania develop, out of its Boyar background (as Siupiur argued), an intellectual elite that could create a modern national history and help turn “peasants into Romanians” (Antohi’s phrase); and even then this elite seemed more attracted to conservative [End Page 735] (Herder, Savigny, Burke) than to liberal views of autochthonism. Many features of Western modernity, such as Newtonian science, reached Romania late, and indeed there was a retrograde movement against liberalism under the aegis by orthodox religion. In any case this intelligentsia has been as fragmented and multiform as the Romanian past itself. True, some Romanian scholars like to posit a mainstream tradition, “excesses aside,” as one speaker put it—but how, asked another, can historians put “excesses” aside from the devastating perspective of this century?Political and cultural self-examination was the dominant theme of this conference. Nationality, said Pippidi, depends on three factors, viz., name, language, religion, and territory. The Romanian name dates from the tenth century, indicating a separation of the Roman from the Greek tradition in Wallachia; and from the seventeenth century the idea of a mainly Roman provenance was given privilege. As a language, “Romanian” was spoken in the late Middle Ages, but the first written document is dated 1521. The principal religion in Romania was and is Greek orthodox, although there are also Roman Catholic, Jewish, Islamic, and German Protestant communities, as well as the Uniate church created in the eighteenth century. As for the territory, this has been a matter of change, conflict, and confusion throughout the tragic course... (shrink)

Interrogating the concepts of allegiance and identity in a globalised world involves renewing our understanding of membership and participation within and beyond the nation-state. Allegiance can be used to define a singular national identity and common connection to a nation-state. In a global context, however, we need more dynamic conceptions to understand the importance of maintaining diversity and building allegiance with others outside borders. Understanding how allegiance and identity are being reconfigured today provides valuable insights into important contemporary (...) debates around citizenship. This book reveals how public and international law understand allegiance and identity. Each involves viewing the nation-state as fundamental to concepts of allegiance and identity, but they also see the world slightly differently. With contributions from philosophers, political scientists and social psychologists, the result is a thorough appraisal of allegiance and identity in a range of socio-legal contexts. (shrink)

The Article traces recent trends in the management and distribution of citizenship within the Israeli context of the 1990s, as they have evolved in the wake of new modes of migration that are neither Jewish nor Palestinian and that stem from liberalized market policies. The Article focuses on administrative and policy initiatives taken since September 2003 that deal with the naturalization of the children of undocumented labor migrants. The vulnerable situation of these migrants in lacking resident status and being eligible (...) for deportation, as well as the predominant Jewish ethno-national character of the Israeli state, make these initiatives and policy measures particularly surprising. However, these measures also reveal the boundaries of liberalizing reforms, as they become part of general trends in the nation-state towards deeming membership manageable without upsetting its national politics of identity. Indeed, it will be argued that, though this liberalizing legal reform is part of a larger context of demystification of national citizenship taking place in Israel following the adoption of socioeconomic liberal policies, it is also indicative of the adaptability of the nation-state as it seeks to reprioritize ethno-national definitions of citizenship in the face of new challenges. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Philosophy, Psychiatry, & Psychology 9.4 (2002) 349-351 [Access article in PDF] Mystical States or Mystical Life?Buddhist, Christian, and Hindu Perspectives Marek Marzanski and Mark Bratton THIS IS AN ORIGINAL and conceptually precise paper. It is a significant attempt to bring religion and psychiatry into conversation. With particular reference to three Oriental epistemologies—Tibetan and Zen Buddhism and Tantric Hinduism—Caroline Brett seeks to offer a means of differentiating mystical states from (...) psychotic ones. She is critical of reductionism in modern psychiatry that seeks either to elide religious experience into psychopathology, or seeks too sharp a distinction between them. Brett claims, by implication, to offer a more fundamental level of discrimination between religious experience and psychopathology than the "cognitive problem-solving model" that Jackson and Fulford propose (1997a).In both mystical and psychotic states, the author argues, there are radical alterations in the structure of experience. Psychotic states, however, result from failures to complete, or, at least, to negotiate smoothly, the transition from a commitment to an epistemology based on illusory reality to one structured according to ultimate reality—a reality that is brought into focus through an alignment of transcendent vision and mundane cognition. Although this epistemological "stuck-ness" can manifest itself in action as destructive behavior, for example, psychological isolation or social and occupational dysfunction, the basis of the distinction between mystical and psychotic states lies in real differences in the states themselves.In our view, there is a tendency in much psychiatric and theological literature to homogenize mystical states and to treat experiences that (arguably) occur on a number of different levels as if they were on the same level. It is still widely thought that a mystical consciousness can somehow be abstracted from the religious traditions out of which this consciousness emerges. It is assumed that we can talk about experience in abstraction from the shared consciousness produced by schooling in a specific historical religion (Shannon 1985, 493). Thus, the altered mystical state of a Zen Master or Saint Teresa of Avila in ecstasy are regarded as identical states of consciousness. Yet it is far from clear that mystical states can be talked about without explicit reference to the language and tradition in which the self is formed, or, in terms that would have different meanings in Abrahamic and Oriental religious traditions, un-selfed. [End Page 349]There is a related tendency to regard religious doctrines as attempts to interpret mystical experience, as second-order reflections on the language of experience, as if religious doctrines were local religious dialects into which core experiences could be translated. We suggest, rather, that there is an iterative relationship between a mystical experience and the religious framework out of which it emerges. Religious doctrines are better seen as sets of instructions designed to guide the movement of prayer, and the movement of prayer, in turn, exemplifies the religious doctrine that shapes it.So could mystical states within the framework of Tibetan and Zen Buddhism and Tantric Hinduism better be understood as exemplification's of the worldviews of those particular religious traditions? For example, the relinquishing of ego structures, the dissolution of subject/object boundaries, the yielding of the contrastive identity between experience and the world, and progress toward undifferentiated union of the self with the cosmic self, seem to exemplify the monist cosmology associated with some of those traditions. By the same token, the psychotic state could be interpreted as an exemplification of an existential stance that has for some reason defected from the movement toward transcendental cognition. The point is that the "real differences" Brett identifies in the two states cannot be understood apart from the religious epistemology and doctrines, which those states, positively or negatively, exemplify. "So far 'from mystical states' being a sort of paradigm of certainty, they have authority only within a frame of reference which is believed in on quite other grounds and are therefore properly to be tested according to their consistency with this" (Williams 1991, 149)The force of Brett's paper, like Jackson and Fulford, is to identify the boundaries... (shrink)

Focusing upon a region in Southern Bulgaria, a region that has been the crossroads between Europe and Asia for many centuries, this book describes how former Ottoman Empire Muslims were transformed into citizens of Balkan nation-states. This is a region marked by shifting borders, competing Turkish and Bulgarian sovereignties, rival nationalisms, and migration. Problems such as these were ultimately responsible for the disintegration of the dynastic empires into nation-states. Land that had traditionally belonged to Muslims—individually or communally—became a (...) symbolic and material resource for Bulgarian state building and was the terrain upon which rival Bulgarian and Turkish nationalisms developed in the wake of the dissolution of the late Ottoman Empire and the birth of early republican Turkey and the introduction of capitalism. By the outbreak of World War II, Turkish Muslims had become a polarized national minority. Their conflicting efforts to adapt to post-Ottoman Bulgaria brought attention to the increasingly limited availability of citizenship rights, not only to Turkish Muslims, but to Bulgarian Christians as well. (shrink)

In this paper I reconstruct the historical significance of the concept of sovereignty and I defend its relevance against the critique of Hannah Arendt. I argue that sovereignty, understood as the concept that expresses the normative unity of the legal order, is not incompatible with plurality and constitutionalism and that it was the condition for the formation of inter state law. Further I criticize the abstract moralism that characterizes today's cosmopolitanism and the paradigm of global governance. Although the significance (...) of sovereignty is shifting in the context of globalisation, it is not becoming irrelevant because it symbolizes the right of political self-determination of a community as well as the capacity to transfer some portion of its regulatory competence to a supra-national legal order. (shrink)

Panarchy is a normative political meta-theory that advocates non-territorial states founded on actual social contracts that are explicitly negotiated and signed between states and their prospective citizens. The explicit social contract, or a constitution, sets the terms under which a state may use coercion against its citizens and the conditions under which the contract may be annulled, revised, rescinded, or otherwise exited from. Panarchy does not advocate any particular model of the state or social justice, but intends to encourage political (...) variety, innovation, experimentation, and choice. With its emphasis on explicit social contracts, Panarchy offers an interesting variation on traditional social contract theories. Today, Panarchist political thought is particularly relevant and interesting in the context of globalization, increased international migration, the weakening of national sovereignty, the rise of the internet "cloud" as a non-territorial locus of political and protopolitical social networks that are not geographic, the invention of cryptocurrencies that may replace national currencies, and the rise of urban centers where people of many different political identities live and work together. This is the first volume to bring together key philosophically and politically interesting yet often overlooked Panarchist texts. From the first published translation of de Puydt seminal 1860 article to contemporary Silicon Valley political theory, the volume includes Panarchist texts from different eras, cultures and geographical regions. The amassed wealth of theoretical insight enables readers to compare different texts in this tradition of political thought and distinguish different streams and varieties within this political tradition, in comparison with Cosmopolitanism, Contractarianism, and Anarchism. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 21st century the conditio humana cannot be understood nationally or locally but only globally. This constitutes a revolution in the social sciences. The `sociological imagination' so far has basically been a nation state imagination. The main problem is how to redefine the sociological frame of reference in the horizon of a cosmopolitan imagination. For the purpose of empirical research I distinguish between three concepts: interconnectedness, liquid modernity and cosmopolitization from within. The latter is a (...) kind of class analysis after class analysis, which takes on board globalization internalized. For the purposes of social analysis, therefore, it is necessary to distinguish systematically between the national manifestation on the one hand and cosmopolitan reality of `global flows', currents of information, symbols, money, risks, people, social inequalities, on the other. This internal involuntary and often unseen cosmopolitanization from below of the national sphere of experience is occurring, however, with the power of economic globalization. So what does inner `cosmopolitanization' mean? The key concepts and questions of a way of life, such as nourishment, production, identity, fear, memory, pleasure, fate, power and politics, can no longer be located and understood nationally, but only globally whether in the shape of globally shared collective futures, capital flows, impending ecological or economic catastrophes, global foodstuff chains, transnational power games, or the `Esperanto' of pop music. In this article I look at transformation in the understanding of space-time, of identity, of the production paradigms, as well as at the resulting consequences for key sociological concepts like class and power and, within this frame, point to certain dilemmas of cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

Since the collapse of the Soviet Union, the United States has faced the challenge of reorienting its foreign policy to address post-Cold War conditions. In this new edition of a groundbreaking work -- one of the first to bring critical theory into dialogue with more traditional approaches to international relations -- David Campbell provides a fundamental reappraisal of American foreign policy, with a new epilogue to address current world affairs and the burgeoning focus on culture and identity in the study (...) of international relations. Extending recent debates in international relations, Campbell shows how perceptions of danger and difference work to establish the identity of the United States. He demonstrates how foreign policy, far from being an expression of a given society, constitutes state identity through the interpretation of danger posed by others. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved. (shrink)

At the beginning of the 21st century the conditio humana cannot be understood nationally or locally but only globally. This constitutes a revolution in the social sciences. The `sociological imagination' so far has basically been a nation state imagination. The main problem is how to redefine the sociological frame of reference in the horizon of a cosmopolitan imagination. For the purpose of empirical research I distinguish between three concepts: interconnectedness , liquid modernity and cosmopolitization from within. The latter is (...) a kind of class analysis after class analysis, which takes on board globalization internalized. For the purposes of social analysis, therefore, it is necessary to distinguish systematically between the national manifestation on the one hand and cosmopolitan reality of `global flows', currents of information, symbols, money, risks, people, social inequalities, on the other. This internal involuntary and often unseen cosmopolitanization from below of the national sphere of experience is occurring, however, with the power of economic globalization. So what does inner `cosmopolitanization' mean? The key concepts and questions of a way of life, such as nourishment, production, identity, fear, memory, pleasure, fate, power and politics, can no longer be located and understood nationally, but only globally whether in the shape of globally shared collective futures, capital flows, impending ecological or economic catastrophes, global foodstuff chains, transnational power games, or the `Esperanto' of pop music. In this article I look at transformation in the understanding of space-time, of identity, of the production paradigms, as well as at the resulting consequences for key sociological concepts like class and power and, within this frame, point to certain dilemmas of cosmopolitanism. (shrink)

I reinterpret the experiences and perceptions of child migrants through the lens of racialization and White Supremacy by advancing work by Cheryl Harris (1993) and Lisa Guenther (2019) on the critical phenomenology of “Whiteness as Property” (WaP) and the protection of “White Space.” WaP is “the collective investment in state violence” to protect the economic, territorial, and legal privileges of Whiteness, while White Space describes its two dimensions: “enclosure and territorial expansion” (Guenther 2019, 202). I build on this foundation by (...) examining the way WaP regulates sociogenic3 and emotive states in order to protect its accrued resources, resulting in an “economy” of racial identity where ownership produces and is produced by particular societal structures and relationships. I use these concepts to understand the framework that willfully misinterprets racialized children. I establish “the Child” as a sociogenic concept and symbol of national futurity and universalism, and therefore of the futurity and universalism of Whiteness; reiterating and interrogating the inconsistency that many immigration and child activists point to, that there is no such thing as an “illegal” or racialized child. Thus, the ICM either loses the privileges and protections afforded to children or must don the White Mask through a performance of victimhood. Through this framework, I undertake an examination of the ICMs as portrayed in the legal process using tools from legal sensorial studies and critical phenomenology, demonstrating the sociogenic shifts that occur for the ICM and how these shifts work to protect WaP. (shrink)