Several changes in the rice and other crop production landscape in the Philippines have occurred since an account of the status of agricultural mechanization was reported forty-five years ago in the first issue (Spring 1971) of Agricultural Mechanization in Southeast Asia, now AMA (Lantin, 1971). Part I of the two-part article on agricultural mechanization in the Philippines provides the brief background of its development. Part II will discuss the current status of agricultural mechanization and the formulation of strategies after having set out a firm policy as provided by the Agriculture and Fisheries Mechanization (AFMech) Law of 2013. Historically, the following chronology of development events related to agriculture and agricultural mechanization that have been unfolding through the years and marked by milestones, have had significant impact on shaping the present status of agricultural mechanization in the Philippines: Before 1521 (Pre-Spanish era) • Blacksmithing and metalworking technologies, probably acquired from Chinese traders, are used for making weapons, household metal wares, hand tools and paraphernalia for fishing and rudimentary agriculture; • Inhabitants thrive on hunting, fishing and little agriculture; natural resources are abundant and more than enough for a small population of tribes sparsely distributed throughout the archipelago; • Ifugao rice terraces in the mountains of Luzon and cultivation techniques have already been well-developed and sustained through the culture of the Indigenous People since about 2,000 years ago. 1521-1898 (Spanish colonial regime) • Spaniards introduce single animal-drawn wooden plow with cast-iron plowshare and moldboard, carabao (water buffalo)-drawn carts for agricultural produce transport and horse-drawn calesas (carriage) for personnel transport; • Spaniards introduce processing technologies such as for making chocolate tablets from cacao, concrete and wood construction technologies for structures such as churches and public buildings and blacksmithing such as for horses a cart and carriage wheels, hand tools and plow accessories. 1902-1940 (American colonial regime) • US military and investors first used three-wheel tractors in abaca (banana fiber crop) plantations in Mindanao to produce cordage for maritime usage and for export; • US mechanization technologies transferred to Philippines such as the tractor-powered stationary rice thresher - the "McCormick" thresher or "trilladora". 1941-1945 (Japanese occupation, World War II • Japan introduces household gadgets such as lamps, cooking appliances • No technology transfer on agricultural mechanization as Japan also uses draft animals in farm operations. 1950-1970 • President Elpidio. Quirino (1948-1953) pursues industrialization making Philippine economy second only to Japan in Asia by early 1960s; unfortunately, this pursuit was not sustained by the succeeding administrations; • Large grain silos for storage of paddy and corn are installed in Northern and Central Luzon but turned out to be "white elephants" and later dismantled; • Human and animal farm power sources are predominant; agricultural mechanization and labor productivity levels are low; • Small landholdings of up to 3 ha constitute 62.3 % of total farms in 1960; • Four-wheel tractor sales are driven by credit programs and high sugar prices; • IRRI is established in 1960 at the University of the Philippines College of Agriculture campus, now UP Los Baños (UPLB); the green revolution starts; IRRI develops IR8 or "miracle rice" in 1966; • Hand tractors from Japan are introduced in early 1960s; Land-master tractor from UK fits as workhorse for multiple cropping project by IRRI; • President Ferdinand Marcos (1965- 1986) builds infrastructures such as roads, ports, dams for irrigation and power generation as foundation for industrialization originally envisioned by President Quirino to support agriculture. 1971-1980 • Agricultural Mechanization in Southeast Asia (now AMA) launches its maiden issue -Spring 1971; • IRRI Agricultural Engineering Department undertakes the Small Farm Machinery Development Program under USAID grant; the axial-flow thresher makes obsolete the traditional pedal drum and manual threshing methods; • President Marcos declares martial law; Masagana-99 rice program enables export of rice; GO 47 strategy for corporate rice produc- tion fails; the barangay as basic political unit is organized; • Institution-building and strengthening start: AMTEC in 1977; PhilRice in 1985; Philippines hosts the Regional Network for Agricultural Machinery (RNAM) at UPLB with the Agricultural Mechanization Development Program (AMDP) as country counterpart, which advocates agricultural mechanization policy; • First fuel crisis occurs in 1973 and a second one in 1979. 1981-1990 • IRRI-AED releases more designs of small farm machines and devices; • UPLB-based RNAM actively conducts regional activities on agricultural machinery and mechanization; • SV Agro-industries in Iloilo develops floating power tiller; IRRI-AED modifies it into hydrotiller; both designs are adopted by farmers; • Delta Motor Corporation with technology backstopping of Toyota Motor Corporation of Japan landmark manufactures 1,000 units of 10-hp diesel engine, the first in Southeast Asia; • People's Power Revolution in 1986 causes political turmoil and economic downturn; cuts short the Marcos strategy of infrastructure development to support industrialization which in turn was aimed at supporting agriculture. 1991-2000 • IRRI-AED releases design of the rice stripper-gatherer SG800 based on stripper rotor technology developed by the UK Silsoe Research Institute; • IRRI phases out design and development of rice production machinery and focuses instead on postharvest technologies starting in late 1990s; • PhilRice-Rice Engineering and Mechanization Division (REMD) and the Bureau of Postharvest Research and Development (BPRE) sustain research, development and extension (RDE) activities of rice production and postharvest machinery; • Functions of the Department of Agriculture and other government agencies are devolved to local government units (LGUs) 2001-2016 • The Agriculture and Fisheries Mechanization (AFMech) Law is passed in 2013; this landmark legislation now firms up the policy of modernizing Philippine agriculture through agricultural mechanization; • The Philippines starts deliberate shifting from labor-intensive and low labor-productive farm operation methods to mechanized farming; • PHilMech implements the Department of Agriculture's Rice Mechanization and Postharvest Program (RMPP) for 2011-2016; promotes production and postharvest machinery among Farmers' Associations on favourable procurement terms; • The Philippines imports some 200,000 single-cylinder gasoline and diesel engines in 2013 alone (AMMDA, 2014) mostly from US, China, Thailand, Indonesia and Vietnam; • A new National Agro-fishery Mechanization Program (NAF-MP) is being formulated by the Bureau of Agricultural and Fisheries Mechanization Engineering (BAFE); • Level of mechanization is still low with work animals still the predominant power source for small landholdings, which have presently increased in number, further reduced in size and been widely scattered because of partitioning among heirs, inter-regional marriages, land reform and sale/conversion for non-agricultural uses. • Small landholdings of up to 3 ha constitute 88.4% of total farms in 2012 • Power tillers are gradually replacing the carabao through increasing availability of custom hire services, but not as rapidly as desired because of high prices of imported engines • Imported four-wheel tractors, rice transplanters and combines start getting popular • Foreign exchange remittances by overseas Filipino workers and professionals slowing down due to Middle East crisis, low fossil fuel prices and economic growth rate slowdown - may affect importation of agricultural power and machinery • Killer typhoon Haiyan or Yolanda devastates Leyte, Samar and other Northern Visayan provinces killing some 10,000 people (unofficial estimate) in 2013 Beyond 2016 The following are some issues to consider in the formulation of agricultural mechanization policies and strategies: • Deliberate pursuit of national industrialization to support agriculture; • National Agro-fisheries Mechanization Program (NAFMP) to continue distributing power and machinery which are "Made not in the Philippines?" • Local manufacture of engines; development of renewable and environment friendly farming technologies; • RDE on technologies for land levelling and precision agriculture, automation and robotics but not to neglect the classic designs for transition from traditional to high-tech agricultural mechanization; • Overhaul of polices and laws for farmland inheritance, land forming and terracing for soil and water conservation as well as for agricultural mechanization; • Building of infrastructures for irrigation and drainage, transport (roads, railways, cableways and ports) for efficient agricultural mechanization; and • Other issues that may crop up.
An educational model is especially something to be compared, to achieve a paradigm and a practical guide to guide the behavior of those involved in educational and administrative goals of the institution. The educational model forms a state of permanent reference which nouns and adjectives processes of the University, originating at the ends of education given in the Constitution, are described in the Education Act and are raised, framed to be Fulfilled in the organic law of the University statutes, regulations, and generally, the systems that regulate and indict. The educational model, despite its complexity and length, should be considered first as an indicative standard of the institution, but also as the sum of the accepted customs, unwritten codes of conduct and a way of being politically quirky conferred a distinctive college seal. The Dimensions of Model Following the definitions and conditions above, the educational model is made and harmonizes with what has been called "Dimensions", as if his background and his form had an almost geometric connotation, indicating the direction of the actions and covers the hallmarks of a whole, as an integrated whole. To achieve different approaches, containing the reasons for philosophical, educational, social, regulatory, political and operational with the educational work of the University is built adopting. The conformation of the model in dimensions is performed by the need to consolidate into one conceptual base of knowledge articulated objects that make up the essence and University activities. Accordingly, each dimension is used to group correlated and ideas that support the results. A dimension is a conceptual map that locates and lists the primary objects, ideas, ways to access them; functions and processes; subjects to apply as social entities (students and teachers) and linked to the means to apprehend knowledge; references to its scope and characteristics obey a default order and delimited; and the rules and decisions to achieve it, coupled with the resources and procedures for practice and operations. Philosophical Dimension: Institutional and educational philosophy as a starting point of the educational model, education as a product of human thought Pedagogical Dimension: It is stated, as a reference, the adoption of pedagogical and psychological potentialities associated with the current purposes of the university. Sociological Dimension: express the basics to sustain, in the sociological field, a comprehensive look at the corporate level, starting from the premise that the university, being the product of society, is a public good, a social heritage; and both his corporeal expression or material as intangible or spiritual, is the product of men and serves them. The Legal Dimension: presents the legal structure of the University. Here the bodies of rules derived from two guiding principles of the institution are: a culture of respect for the law: justice and truth, of which the Legal Dimension considers another fundamental principle is clear. The Political Dimension: represents the summary of the policy wisdom of the institution, its ability to develop networks of concepts to establish lines of congruence between the guiding principles, settled in the Philosophical Dimension; the plot of educational theory, methods, and academic and administrative processes of the academic work. The last operational dimension of the Dimensions Educational Model poses institutional conditions to be created to synthesize and guide the efforts of the University, around the transition from reality to a stage of full development, while searching for the desired future scenarios will be guided by the Mission and Vision towards the light of the educational model. ; Un modelo educativo es sobre todo, algo con que compararse, un paradigma por alcanzar y una guía práctica para orientar el comportamiento de quienes participan en los hechos educativos y administrativos de la institución. El Modelo Educativo conforma un estado de referencia permanente sobre el cual se articulan los procesos sustantivos y adjetivos de la Universidad, que parten de los fines de la educación propuestos en la Constitución, se describen en la Ley General de Educación y son planteados, para ser cumplidos, en la ley orgánica de la Universidad, sus estatutos, reglamentos, y en general, los ordenamientos que la encausan y regulan. El Modelo Educativo, pese a su complejidad y extensión, debe ser considerado primero como una norma indicativa de la institución, pero también como la suma de sus costumbres aceptadas, códigos de conducta no escritos y un modo de ser peculiar en lo político que le confiere un sello distintivo a la universidad. Las Dimensiones del ModeloSiguiendo las definiciones y condiciones anteriores, el Modelo Educativo se compone y armoniza mediante lo que se ha denominado "Dimensiones", como si su fondo y su forma tuvieran una connotación casi geométrica, que indica la dirección de las acciones y abarca las características distintivas del conjunto, como un todo integrado. Para lograrlo se adoptan diversos enfoques, que contienen las razones de orden filosófico, pedagógico, social, normativo, político y operativo con que se construye el quehacer educativo de la Universidad. La conformación del Modelo en Dimensiones se realiza por la necesidad de agrupar en una sola base conceptual articulada los objetos del conocimiento que conforman la esencia y quehacer de la Universidad. En consecuencia, cada Dimensión sirve para agrupar y correlacionar las ideas que la sustentan con los resultados. Una Dimensión es un mapa conceptual que ubica y relaciona los objetos primordiales, las ideas, con las vías para acceder a ellos; las funciones y procesos; los sujetos a quienes se aplican como entes sociales (educandos y educadores) y el conocimiento ligado a los medios para aprehenderlo; las referencias para que sus alcances y características obedezcan a un orden predeterminado y delimitado; y las normas y decisiones para lograrlo, aunadas a los recursos y procedimientos para la práctica y las operaciones. Dimensión Filosófica: La filosofía institucional y educativa como punto de partida del Modelo Educativo, La educación como producto del pensamiento humanoDimensión Pedagógica:Se enuncia, como referencia, la adopción de corrientes pedagógicas y psicológicas asociadas a las potencialidades de los fines universitarios.Dimensión Sociológica: expresa los conceptos básicos para sustentar, en el campo de lo sociológico, una visión integral de alcance institucional, partiendo de la premisa de que la universidad, al ser producto de la sociedad, es un bien público, un patrimonio social; y tanto su expresión corpórea o material como intangible o espiritual, es producto de los hombres y está al servicio de ellos.La Dimensión Jurídica:presenta la estructura jurídica de la Universidad. En ella se muestran los cuerpos de normas que derivan de dos principios rectores de la institución: la justicia y la verdad, de los cuales se desprende la Dimensión Jurídica que considera otro principio fundamental: la cultura de respeto a la ley.La Dimensión Política:representa el resumen de la sabiduría directiva de la institución, de su capacidad para desarrollar redes de conceptos que establezcan líneas de congruencia entre los principios rectores, asentados en la Dimensión Filosófica; la trama de las tesis educativas, los métodos y procesos académicos y administrativos del quehacer académico.Dimensión operativaLa ultima de las Dimensiones del Modelo Educativo plantea las condiciones institucionales que deben crearse para sintetizar y orientar el esfuerzo de la Universidad, en torno a la transición de la realidad, hacia un estadio de pleno desarrollo, en tanto que la búsqueda de los escenarios del futuro deseado será guiada por la Misión y hacia la Visión, a la luz del Modelo Educativo.
Статья посвящена анализу состояния и роли основных субъектов предстоящей российской модернизации, их взаимоотношениям между собой, а также структур и процессов, блокирующих переход нашей страны на путь цивилизованного развития. Проведенный критический разбор наличных социальных и политических практик, позволил автору выдвинуть ряд обоснованных, хотя и дискуссионных предложений, обеспечивающих названный переходIn this paper the author analyzes the state and the role of the major agents of Russia's eventual modernization, their inter-relationships as well as structures and processes, which prevent Russia from following the path of civilized development. Many agree that Russia's current underdevelopment with respect to developed countries creates a demand for its accelerated modernization, i.e. transition to a competitive, knowledge-driven and highly technological economy. Such strategic maneuver has become extremely necessary due to an obvious failure of the previous modernization project, i.e. 'westernization' that led to a criminalized privatization, and thus an emergence of an enormously unequal caste-like society. In spite of rather favourable initial conditions (an abundance of natural resources, high intellectual potential and the relatively low cost of labour) everything collapsed. According to many leading experts the scales of the country's economic downturn have been greater than those of the USA during its Great Depression. Its current economic growth already causes a lot of problems and lacks stability, since it is intensified purely through an inflow of petrodollars and foreign loans. This calls for a substantial change in the key spheres of public life, where the role of efficient state cannot be underestimated. The efficient state relies primarily on its people's trust, whose interests, rights and freedoms it carries out and secures. Does this apply to Russia's current authorities? The analysis of the data from a number of all-national surveys shows that Russian people more or less explicitly regard the Russian state as a protector and a mouthpiece of the rich, the administrating and business class, whose interests are not only interrelated but usually tightly soldered together through a corruption contract. The Russian state is regarded as a 'socially oriented state' only in 16% of cases, while only 21% of respondents see it as a 'democratic' state. However, it should be outlined that the people clearly distinguish between the supreme power: the president, the prime minister and their appointed officials, whom they trust, and the rest of power structures, whom they usually distrust. Neither the legislative bodies, nor the executive power are legitimate in Russia's public opinion. Moreover, precisely such identification of the latter with governmental bodies leads to a negative perception of power and its rejection as a whole. Thus there has once again formed an opposition between 'us' (common people) and 'them' the ruling class of the state bureaucracy and business, which has already been the cause of social cataclysms in the past. What lies at the core of this cleavage, which has to be overcome in order to make modernization possible? This article addresses the issue of the no. 1 enemy in any democratic state and any positive change in society namely corruption. The existence of a strong lobby of higher bureaucrats and large businessmen has led to the adoption of an emasculated version of the anti-corruption law. Precisely, it has been revised to exclude the internationally accepted clause, according to which illegal property is subject to confiscation. The analysis shows that this law, be it a purpose or a misunderstanding, has an absolutely opposite effect and only imitates the struggle against corruption. Unfortunately, the adopted law and the following practice create an impression that authorities (except for supreme power) clearly aim at reducing the scale of the public discussion and making the people conform to it as an inevitable evil, which can be overcome by through occasional disciplinary measures. As a result the problem remains completely unresolved. A thorough analysis of the nature and factors of corruption in Russia and other countries, who, at least, seriously try to solve this problem (China), or have recently fought it (Singapore, Turkmen, Japan) or have solved it long ago (Switzerland, Scandinavian countries, Germany, etc.), show that Russia completely lacks such strategy. Corruption in todays Russia is a multifold phenomenon of total lawlessness: the unbundling and stripping of budgets, bribery, criminal protection and crime suppression, money laundering, the lobbying of business interests via all branches of power, etc. Moreover, after the tragedies of Budenovsk, Dubrovka and Beslan corruption has apparently become one of the major causes for growing terrorism and extremism. Why do then authorities struggle so relentlessly against the consequences i.e. terrorism, and limit themselves to doubtfully efficient measures when fighting against its primary cause? The author is trying to answer this question. A struggle for Russia's new path development will not only be open to the public, the public itself will have to become one of its major actors. This is the motive, which was announced in the President's Address to the Federal Assembly. Unfortunately, since 1993 the vector of Russia's policy has been generally oriented towards a completely different future: the people were about to lose the status of a political actor and become a passive force of the state and societal change. This is not a casual turn, although it is only a declaration of Dmitry Medvedev. It seems to be the result of the previous modernization attempt, which has brought up a cynical, avaricious and consumption-oriented personality. It looks as though the state has finally realized that Russia come to a dead-end with market 'mutants' swarming in its structures, criminal and semi-criminal business. This dead-end can only be overcome through a multifold modernization and meritocratic mobilization of masses. The main obstacle, which prevents them from entering the process of modernization is lawlessness and insecurity that lead to a total irresponsibility. That is why successful modernization would only become possible when people regain trust in themselves as an active force of this process. The first step towards such change is a shift from imitative democracy to an authentic sovereignty of people, the supremacy of their power, which is a direct warranty of the Russian Constitution: i.e. the carrying out of referendums, which address the most vital issues of the country's being, including efficient measures against corruption, which the Russian Parliament has yet failed to develop. The people can provide a substantial support for power in working out clear and long-term goal as well as appropriate means for the fulfillment. The making of a free society for free people is a worthy goal after all. Although it requires a solid social, legal, moral and ethic basis, which would help moderate the people's social an economic instincts, its manners and habits, which were fostered by an inefficient and often anti-social use of private property over the means of production. In other words, a development of civil control over the state and business authorities is desperately needed. The results presented in this paper help distinguishing the core problem which has to be resolved by means of both, society and the state, to enhance the process of modernization: the creating of a new public solidarity between the state and its people, the people and business, since the previous models have already proved their inefficiency. First of all, this concerns the change in the character of power, which has to demonstrate its loyalty to the people rather than currency traders, corrupted officials and the semi-criminal business. Today, as never before, Russia requires a strong state, which would be able to overcome the total corruption, oligarchic and monopolistic structures, which harm its economy and postpone modernization. The critical review of existing social and political practices allows for a number of reasonable, as well as quite disputable suggestions, which could prove useful in stipulating the process of modernization in Russia.
Целью статьи является не только и не столько описание уровня жизни населения, и даже не дифференциация его по уровню жизни как таковая, а анализ неравенства по благосостоянию как важного аспекта существующей в обществе социальной стратификации. Изучая проблемы социально-экономического неравенства в современной России, необходимо, по-видимому, учитывать как общемировые тенденции, так и специфические особенности страны, связанные с ее принадлежностью к трансформирующимся обществам, переживающим переход от советской социетальной системы к новому состоянию, пока еще не во всем определившемуся по своей направленности. Данные представительных опросов экономически активного населения России позволили не ограничиться среднеарифметическими показателями, что особенно важно в условиях резкой социальной дифференциации в показателях уровня жизни. Наши опросы охватили представителей экономически активной части населения. Пенсионеры, инвалиды, студенты, как одиночки, так и образующие самостоятельные семьи, в состав респондентов не входят. Это само по себе означает, что полученные нами характеристики уровня жизни общества скорее несколько завышены, чем занижены. ; This paper aims not only and not just at describing the living situation of the population and its differentiation, but also at analyzing the general inequalities as an important aspect of the existing stratification. In studying problems of socioeconomic inequalities in contemporary Russia it is necessary to consider worldwide tendencies as well as country-specific trends related to its transition from Soviet societal system to a new and yet undefined condition. The data from representative surveys of economically active Russian population allowed us not to confine ourselves exclusively to average figures, which is especially important when considering the dramatic differentiation of living standards. Our samples do not include students and the retired (alone, as well as within families). This in itself means, that the figures we have gained are more likely to be underestimated, than overestimated. In post-Soviet Russia the actions of politicians, who actually defined the social policy in 1990s the beginning of 2000s, to a greater degree were influenced by a neo-conserv-ative wave, which came generally from the USA and Great Britain. One should bear in mind that the concept of reforms came originally from the need for raising the efficiency of the economy system. Social sphere was regarded as one of the elements of the economic policy. The efficiency criterion was economic in nature, while social sphere was one of the general policy constraints. Despite numerous statements about "socially oriented economy", "social state", the development of the social sphere in Russia was not considered as an evident objective of the reforms. Enough to say, there were barely any attempts to solve the poverty question at the beginning of reforms, as well as many years later. It was absolutely ignored, that unlike many transforming national economies most households in Russia lacked the required material and financial resources to ease their adaptation to a new socioeconomic situation. Moreover, "the shock therapy" involved the appropriation of all the savings from population and enterprises in the first months of 1992 through the liberalization of prices without corresponding deposit compensation. In our perceptions over poverty and low living standards of the lower strata we rely on the information about poverty lines, which are drawn from the necessity to satisfy the minimum subsistence needs (according to world-wide accepted criteria). In Russia this means the inability of a family to satisfy its needs in nutrition, clothing, housing with its current income. The forming (and, most likely, fully formed) Russian society features an unprecedented gap between the rich and the poor, unseen anywhere among the developed countries. In 1990s the property differentiation of the population has sharply increased and brought the mass strata of the so called "new poor" working poor. The actual average wage (in the prices of 1991) during 1991-1998 has reduced from 548 to 193 roubles, i.e. almost threefold. Since 1999 the wages started to grow. Although still in 2004, after a 5-year economic growth, the real wage was just 89% of its miserable 1990 level. Only by the end of 2005 the real wage has reached the pre-reform level of 1990 (100.3%). In 2006 the wage has grown 166Summaries at 13.4% and another 16.2% in 2007. This has brought its value to a far greater than the one of the pre-reform period, although one should, of course, consider the lack of the information about the growing income differentiation. Taken for 100% in 1991 the average wage has become 67% in education in 2007 (56% in 2000); 257% in finance; 45% in agriculture; 209% in primary sector (raw materials industry); and 97% in manufacturing industries. In 2006 the greater decile coefficient was observed in trade (33-fold) and financial activities (32-fold). For reference, in industries with a lower level of inequalities in 2006 this figure was: 11.5 in energy, gas and water supplies, 14.5 in transport and 15 in public health and 16 in education. According to independent researches the decile coefficient for the whole population was estimated at 25, while far greater in Moscow 40-50. Even according to the underestimated data of the Russian Statistical Services this figure in 2007 was 16.8 compared with the earlier 13-14. The Audit Chamber has conducted its own evaluation and received the following results: 30 for Russia as a whole and 41 in Moscow. According to the data of our representative survey (December 2006) there exists a high correlation between household income and other types of resources, which households/families possess. All of the corresponding indicators we have used increase with the higher income rates. The correlation of income with other values is more obvious for such group-forming criteria as the index for authority level and the ownership status (ownership of enterprises and/or financial securities). One should also pay attention to a lower social capital of the representatives of the lower income strata. This is a very important evidence, which indicates that the lower strata have mostly worked out this resource, which aided their survival in the early 1990s. After gaining mass support with the loud promises to fight privileges and bring social justice, individual freedom and equal opportunities the newly formed neo-nomenklatura was first forced to conceal the original vector of its policy under the mask of "the social state" that is how it was claimed in the Constitution of Russian Federation. Although for the major part of the ruling class these reforms posed a great opportunity to give up social liabilities in circumstances, where their own appetites for higher living standards have grown sharply, along with the unstable incomes form oil, gas and other exports due to the volatility of the world market. At the same time the infringement of rights for work and the corresponding pay affects almost a quarter of the economically active population. The proportion of the poor has barely reduced. A significant part of the younger people is not just uneducated, but sometimes illiterate. The guarantee for free public medical service has turned into situation, when one would wait for ages for a required surgical operation. The boom in housing construction has no effects on the situation of the lower strata. All this happens against the ostentatious "money waste" not only by the new business class, but also higher government officials, especially the top-managers of government-owned corporations. The social policy is required as long as the people do not interfere with the plans and interests of the new political elite, i.e. the provision of social stability and the legality of their capitals within the country and especially abroad. Summaries167 The post-Soviet ruling strata are unable and have no desire to represent the all-national interests. This reflects, on the one hand, their succession from the Soviet nomenklatura, and, on the other, the lack of traditions for massive political opposition and the forming of counter-elites as, for example, in Poland or Hungary.
Sekularizam američkog društva i duboka, bogato razuđena i strukturirana, ali iskrena religioznost Amerikanaca, uporedne su pojave samo naizgled protivrečne. Štaviše, naučno znanje nije uspelo da prevlada i obesmisli religiozna ili praznoverna uverenja, kao bezvredna ili neproverena nepotvrđena. Ukoliko su SAD zaista imale pionirsku ulogu u izgradnji otvorenog, demokratskog i sekularnog društva, postavljenog na osnovama racionalizma, prosvetiteljstva i prvenstva nauke i neposrednog, empirijskog iskustva, američko društvo je, u takvom kontekstu, podsticalo individualnu religioznost i sektarijanizam koji je, u američkom slučaju, ukazivao na značajno razmicanje granica sloboda savesti. U američkom slučaju, drugim rečima, naučna sumnja u religiozno verovanje nije bila činilac njegovog osporavanja. Građanska religioznost, koja se emancipovala i razvila upravo u američkom društvu, dopušta povlačenje u privatnost, usklađivanje određenih naučnih znanja u verske dogmatske sisteme (pre svega savremene društvene nauke), i prilagođavanje oblicima, iskušenjima i nedaćama urbanog života naročito u angažovanju organizovanih verskih grupa i njihovim suočavanjem sa otuđenjem i kriminalom. Građanska religioznost je takođe vremenom postajala trpeljiva i otvorena u domenu društvenog ponašanja ili seksualnih opredeljenja. Verska osećanja spadaju u najdublja i najteže ih je potisnuti. Ako verovanje u vrhovni razlog nije uništeno u sekularnim društvima, u ateističkim totalitarnim režimima je jedno takođe suštinski religiozno verovanje u istorijsku nuždu i partijsko rukovodstvo nasilno nametnuto celini društva. Politička moć neograničena demokratskim institucijama, gruba i otuđena, obuhvata i demonsko osećanje uzvišene i magične svetosti. Gospodarenje, apsolutna vlast, spada u najgore poroke. Politička moć pretvara individualne želje u božanski zakon sublimisanog zla. Totalitarni režimi smišljeno, planski ili spontano, uništavajući ljudske živote, otkrivaju suštinsko nepoštovanja života i smrti, ne pominjući osnovna ljudska prava. Sadističko zakonodavstvo, izvršna brutalnost i pseudopravna obest, tu uvek postoji i jedna nesporna, gotovo religiozna svrha. Teokratska uverenja apsolutnu ispravnost, ponekad ispunjena iskrenim religioznim osećanjima smeštena u sistem konkretnih političkih i ekonomskih interesa, pokreću etničke obračune i međunarodne sukobe. Etnički šovinizmi proistekli su iz utilitarnog i uobraženog tumačenja prošlosti i uloge u opštoj istoriji, i teoloških uverenja u sopstvenu transcedentnu kolektivnu ispravnost. Upravo su na evropskom jugoistoku, na tradicionalnim granicama dominantnih veroispovesti nastajali savremeni identiteti obeleženi uverenjem u čistotu etničkog porekla i naročitih kolektivnih osobina. Pri tom se verski identiteti, takođe apsolutno vrednovani, nisu morali zasnivati na istinskoj religioznoj predanosti. Inače su verske zajednice istorijski povezane s nedemokratskim i antiliberalnim snagama. Mada je u većini savremenih civilizovanih društava potreba za odvajanjem crkve i države ostvarena gotovo u potpunosti, i u njima se neretko nailazi na formalne, nekad i suštinske primere odstupanja od sekularizma (u Severnoj Irskoj su, uporedno sa siromaštvom, samo u poslednje dve decenije verski sukobi izazvali nasilnu smrt više od dve hiljade osoba) Naročito su u tom domenu primetne razlike između evropskih zemalja i SAD. Dok u Evropi dominiraju crkve, u SAD su većinske verske zajednice protestantske denominacije; crkve su, po strukturi, hijerarhijske, zasnovane na tradicionalnom autoritetu, dok su denominacije uglavnom kongregacionalne više demokratične. U Evropi se versko opredeljenje preuzima od predaka i prenosi u porodicama, dok u SAD to ne mora da bude slučaj, budući da se versko opredeljenje iskazuje tek u dobu kad se donose sve važne odluke. U Evropi su crkve istorijski vezane za državu, da bi američki protestantski sektarijanizam osnažio društveni, ekonomski i politički individualizam. Američke denominacije većinom neguju optimističko viđenje ljudske prirode dok tradicionalističke zajednice ljudsku prirodu i ustanove smatraju slabim iskvarenim i nemoralnim. Evropski i američki primeri nude i različite obrasce pojedinačnih i kolektivnih identiteta. Evropska kultura potekla je iz regionalnih, etničkih i verskih zajednica, mada su se one, u tadašnjim oblicima, prebacivale i na američku stranu, naročito u ranom kolonijalnom razdoblju. Već je Maks Veber primetio da su SAD građanska sredina, jedina koja nije ponela postfeudalna opterećenja. SAD nisu poznavale ni prevlast crkvenog establišmenta i aristokratije. I liberalne težnje su se, u SAD oslanjale na specifičnu religioznu tradiciju u tom smislu da je verski individualizam bio prirođen racionalnom i kompetitivnom ponašanju. U nemogućnosti da bilo koja od verskih zajednica osvoji neki oblik apsolutne prevlasti, većina američkih denominacija okupljala su se oko kongregacionalističih, umesto hijerarhijskih zajednica, podupirući egalitarne i antielitističke vrednosti. Dok su u najvećem delu Evrope liberalne politike bile u vezi s neposrednim opiranjem kleru i hrišćanstvu, da bi sekularizacija države stekla gotovo antihrišćanske implikacije, u SAD se odigrala postepena i u velikoj meri pomirljiva diferencijacija verskog i sekularnog domena. ; Theocratic convictions in absolute rightness, occasionally even serene religious sentiments, located in front of concrete political and economic interests, still animate ethnic disputes and international conflicts. Contemporary southeastern European mess of independent states and those under international custody has emerged from a historical sequence of skirmishes within an extensive chauvinistic framework. On traditional boundaries of three dominant denominations (Catholicism, Eastern Orthodoxy and Islam), modern collective identities have been designated by convictions in particularity and purity of ethnic provenience, sustained by sharp religious assignment, not always meaning a deep and sincere devotion. Especially the entities scarcely differentiated by language and genealogical descent have equalized their ethnic and religious appropriation. Even under custody of modern powers, rudimentary and troublous ethnic communities remained too remote from currents of modernity. In such terms, the second possibly definite disintegration of Yugoslavia has sometimes been considered as a failure of initial project, conceived by the same victorious allies in two world wars together with the USA, of a multicultural, presumably democratic experiment. Experiment that hasn't succeeded, during the collapse of the eastern communist confederation, to carry out a democratic and liberal transition, the union perished in its internal, purposeless disputes, in another butchery of civil, ethnic and religious war. Although religious communities are historically associated with non-democratic and antiliberal forces, in most of the contemporary civilized societies the need for a separation of the church and the state has been accomplished almost entirely. (In Northern Ireland, along with the poverty, only in the last two decades religious troubles caused a violent death of more than two thousand persons) While in Europe, and elsewhere, dominate the churches, in the USA the religious life is mostly contained by the sects. The churches, in structure, are hierarchical, founded on traditional authority. Sects are predominantly congregational. In Europe, religious orientation is mostly ancestry, inherited, and derived from the family. In the USA that must not be a case, since individuals are asked to make a religious commitment only upon reaching the age of decision. In Europe, churches are historically linked to the state. American Protestant sectarianism has strengthened social, economic and political individualism. Generally, American sects are running an optimistic view on human nature, while traditionalist societies both human nature and human institutions consider weak, corrupt and immoral. American religion "demonstrates many of the characteristics that theorists have identified with modern culture." In Europe, the efforts to introduce a church into the deepest structures of contemporary life usually fail, and sometimes appear grotesque. Europe and the USA also differ in the patterns of individual and collective identities. European culture has risen mostly from ethnic and regional communities (these regional structures have been partly translated in USA, especially in the early colonial period). Max Weber already emphasized that the USA was the only purely bourgeois country the only which was not post-feudal, that skipped the predominance of church establishment and aristocracy. He stated that the Protestantism facilitated the rise of capitalism, while the liberal orientation derived from its specific religious tradition in the sense that the sectarian beliefs appeared as the most conducive to the kind of rational, competitive individualistic behavior. In impossibility, each of them, to assign its predominance, the most of the American sects evolved as congregational, not hierarchical communities, fostering egalitarian, populist, anti-elitist values. While in much of Europe liberal politics came to be associated with direct opposition to the clergy and the Christianity, and the secularization of the state even got definite anti-Christian implications, in America took place a gradual and largely peaceful differentiation of religious and secular domains.
The Biodiversity Coalition Newsletter No. 13 May 1996 An International NGO Network for Biodiversity Conservation (C/- P. 0., Cygnet 7112, Tasmania, Australia, ph/fax: +61-02- 9 5174 5 ) Code Number: NL96008 Size of Files: Text: 64K Graphics: Line Drawings (gif) - 19K GEF ABANDONS BIODIVERSITY In petulant refusal to be guided by the CBD's COP, let alone operate under its authority and control, the GEF Council has effectively stopped funding biodiversity projects. At its latest meeting in Washington (2-4 April 1996), GEF Council approved less than $5 million for expenditure on only two biodiversity related projects - one involves Kazakhstan which has not ratified and the other involves the ten southern African countries including Namibia and Angola which have not ratified - out of total approved expenditure of more than $260 million. --- FAO STILL UP TO ITS OLD TRICKS AT LEIPZIG FAO(UN)'s supposedly 'technical' international conference at Leipzig next month looks like being a political 'talk-fest'. This regrettable prospect is a direct and inevitable consequence of the FAO(UN)'s self-serving political aggression. On the one hand, their CPGR networks stubbornly refuse to recognise the new international legal regime with respect to ownership and control of genetic resources established by entry into force of the Biodiversity Convention. --- HELP! The Biodiversity Coalition is in desperate need of funds. Local sources of financial and in-kind support are not likely to be forthcoming next financial year (from June 1996) for a variety of reasons. While we appreciate that most recipients of the Newsletter are in no position to contribute financially to its continued publication - which is one of the objectives of the Newsletter, after all - this is a plea to those organisations and individuals who may have some capacity to pay to consider making a substantial contribution. --- EX-SITU/IN-SITU CONSERVATION - DEFINITIONS AND RESPONSIBILITIES The Biodiversity Convention defines 'ex-situ conservation' as "the conservation of components of biological diversity outside their natural habitats" while 'in-situ conservation' is defined as "the conservation of ecosystems and natural habitats and the maintenance and recovery of viable populations of species in their natural surroundings and, in the case of domesticated or cultivated species, in the surroundings where they have developed their distinctive properties". --- SUSTAINABILITY - FOR WHAT AND FOR WHOM? A Job for SBSTTA "Sustainability" has become one of those words which everyone chooses to interpret in their own way to reflect their own interests. While the problem is not limited to biodiversity conservation, if the Biodiversity Convention is to be properly implemented, the CBD's COP must come up with its interpretation of sustainability - based on advice from its scientific advisory body, the SBSTTA. --- CRITERIA FOR ASSESSING THE SUSTAINABILITY OF TRADE IN WILD FAUNA AND FLORA (Abridged Draft Prepared by the Wildlife Use Working Group of the Species Survival Network, a network of NGOs working within CITES for the protection and conservation of species in international commercial trade, 5 Jan 1996) --- COMMERCIALISING TRADITIONAL USES - MAKING THE TRANSITION FROM HUNTER-GATHERING TO AGRICULTURAL PRODUCTION A common theme in the history of human civilisation is the domestication of wild species of animals and plants as the key to producing agricultural surpluses capable of supporting urban communities. Such domestication is necessary to allow intensive production to meet high demand - especially in these modern days of global trade and massive markets. --- ITTO DOES BETTER Donors now contribute substantially more money to the ITTO [International Tropical Timber Organisation] than they do to the GEF biodiversity window. The graph, reproduced from the latest issue of 'Tropical Forest Update [6(1 ) March 1996/1 ], the ITTO's own in-house magazine, shows they have donated about US$130M over the last eight years. --- COUNTRIES OF ORIGIN AND COUNTRIES PROVIDING GENETIC RESOURCES - THE POLITICS OF DEFINITIONS The final text of the Biodiversity Convention refers to 'countries of origin' of and 'countries providing' genetic resources. This distinction was lobbied for by seed and gene bank interests (the IARC networks, national agencies of both 'north' and 'south' and corporations) to ensure that the Convention's benefit sharing obligations did not apply to holders or users of genetic material already held in ex-situ collections at the time of entry into force of the Convention [See Article 2. Definitions and Article 15(3) Access to Genetic Resources]. Countries of origin (of specified genetic resources) are those conserving those resources in-situ and/or providing resources directly from in-situ sources i.e., not from ex-situ collections. --- NICARAGUAN ARMY TO DEFEND NATURE: IUCN [Bulleting 4/95] reports that "Environmental conservation will now be one of the Nicaraguan army's priority objectives." "The Nicaraguan army is a green army, not because of the colour of its uniforms, but thanks to its commitment to natural resource conservation in our country", said General Joaquin Lacayo, Commander-in-Chief of the Nicaraguan armed forces. --- PAYING THE RENT With donor governments having left the field for a while in stopping GEF funding for CBD implementation, now is the time to push for establishing a COP-controlled fund based on contributions from corporate users of genetic resources - principally seed and gene companies, pharmaceutical companies and biotech companies. Exploratory discussions need to be pursued vigorously by the Secretariat to the mandate given to it by COP 2 to "further explore possibilities to identify additional financial resources" with a view to convening a meeting of interested corporations later this year. --- RATIFICATION PROGRESS 142 countries have now ratified the Convention, as of 21 February 1996. It is particularly pleasing to see that Poland and Yemen despite the latter's recent troubles, have now ratified. The following 35 countries, however, despite being original signatories to the CBD, have still not ratified. Other Governments and NGOs with access to these tardy Governments are urged to persuade them to ratify as soon as possible: As ever, the absence of the USA remains a great disappointment. --- COOPERATION GOING WELL While the GEF may have gone off in a sulk, other international agencies have been showing enthusiastic support for the CBD. Following signature of an MoU with the Ramsat Secretariat last year, the CBD Secretariat has just signed a similar MoU with the CITES Secretariat. Also, in March this year, the IOC [Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission] has committed itself to full cooperation through SBSTTA. Interestingly, it looks like UNESCO-serviced international organisations and networks, like the IOC, the Man and the Biosphere Programme and the World Heritage Committee, are all responding very positively to the CBD - in marked contrast to FAO and the World Bank. --- WHODUNNIT The Biodiversity Coalition is a project of WWF(Australia) funded by the Biodiversity Unit of the Australian Federal Government's Department of Environment. It is coordinated by Alistair Graham and its principal output is this Newsletter plus the giving of advice, encouragement and support to numerous groups and individuals, many of whom have contributed to the ideas and information in the Newsletter. For further information, please contact: Alistair Graham, C/- P.O., Cygnet 7112, Tasmania, Australia; ph/fax:+61-02-951745 --- Invitacion FORO LATINOAMERICANO DE BIODIVERSIDAD Mayo 26-29 de 1996, Centro de Convenciones Hotel Irotama, Santa Marta, Colombia, en contribucion al proceso del: Foro Global de Biodiversidad Antecedentes El Foro Latinoamericano de Biodiversidad es la contribucion regional al Foro Global de Biodiversidad auspiciado por la UICN, el WRI yel PNUMA, como un aporte al debate asociado a la Convencion sobre Diversidad Biologica firmada por los Jefes de Estados en Rio de Janiero en 1992, puesta en vigor a partir de diciembre de 1993, y hoy en dia ratificada por alrededor de 130 gobiernos. Desde entonces se hart realizado tres Foros Globales de Biodiversidad cuyos resultados han contribuido a la definicion de la agenda para la toma de decisiones durante las reuniones de la Conferencia de las Partes.
Seit Ende des Kalten Krieges hat die russische Regierung unklare, doppeldeutige und widersprüchliche Signale von den ehemaligen Gegnern aus dem westlichen Lager erhalten. Gegenteiliger Versicherungen und formaler Kooperation zum Trotz erlebte Russland die schnelle Expansion der NATO als Bedrohung. Die vom ehemaligen US-Präsidenten Bush geplante Raketenabwehr in Osteuropa, die Forderung ehemaliger Ostblockländer nach einem aggressiveren Kurs der Nato gegenüber Russland und der Militärschlag (des Nato-Anwartschaftslandes) Georgiens gegen Südossetien - als Auftakt zum kurzen Kaukasuskrieg im August 2008 - führten zu einer deutlichen Verschlechterung der Sicherheitslage in Europa insgesamt. Der außenpolitische Ansatz der neuen US-Regierung Präsident Obamas verspricht eine Abkehr von der unilateralen Politik seines Vorgängers und weckt Hoffnungen, dass über die angekündigte nukleare Abrüstung auch der Geist der KSZE Schlussakte von Helsinki, mit der Maxime des Gewaltverzichts und der friedlichen Regelung von Konfliktfällen, wieder belebt wird. (IFSH-Pll)
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Daniel Deudney on Mixed Ontology, Planetary Geopolitics, and Republican Greenpeace
This is the second in a series of Talks dedicated to the technopolitics of International Relations, linked to the forthcoming double volume 'The Global Politics of Science and Technology' edited by Maximilian Mayer, Mariana Carpes, and Ruth Knoblich
World politics increasingly abrasions with the limits of state-centric thinking, faced as the world is with a set of issues that affect not only us collectively as mankind, but also the planet itself. While much of IR theorizing seems to shirk such realizations, the work of Daniel Deudney has consistently engaged with the complex problems engendered by the entanglements of nuclear weapons, the planetary environment, space exploration, and the kind of political associations that might help us to grapple with our fragile condition as humanity-in-the world. In this elaborate Talk, Deudney—amongst others—lays out his understanding of the fundamental forces that drive both planetary political progress and problems; discusses the kind of ontological position needed to appreciate these problems; and argues for the merits of a republican greenpeace model to political organization.
Print version of this Talk (pdf)
What is, according to you, the biggest challenge / principal debate in current IR? What is your position or answer to this challenge / in this debate?
The study of politics is the study of human politics and the human situation has been—and is being—radically altered by changes in the human relationships with the natural and material worlds. In my view, this means IR and related intellectual disciplines should focus on better understanding the emergence of the 'global' and the 'planetary,' their implications for the overall human world and its innumerable sub-worlds, and their relations with the realization of basic human needs. The global and the planetary certainly don't comprise all of the human situation, but the fact that the human situation has become global and planetary touches every other facet of the human situation, sometimes in fundamental ways. The simple story is that the human world is now 'global and planetary' due to the explosive transformation over the last several centuries of science-based technology occurring within the geophysical and biophysical features of planet Earth. The natural Earth and its relationship with humans have been massively altered by the vast amplifications in dispersed human agency produced by the emergence and spread of machine-based civilization. The overall result of these changes has been the emergence of a global- and planetary-scale material and social reality that is in some ways similar, but in other important ways radically different, from earlier times. Practices and structures inherited from the pre-global human worlds have not adequately been adjusted to take the new human planetary situation into account and their persistence casts a long and partially dark shadow over the human prospect.
A global and planetary focus is also justified—urgently—by the fact that the overall human prospect on this planet, and the fate of much additional life on this planet, is increasingly dependent on the development and employment of new social arrangements for interacting with these novel configurations of material and natural possibilities and limits. Human agency is now situated, and is making vastly fateful choices—for better or worse—in a sprawling, vastly complex aggregation of human-machine-nature assemblies which is our world. The 'fate of the earth' now partly hinges on human choices, and helping to make sure these choices are appropriate ones should be the paramount objective of political scientific and theoretical efforts. However, no one discipline or approach is sufficient to grapple successfully with this topic. All disciplines are necessary. But there are good reasons to believe that 'IR' and related disciplines have a particularly important possible practical role to play. (I am also among those who prefer 'global studies' as a label for the enterprise of answering questions that cut across and significantly subsume both the 'international' and the 'domestic.')
My approach to grappling with this topic is situated—like the work of now vast numbers of other IR theorists and researchers of many disciplines—in the study of 'globalization.' The now widely held starting point for this intellectual effort is the realization that globalization has been the dominant pattern or phenomenon, the story of stories, over at least the last five centuries. Globalization has been occurring in military, ecological, cultural, and economic affairs. And I emphasize—like many, but not all, analysts of globalization—that the processes of globalization are essentially dependent on new machines, apparatuses, and technologies which humans have fabricated and deployed. Our world is global because of the astounding capabilities of machine civilization. This startling transformation of human choice by technological advance is centrally about politics because it is centrally about changes in power. Part of this power story has been about changes in the scope and forms of domination. Globalization has been, to state the point mildly, 'uneven,' marked by amplifications of violence and domination and predation on larger and wider scales. Another part of the story of the power transformation has been the creation of a world marked by high degrees of interdependence, interaction, speed, and complexity. These processes of globalization and the transformation of machine capabilities are not stopping or slowing down but are accelerating. Thus, I argue that 'bounding power'—the growth, at times by breathtaking leaps, of human capabilities to do things—is now a fundamental feature of the human world, and understanding its implications should, in my view, be a central activity for IR scholars.
In addressing the topic of machine civilization and its globalization on Earth, my thinking has been centered first around the developing of 'geopolitical' lines argument to construct a theory of 'planetary geopolitics'. 'Geopolitics' is the study of geography, ecology, technology, and the earth, and space and place, and their interaction with politics. The starting point for geopolitical analysis is accurate mapping. Not too many IR scholars think of themselves as doing 'geography' in any form. In part this results from of the unfortunate segregation of 'geography' into a separate academic discipline, very little of which is concerned with politics. Many also mistake the overall project of 'geopolitics' with the ideas, and egregious mistakes and political limitations, of many self-described 'geopoliticans' who are typically arch-realists, strong nationalists, and imperialists. Everyone pays general lip service to the importance of technology, but little interaction occurs between IR and 'technology studies' and most IR scholars are happy to treat such matters as 'technical' or non-political in character. Despite this general theoretical neglect, many geographic and technological factors routinely pop into arguments in political science and political theory, and play important roles in them.
Thinking about the global and planetary through the lens of a fuller geopolitics is appealing to me because it is the human relationship with the material world and the Earth that has been changed with the human world's globalization. Furthermore, much of the actual agendas of movements for peace, arms control, and sustainability are essentially about alternative ways of ordering the material world and our relations with it. Given this, I find an approach that thinks systematically about the relations between patterns of materiality and different political forms is particularly well-suited to provide insights of practical value for these efforts.
The other key focus of my research has been around extending a variety of broadly 'republican' political insights for a cluster of contemporary practical projects for peace, arms control, and environmental stewardship ('greenpeace'). Even more than 'geopolitics,' 'republicanism' is a term with too many associations and meanings. By republics I mean political associations based on popular sovereignty and marked by mutual limitations, that is, by 'bounding power'—the restraint of power, particularly violent power—in the interests of the people generally. Assuming that security from the application of violence to bodies is a primary (but not sole) task of political association, how do republican political arrangements achieve this end? I argue that the character and scope of power restraint arrangements that actually serve the fundamental security interests of its popular sovereign varies in significant ways in different material contexts.
Republicanism is first and foremost a domestic form, centered upon the successive spatial expansion of domestic-like realms, and the pursuit of a constant political project of maximally feasible ordered freedom in changed spatial and material circumstances. I find thinking about our global and planetary human situation from the perspective of republicanism appealing because the human global and planetary situation has traits—most notably high levels of interdependence, interaction, practical speed, and complexity—that make it resemble our historical experience of 'domestic' and 'municipal' realms. Thinking with a geopolitically grounded republicanism offers insights about global governance very different from the insights generated within the political conceptual universe of hierarchical, imperial, and state-centered political forms. Thus planetary geopolitics and republicanism offers a perspective on what it means to 'Think Globally and Act Locally.' If we think of, or rather recognize, the planet as our locality, and then act as if the Earth is our locality, then we are likely to end up doing various approximations of the best-practice republican forms that we have successfully developed in our historically smaller domestic localities.
How did you arrive at where you currently are in IR?
Like anybody else, the formative events in my intellectual development have been shaped by the thick particularities of time and place. 'The boy is the father of the man,' as it is said. The first and most direction-setting stage in the formation of my 'green peace' research interests was when I was in 'grade school,' roughly the years from age 6-13. During these years my family lived in an extraordinary place, St Simons Island, a largely undeveloped barrier island off the coast of southern Georgia. This was an extremely cool place to be a kid. It had extensive beaches, and marshes, as well as amazing trees of gargantuan proportions. My friends and I spent much time exploring, fishing, camping out, climbing trees, and building tree houses. Many of these nature-immersion activities were spontaneous, others were in Boy Scouts. This extraordinary natural environment and the attachments I formed to it, shaped my strong tendency to see the fates of humans and nature as inescapably intertwined. But the Boy Scouts also instilled me with a sense of 'virtue ethics'. A line from the Boy Scout Handbook captures this well: 'Take a walk around your neighborhood. Make a list of what is right and wrong about it. Make a plan to fix what is not right.' This is a demotic version of Weber's political 'ethic of responsibility.' This is very different from the ethics of self-realization and self-expression that have recently gained such ground in America and elsewhere. It is now very 'politically incorrect' to think favorably of the Boy Scouts, but I believe that if the Scouting experience was universally accessible, the world would be a much improved place.
My kid-in-nature life may sound very Tom Sawyer, but it was also very Tom Swift. My friends and I spent much of our waking time reading about the technological future, and imaginatively play-acting in future worlds. This imaginative world was richly fertilized by science fiction comic books, television shows, movies, and books. Me and my friends—juvenile technological futurists and techno-nerds in a decidedly anti-intellectual culture—were avid readers of Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Robert Heinlein, and each new issue of Analog was eagerly awaited. While we knew we were Americans, my friends and I had strong inclinations to think of ourselves most essentially as 'earthlings.' We fervently discussed extraterrestrial life and UFOs, and we eagerly awaited the day, soon to occur, we were sure, in which we made 'first contact.' We wanted to become, if not astronauts, then designers and builders of spaceships. We built tree houses, but we filled them with discarded electronics and they became starships. We rode bicycles, but we lugged about attaché cases filled with toy ray guns, transistor radios, firecrackers, and homemade incendiary devices. We built and fired off rockets, painstaking assembled plastic kit models of famous airplanes and ships, and then we would blow them apart with our explosives. The future belonged to technology, and we fancied ourselves its avant garde.
Yet the prospect of nuclear Armageddon seemed very real. We did 'duck and cover' drills at school, and sat for two terrifying weeks through the Cuban Missile Crisis. My friends and I had copies of the Atomic Energy Commission manuals on 'nuclear effects,' complete with a slide-rule like gadget that enabled us to calculate just what would happen if near-by military bases were obliterated by nuclear explosions. Few doubted that we were, in the words of a pop song, 'on the eve of destruction.' These years were also the dawning of 'the space age' in which humans were finally leaving the Earth and starting what promised to be an epic trek, utterly transformative in its effects, to the stars. My father worked for a number of these years for a large aerospace military-industrial firm, then working for NASA to build the very large rockets needed to launch men and machines to the moon and back. My friends and I debated fantastical topics, such as the pros and cons of emigrating to Mars, and how rapidly a crisis-driven exodus from the earth could be organized.
Two events that later occurred in the area where I spent my childhood served as culminating catalytic events for my greenpeace thinking. First, some years after my family moved away, the industrial facility to mix rocket fuel that had been built by the company my father worked for, and that he had helped put into operation, was struck by an extremely violent 'industrial accident,' which reduced, in one titanic flash, multi-story concrete and steel buildings filled with specialized heavy industrial machinery (and everyone in them) into a grey powdery gravel ash, no piece of which was larger than a fist. Second, during the late 1970s, the US Navy acquired a large tract of largely undeveloped marsh and land behind another barrier island (Cumberland), an area 10-15 miles from where I had lived, a place where I had camped, fished, and hunted deer. The Navy dredged and filled what was one of the most biologically fertile temperate zone estuaries on the planet. There they built the east coast base for the new fleet of Trident nuclear ballistic missile submarines, the single most potent violence machine ever built, thus turning what was for me the wildest part of my wild-encircled childhood home into one of the largest nuclear weapons complexes on earth. These events catalyzed for me the realization that there was a great struggle going on, for the Earth and for the future, and I knew firmly which side I was on.
My approach to thinking about problems was also strongly shaped by high school debate, where I learned the importance of 'looking at questions from both sides,' and from this stems my tendency to look at questions as debates between competing answers, and to focus on decisively engaging, defeating, and replacing the strongest and most influential opposing positions. As an undergraduate at Yale College, I started doing Political Theory. I am sure that I was a very vexing student in some ways, because (the debater again) I asked Marxist questions to my liberal and conservative professors, and liberal and conservative ones to my Marxist professors. Late in my sophomore year, I had my epiphany, my direction-defining moment, that my vocation would be an attempt to do the political theory of the global and the technological. Since then, the only decisions have been ones of priority and execution within this project.
Wanting to learn something about cutting-edge global and technological and issues, I next went to Washington D.C. for seven years. I worked on Capitol Hill for three and a half years as a policy aide, working on energy and conservation and renewable energy and nuclear power. I spent the other three and a half years as a Senior Researcher at the Worldwatch Institute, a small environmental and global issues think tank that was founded and headed by Lester Brown, a well-known and far-sighted globalist. I co-authored a book about renewable energy and transitions to global sustainability and wrote a study on space and space weapons. At the time I published Whole Earth Security: a Geopolitics of Peace (1983), in which my basic notions of planetary geopolitics and republicanism were first laid out. During these seven years in Washington, I also was a part-time student, earning a Master's degree in Science, Technology and Public Policy at George Washington University.
In all, these Washington experiences have been extremely valuable for my thinking. Many political scientists view public service as a low or corrupting activity, but this is, I think, very wrong-headed. The reason that the democratic world works as well as it does is because of the distributive social intelligence. But social intelligence is neither as distributed nor as intelligent as it needs to be to deal with many pressing problems. My experience as a Congressional aide taught me that most of the problems that confront my democracy are rooted in various limits and corruptions of the people. I have come to have little patience with those who say, for example, rising inequality is inherent in capital C capitalism, when the more proximate explanation is that the Reagan Republican Party was so successful in gutting the progressive tax system previously in place in the United States. Similarly, I see little value in claims, to take a very contemporary example, that 'the NSA is out of control' when this agency is doing more or less what the elected officials, responding to public pressures to provide 'national security' loudly demanded. In democracies, the people are ultimately responsible.
As I was immersed in the world of arms control and environmental activism I was impressed by the truth of Keynes's oft quoted line, about the great practical influence of the ideas of some long-dead 'academic scribbler.' This is true in varying degrees in every issue area, but in some much more than others. This reinforced my sense that great potential practical consequence of successfully innovating in the various conceptual frameworks that underpinned so many important activities. For nuclear weapons, it became clear to me that the problem was rooted in the statist and realist frames that people so automatically brought to a security question of this magnitude.
Despite the many appeals of a career in DC politics and policy, this was all for me an extended research field-trip, and so I left Washington to do a PhD—a move that mystified many of my NGO and activist friends, and seemed like utter folly to my political friends. At Princeton University, I concentrated on IR, Political Theory, and Military History and Politics, taking courses with Robert Gilpin, Richard Falk, Barry Posen, Sheldon Wolin and others. In my dissertation—entitled Global Orders: Geopolitical and Materialist Theories of the Global-Industrial Era, 1890-1945—I explored IR and related thinking about the impacts of the industrial revolution as a debate between different world order alternatives, and made arguments about the superiority of liberalist, internationalist, and globalist arguments—most notably from H.G. Wells and John Dewey—to the strong realist and imperialist ideas most commonly associated with the geopolitical writers of this period.
I also continued engaging in activist policy affiliated to the Program on Nuclear Policy Alternatives at the Center for Energy andEnvironmental Studies (CEES), which was then headed by Frank von Hippel, a physicist turned 'public interest scientist', and a towering figure in the global nuclear arms control movement. I was a Post Doc at CEES during the Gorbachev era and I went on several amazing and eye-opening trips to the Soviet Union. Continuing my space activism, I was able to organize workshops in Moscow and Washington on large-scale space cooperation, gathering together many of the key space players on both sides. While Princeton was fabulously stimulating intellectually, it was also a stressful pressure-cooker, and I maintained my sanity by making short trips, two of three weekends, over six years, to Manhattan, where I spent the days working in the main reading room of the New York Public Library and the nights partying and relaxing in a world completely detached from academic life.
When it comes to my intellectual development in terms of reading theory, the positive project I wanted to pursue was partially defined by approaches I came to reject. Perhaps most centrally, I came to reject an approach that was very intellectually powerful, even intoxicating, and which retains great sway over many, that of metaphysical politics. The politics of the metaphysicians played a central role in my coming to reject the politics of metaphysics. The fact that some metaphysical ideas and the some of the deep thinkers who advanced them, such as Heidegger, and many Marxists, were so intimately connected with really disastrous politics seemed a really damning fact for me, particularly given that these thinkers insisted so strongly on the link between their metaphysics and their politics. I was initially drawn to Nietzsche's writing (what twenty-year old isn't) but his model of the philosopher founder or law-giver—that is, of a spiritually gifted but alienated guy (and it always is a guy) with a particularly strong but frustrated 'will to power' going into the wilderness, having a deep spiritual revelation, and then returning to the mundane corrupt world with new 'tablets of value,' along with a plan to take over and run things right—seemed more comic than politically relevant, unless the prophet is armed, in which case it becomes a frightful menace. The concluding scene in Herman Hesse's Magister Ludi (sometimes translated as The Glass Bead Game) summarized by overall view of the 'high theory' project. After years of intense training by the greatest teachers the most spiritually and intellectually gifted youths finally graduate. To celebrate, they go to lake, dive in, and, having not learned how to swim, drown.
I was more attracted to Aristotle, Hume, Montesquieu, Dewey and other political theorists with less lofty and comprehensive views of what theory might accomplish; weary of actions; based on dogmatic or totalistic thinking; an eye to the messy and compromised world; with a political commitment to liberty and the interests of the many; a preference for peace over war; an aversion to despotism and empire; and an affinity for tolerance and plurality. I also liked some of those thinkers because of their emphasis on material contexts. Montesquieu seeks to analyze the interaction of material contexts and republican political forms; Madison and his contemporaries attempt to extend the spatial scope of republican political association by recombining in novel ways various earlier power restraint arrangements. I was tremendously influenced by Dewey, studying intensively his slender volume The Public and its Problems (1927)—which I think is the most important book in twentieth century political thought. By the 'public' Dewey means essentially a stakeholder group, and his main point is that the material transformations produced by the industrial revolution has created new publics, and that the political task is to conceptualize and realize forms of community and government appropriate to solving the problems that confront these new publics.
One can say my overall project became to apply and extend their concepts to the contemporary planetary situation. Concomitantly reading IR literature on nuclear weapons, I was struck by fact that the central role that material realities played in these arguments was very ad hoc, and that many of the leading arguments on nuclear politics were very unconvincing. It was clear that while Waltz (Theory Talk #40) had brilliantly developed some key ideas about anarchy made by Hobbes and Rousseau, he had also left something really important out. These sorts of deficiencies led me to develop the arguments contained in Bounding Power. I think it is highly unlikely that I would have had these doubts, or come to make the arguments I made without having worked in political theory and in policy.
I read many works that greatly influenced my thinking in this area, among them works by Lewis Mumford, Langdon Winner's Autonomous Technology, James Lovelock's Gaia, Charles Perrow's Normal Accidents (read a related article here, pdf), Jonathan Schell's Fate of the Earth and The Abolition, William Ophul's Ecology and the Politics of Scarcity... I was particularly stuck by a line in Buckminster Fuller's Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth (pdf), that we live in a 'spaceship' like closed highly interconnected system, but lack an 'operating manual' to guide intelligently our actions. It was also during this period that I read key works by H.G. Wells, most notably his book, Anticipations, and his essay The Idea of a League of Nations, both of which greatly influenced my thinking.
This aside, the greatest contribution to my thinking has come from conversations sustained over many years with some really extraordinary individuals. To mention those that I have been arguing with, and learning from, for at least ten years, there is John O'Looney, Wesley Warren, Bob Gooding-Williams, Alyn McAuly, Henry Nau, Richard Falk, Michael Doyle (Theory Talk #1), Richard Mathew, Paul Wapner, Bron Taylor, Ron Deibert, John Ikenberry, Bill Wohlforth, Frank von Hippel, Ethan Nadelmann, Fritz Kratochwil, Barry Buzan (Theory Talk #35), Ole Waever, John Agnew (Theory Talk #4), Barry Posen, Alex Wendt (Theory Talk #3), James der Derian, David Hendrickson, Nadivah Greenberg, Tim Luke, Campbell Craig, Bill Connolly, Steven David, Jane Bennett, Daniel Levine (TheoryTalk #58), and Jairus Grove. My only regret is that I have not spoken even more with them, and with the much larger number of people I have learned from on a less sustained basis along the way.
What would a student need to become a specialist in IR or understand the world in a global way?
I have thought a great deal about what sort of answers to this question can be generally valuable. For me, the most important insight is that success in intellectual life and academia is determined by more or less the same combination of factors that determines success more generally. This list is obvious: character, talent, perseverance and hard work, good judgment, good 'people skills,' and luck. Not everyone has a talent to do this kind of work, but the number of people who do have the talent to do this kind of work is much larger than the number of people who are successful in doing it. I think in academia as elsewhere, the people most likely to really succeed are those whose attitude toward the activity is vocational. A vocation is something one is called to do by an inner voice that one cannot resist. People with vocations never really work in one sense, because they are doing something that they would be doing even if they were not paid or required. Of course, in another sense people with vocations never stop working, being so consumed with their path that everything else matters very little. People with jobs and professions largely stop working when they when the lottery, but people with vocations are empowered to work more and better. When your vocation overlaps with your job, you should wake up and say 'wow, I cannot believe I am being paid to do this!' Rather obviously, the great danger in the life paths of people with vocations is imbalance and burn-out. To avoid these perils it is beneficial to sustain strong personal relationships, know when and how to 'take off' effectively, and sustain the ability to see things as an unfolding comedy and to laugh.
Academic life also involves living and working in a profession. Compared to the oppressions that so many thinkers and researchers have historically suffered from, contemporary professional academic life is a utopia. But academic life has several aspects unfortunate aspects, and coping successfully with them is vital. Academic life is full of 'odd balls' and the loose structure of universities and organization, combined with the tenure system, licenses an often florid display of dubious behavior. A fair number of academics have really primitive and incompetent social skills. Others are thin skinned-ego maniacs. Some are pompous hypocrites. Some are ruthlessly self-aggrandizing and underhanded. Some are relentless shirkers and free-riders. Also, academic life is, particularly relative to the costs of obtaining the years of education necessary to obtain it, not very well paid. Corruptions of clique, ideological factionalism, and nepotism occur. If not kept in proper perspective, and approached in appropriate ways, academic department life can become stupidly consuming of time, energy, and most dangerously, intellectual attention. The basic step for healthy departmental life is to approach it as a professional role.
The other big dimension of academic life is teaching. Teaching is one of the two 'deliverables' that academic organizations provide in return for the vast resources they consume. Shirking on teaching is a dereliction of responsibility, but also is the foregoing of a great opportunity. Teaching is actually one of the most assuredly consequential things academics do. The key to great teaching is, I think, very simple: inspire and convey enthusiasm. Once inspired, students learn. Once students take questions as their own, they become avid seekers of answers. Teachers of things political also have a responsibility to remain even-handed in what they teach, to make sure that they do not teach just or mainly their views, to make sure that the best and strongest versions of opposing sides are heard. Teaching seeks to produce informed and critically thinking students, not converts. Beyond the key roles of inspiration and even-handedness, the rest is the standard package of tasks relevant in any professional role: good preparation, good organization, hard work, and clarity of presentation.
Your main book, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village (2007), is a mix of intellectual history, political theory and IR theory, and is targeted largely at realism. How does a reading and interpretation of a large number of old books tell us something new about realism, and the contemporary global?
Bounding Power attempts to dispel some very large claims made by realists about their self-proclaimed 'tradition,' a lineage of thought in which they place many of the leading Western thinkers about political order, such as Thucydides, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Rousseau, and the 'global geopoliticans' from the years around the beginning of the twentieth century. In the book I argue that the actual main axis of western thinking about political order (and its absence) is largely the work of 'republican' thinkers from the small number of 'republics', and that many of the key ideas that realists call realist and liberals call liberal are actually fragments of a larger, more encompassing set of arguments that were primarily in the idioms of republicanism. This entails dispelling the widely held view that the liberal and proto-liberal republican thought and practice are marked by 'idealism'—and therefore both inferior in their grasp of the problem of security-from violence and valuable only when confined to the 'domestic.' I demonstrate that this line of republican security thinkers had a robust set of claims both about material contextual factors, about the 'geopolitics of freedom', and a fuller understanding of security-from-violence. The book shows how perhaps the most important insights of this earlier cluster of arguments has oddly been dropped by both realists (particularly neorealists) and liberal international theorists. And, finally, it is an attempt to provide an understanding that posits the project of exiting anarchy on a global scale as something essentially unprecedented, and as something that the best of our inherited theory leaves us unable to say much about.
The main argument is contained in my formulation of what I think are the actual the two main sets of issues of Western structural-materialist security theory, two problematiques formulated in republican and naturalist-materialist conceptual vocabularies. The first problematique concerns the relationship between material context, the scope of tolerable anarchy, and necessary-for-security government. The second problematic concerns the relative security-viability of two main different forms of government—hierarchical and republican.
This formulation of the first problematic concerning anarchy differs from the main line of contemporary Realist argument in that it poses the question as one about the spatial scope of tolerable anarchy. The primary variable in my reconstruction of the material-contextual component of these arguments is what I term violence interdependence (absent, weak, strong, and intense). The main substantive claim of Western structural-materialist security theory is that situations of anarchy combined with intense violence interdependence are incompatible with security and require substantive government. Situations of strong and weak violence interdependence constitute a tolerable (if at times 'nasty and brutish') second ('state-of-war') anarchy not requiring substantive government. Early formulations of 'state of nature' arguments, explicitly or implicitly hinge upon this material contextual variable, and the overall narrative structure of the development of republican security theory and practice has concerned natural geographic variations and technologically caused changes in the material context, and thus the scope of security tolerable/intolerable anarchy and needed substantive government. This argument was present in early realist versions of anarchy arguments, but has been dropped by neorealists. Conversely, contemporary liberal international theorists analyze interdependence, but have little to say about violence. The result is that the realists talk about violence and security, and the liberals talk about interdependence not relating to violence, producing the great lacuna of contemporary theory: analysis of violence interdependence.
The second main problematique, concerning the relative security viability of hierarchical and republican forms, has also largely been lost sight of, in large measure by the realist insistence that governments are by definition hierarchical, and the liberal avoidance of system structural theory in favor of process, ideational, and economic variables. (For neoliberals, cooperation is seen as (possibly) occurring in anarchy, without altering or replacing anarchy.) The main claim here is that republican and proto-liberal theorists have a more complete grasp of the security political problem than realists because of their realization that both the extremes of hierarchy and anarchy are incompatible with security. In order to register this lost component of structural theory I refer to republican forms at both the unit and the system-level as being characterized by an ordering principle which I refer to as negarchy. Such political arrangements are characterized by the simultaneous negation of both hierarchy and anarchy. The vocabulary of political structures should thus be conceived as a triad-triangle of anarchy, hierarchy, and negarchy, rather than a spectrum stretching from pure anarchy to pure hierarchy. Using this framework, Bounding Power traces various formulations of the key arguments of security republicans from the Greeks through the nuclear era as arguments about the simultaneous avoidance of hierarchy and anarchy on expanding spatial scales driven by variations and changes in the material context. If we recognize the main axis of our thinking in this way, we can stand on a view of our past that is remarkable in its potential relevance to thinking and dealing with the contemporary 'global village' like a human situation.
Nuclear weapons play a key role in the argument of Bounding Power about the present, as well as elsewhere in your work. But are nuclear weapons are still important as hey were during the Cold War to understand global politics?
Since their arrival on the world scene in the middle years of the twentieth century, there has been pretty much universal agreement that nuclear weapons are in some fundamental way 'revolutionary' in their implications for security-from-violence and world politics. The fact that the Cold War is over does not alter, and even stems from, this fact. Despite this wide agreement on the importance of nuclear weapons, theorists, policy makers, and popular arms control/disarmament movements have fundamental disagreements about which political forms are compatible with the avoidance of nuclear war. I have attempted to provide a somewhat new answer to this 'nuclear-political question', and to explain why strong forms of interstate arms control are necessary for security in the nuclear age. I argue that achieving the necessary levels of arms control entails somehow exiting interstate anarchy—not toward a world government as a world state, but toward a world order that is a type of compound republican union (marked by, to put it in terms of above discussion, a nearly completely negarchical structure).
This argument attempts to close what I term the 'arms control gap', the discrepancy between the value arms control is assigned by academic theorists of nuclear weapons and their importance in the actual provision of security in the nuclear era. During the Cold War, thinking among IR theorists about nuclear weapons tended to fall into three broad schools—war strategists, deterrence statists, and arms controllers. Where the first two only seem to differ about the amount of nuclear weapons necessary for states seeking security (the first think many, the second less), the third advocates that states do what they have very rarely done before the nuclear age, reciprocal restraints on arms.
But this Cold War triad of arguments is significantly incomplete as a list of the important schools of thought about the nuclear-political question. There are four additional schools, and a combination of their arguments constitutes, I argue, a superior answer to the nuclear-political question. First are the nuclear one worlders, a view that flourished during the late 1940s and early 1950s, and held that the simple answer to the nuclear political question is to establish a world government, as some sort of state. Second are the populist anti-nuclearists, who indict state apparatuses of acting contrary to the global public's security interests. Third are the deep arms controllers, such as Jonathan Schell, who argue that nuclear weapons need to be abolished. Fourth are the theorists of omniviolence, who theorize situations produced by the leakage of nuclear weapons into the hands of non-state actors who cannot be readily deterred from using nuclear weapons. What all of these schools have in common is that they open up the state and make arguments about how various forms of political freedom—and the institutions that make it possible—are at issue in answering the nuclear-political question.
Yet one key feature all seven schools share is that they all make arguments about how particular combinations and configurations of material realities provide the basis for thinking that their answer to the nuclear-political question is correct. Unfortunately, their understandings of how material factors shape, or should shape, actual political arrangements is very ad hoc. Yet the material factors—starting with sheer physical destructiveness—are so pivotal that they merit a more central role in theories of nuclear power. I think we need to have a model that allows us to grasp how variations in material contexts condition the functionality of 'modes of protection', that is, distinct and recurring security practices (and their attendant political structures).
For instance, one mode of protection—what I term the real-state mode of protection—attempts to achieve security through the concentration, mobilization, and employment of violence capability. This is the overall, universal, context-independent strategy of realists. Bringing into view material factors, I argue, shows that this mode of protection is functional not universally but specifically—and only—in material contexts that are marked by violence-poverty and slowness. This mode of protection is dysfunctional in nuclear material contexts marked by violence abundance and high violence velocities. In contrast, a republican federal mode of protection is a bundle of practices that aim for the demobilization and deceleration of violence capacity, and that the practices associated with this mode of protection are security functional in the nuclear material context.
What emerges from such an approach to ideas about the relation between nuclear power and security from violence is that the epistemological foundations for any of the major positions about nuclear weapons are actually much weaker than we should be comfortable with. People often say the two most important questions about the nuclear age are: what is the probability that nuclear weapons will be used? And then, what will happen when they are used? The sobering truth is that we really do not have good grounds for confidently answering either of those two questions. But every choice made about nuclear weapons depends on risk calculations that depend on how we answer these questions.
You have also written extensively on space, a topic that has not recently attracted much attention from many IR scholars. How does your thinking on this relate to your overall thinking about the global and planetary situation?
The first human steps into outer space during the middle years of the twentieth century have been among the most spectacular and potentially consequential events in the globalization of machine civilization on Earth. Over the course of what many call 'the space age,' thinking about space activities, space futures, and the consequences of space activities has been dominated by an elaborately developed body of 'space expansionist' thought that makes ambitious and captivating claims about both the feasibility and the desirability of human expansion into outer space. Such views of space permeate popular culture, and at times appear to be quite influential in actual space policy. Space expansionists hold that outer space is a limitless frontier and that humans should make concerted efforts to explore and colonize and extend their military activities into space. They claim the pursuit of their ambitious projects will have many positive, even transformative, effects upon the human situation on Earth, by escaping global closure, protecting the earth's habitability, preserving political plurality, and enhancing species survival. Claims about the Earth, its historical patterns and its contemporary problems, permeate space expansionist thinking.
While the feasibility, both technological and economic, of space expansionist projects has been extensively assessed, arguments for their desirability have not been accorded anything approaching a systematic assessment. In part, such arguments about the desirability of space expansion are difficult to assess because they incorporate claims that are very diverse in character, including claims about the Earth (past, present, and future), about the ways in which material contexts made up of space 'geography' and technologies produce or heavily favor particular political outcomes, and about basic worldview assumptions regarding nature, science, technology, and life.
By breaking these space expansionist arguments down into their parts, and systematically assessing their plausibility, a very different picture of the space prospect emerges. I think there are strong reasons to think that the consequences of the human pursuit of space expansion have been, and could be, very undesirable, even catastrophic. The actual militarization of that core space technology ('the rocket') and the construction of a planetary-scope 'delivery' and support system for nuclear war-fighting has been the most important consequence of actual space activities, but these developments have been curiously been left out of accounts of the space age and assessments of its impacts. Similarly, much of actually existing 'nuclear arms control' has centered on restraining and dismantling space weapons, not nuclear weapons. Thus the most consequential space activity—the acceleration of nuclear delivery capabilities—has been curiously rendered almost invisible in accounts of space and assessments of its impacts. This is an 'unknown known' of the 'space age'. Looking ahead, the creation of large orbital infrastructures will either presuppose or produce world government, potentially of a very hierarchical sort. There are also good reasons to think that space colonies are more likely to be micro-totalitarian than free. And extensive human movement off the planet could in a variety of ways increase the vulnerability of life on Earth, and even jeopardize the survival of the human species.
Finally, I think much of space expansionist (and popular) thinking about space and the consequences of humans space activities has been marked by basic errors in practical geography. Most notably, there is the widespread failure to realize that the expansion of human activities into Earth's orbital space has enhanced global closure, because the effective distances in Earth's space make it very small. And because of the formidable natural barriers to human space activity, space is a planetary 'lid, not a 'frontier'. So one can say that the most important practical discovery of the 'space age' has been an improved understanding of the Earth. These lines of thinking, I find, would suggest the outlines of a more modest and Earth-centered space program, appropriate for the current Earth age. Overall, the fact that we can't readily expand into space is part of why we are in a new 'earth age' rather than a 'space age'.
You've argued against making the environment into a national security issue twenty years ago. Do the same now, considering that making the environment a bigger priority by making it into a national security issue might be the only way to prevent total environmental destruction?
When I started writing about the relationships between environment and security twenty years ago, not a great deal of work had been done on this topic. But several leading environmental thinkers were making the case that framing environmental issues as security issues, or what came to be called 'securitizing the environment', was not only a good strategy to get action on environmental problems, but also was useful analytically to think about these two domains. Unlike the subsequent criticisms of 'environmental security' made by Realists and scholars of conventional 'security studies', my criticism starts with the environmentalist premise that environmental deterioration is a paramount problem for contemporary humanity as a whole.
Those who want to 'securitize the environment' are attempting to do what William James a century ago proposed as a general strategy for social problem solving. Can we find, in James' language, 'a moral equivalent of war?' (Note the unfortunately acronym: MEOW). War and the threat of war, James observed, often lead to rapid and extensive mobilizations of effort. Can we somehow transfer these vast social energies to deal with other sets of problems? This is an enduring hope, particularly in the United States, where we have a 'war on drugs', a 'war on cancer', and a 'war on poverty'. But doing this for the environment, by 'securitizing the environment,' is unlikely to be very successful. And I fear that bringing 'security' orientations, institutions, and mindsets into environmental problem-solving will also bring in statist, nationalist, and militarist approaches. This will make environmental problem-solving more difficult, not easier, and have many baneful side-effects.
Another key point I think is important, is that the environment—and the various values and ends associated with habitat and the protection of habitat—are actually much more powerful and encompassing than those of security and violence. Instead of 'securitizing the environment' it is more promising is to 'environmentalize security'. Not many people think about the linkages between the environment and security-from-violence in this way, but I think there is a major case of it 'hiding in plain sight' in the trajectory of how the state-system and nuclear weapons have interacted.
When nuclear weapons were invented and first used in the 1940s, scientists were ignorant about many aspects of their effects. As scientists learned about these effects, and as this knowledge became public, many people started thinking and acting in different ways about nuclear choices. The fact that a ground burst of a nuclear weapon would produce substantial radioactive 'fall-out' was not appreciated until the first hydrogen bomb tests in the early 1950s. It was only then that scientists started to study what happened to radioactive materials dispersed widely in the environment. Evidence began to accumulate that some radioactive isotopes would be 'bio-focused', or concentrated by biological process. Public interest scientists began effectively publicizing this information, and mothers were alerted to the fact that their children's teeth were become radioactive. This new scientific knowledge about the environmental effects of nuclear explosions, and the public mobilizations it produced, played a key role in the first substantial nuclear arms control treaty, the Limited Test Ban Treaty of 1963, which banned nuclear weapons testing in the atmosphere, in the ocean, and in space. Thus, the old ways of providing security were circumscribed by new knowledge and new stakeholders of environmental health effects. The environment was not securitized, security was partially environmentalized.
Thus, while some accounts by arms control theorists emphasize the importance of 'social learning' in altering US-Soviet relations, an important part of this learning was not about the nature of social and political interactions, but about the environmental consequences of nuclear weapons. The learning that was most important in motivating so many actors (both within states and in mass publics) to seek changes in politics was 'natural learning,' or more specifically learning about the interaction of natural and technological systems.
An even more consequential case of the environmentalization of security occurred in the 1970's and 1980's. A key text here is Jonathan Schell's book, The Fate of the Earth. Schell's book, combining very high-quality journalism with first rate political theoretical reflections, lays out in measured terms the new discoveries of ecologists and atmospheric scientists about the broader planetary consequences of an extensive nuclear war. Not only would hundreds of millions of people be immediately killed and much of the planet's built infrastructure destroyed, but the planet earth's natural systems would be so altered that the extinction of complex life forms, among them homo sapiens, might result. The detonation of numerous nuclear weapons and the resultant burning of cities would probably dramatically alter the earth's atmosphere, depleting the ozone layer that protects life from lethal solar radiations, and filling the atmosphere with sufficient dust to cause a 'nuclear winter.' At stake in nuclear war, scientists had learned, was not just the fate of nations, but of the earth as a life support system. Conventional accounts of the nuclear age and of the end of the Cold War are loath to admit it, but it I believe it is clear that spreading awareness of these new natural-technological possibilities played a significant role in ending the Cold War and the central role that nuclear arms control occupies in the settlement of the Cold War. Again, traditional ways of achieving security-from-violence were altered by new knowledges about their environmental consequences—security practices and arrangements were partly environmentalized.
Even more radically, I think we can also turn this into a positive project. As I wrote two decades ago, environmental restoration would probably generate political externalities that would dampen tendencies towards violence. In other words, if we address the problem of the environment, then we will be drawn to do various things that will make various types of violent conflict less likely.
Your work is permeated by references to 'material factors'. This makes it different from branches of contemporary IR—like constructivism or postmodernism—which seem to be underpinned by a profound commitment to focus solely one side of the Cartesian divide. What is your take on the pervasiveness and implications of this 'social bias'?
Postmodernism and constructivism are really the most extreme manifestations of a broad trend over the last two centuries toward what I refer to as 'social-social science' and the decline—but hardly the end—of 'natural-social science'. Much of western thought prior to this turn was 'naturalist' and thus tended to downplay both human agency and ideas. At the beginning of the nineteenth century—partly because of the influence of German idealism, partly because of the great liberationist projects that promised to give better consequence to the activities and aspirations of the larger body of human populations (previously sunk in various forms of seemingly natural bondages), and partly because of the great expansion of human choice brought about by the science-based technologies of the Industrial Revolution—there was a widespread tendency to move towards 'social-social science,' the project of attempting to explain the human world solely by reference to the human world, to explain social outcomes with reference to social causes. While this was the dominant tendency, and a vastly productive one in many ways, it existed alongside and in interaction with what is really a modernized version of the earlier 'natural-social science.' Much of my work has sought to 'bring back in' and extend these 'natural-social' lines of argument—found in figures such as Dewey and H.G. Wells—into our thinking about the planetary situation.
In many parts of both European and American IR and related areas, Postmodern and constructivist theories have significantly contributed to IR theorists by enhancing our appreciation of ideas, language, and identities in politics. As a response to the limits and blindnesses of certain types of rationalist, structuralist, and functional theories, this renewed interest in the ideational is an important advance. Unfortunately, both postmodernism and constructivism have been marked by a strong tendency to go too far in their emphasis of the ideational. Postmodernism and constructivism have also helped make theorists much more conscious of the implicit—and often severely limiting—ontological assumptions that underlay, inform, and bound their investigations. This is also a major contribution to the study of world politics in all its aspects.
Unfortunately, this turn to ontology has also had intellectually limiting effects by going too far, in the search for a pure or nearly pure social ontology. With the growth in these two approaches, there has indeed been a decided decline in theorizing about the material. But elsewhere in the diverse world of theorizing about IR and the global, theorizing about the material never came anything close to disappearing or being eclipsed. For anyone thinking about the relationships between politics and nuclear weapons, space, and the environment, theorizing about the material has remained at the center, and it would be difficult to even conceive of how theorizing about the material could largely disappear. The recent 're-discovery of the material' associated with various self-styled 'new materialists' is a welcome, if belated, re-discovery for postmodernists and constructivists. For most of the rest of us, the material had never been largely dropped out.
A very visible example of the ways in which the decline in appropriate attention to the material, an excessive turn to the ideational, and the quest for a nearly pure social ontology, can lead theorizing astray is the core argument in Alexander Wendt's main book, Social Theory of International Politics, one of the widely recognized landmarks of constructivist IR theory. The first part of the book advances a very carefully wrought and sophisticated argument for a nearly pure ideational social ontology. The material is explicitly displaced into a residue or rump of unimportance. But then, to the reader's surprise, the material, in the form of 'common fate' produced by nuclear weapons, and climate change, reappears and is deployed to play a really crucial role in understanding contemporary change in world politics.
My solution is to employ a mixed ontology. By this I mean that I think several ontologically incommensurate and very different realities are inescapable parts the human world. These 'unlikes' are inescapable parts of any argument, and must somehow be combined. There are a vast number of ways in which they can be combined, and on close examination, virtually all arguments in the social sciences are actually employing some version of a mixed ontology, however implicitly and under-acknowledged.
But not all combinations are equally useful in addressing all questions. In my version of mixed ontology—which I call 'practical naturalism'—human social agency is understood to be occurring 'between two natures': on the one hand the largely fixed nature of humans, and on the other the changing nature composed of the material world, a shifting amalgam of actual non-human material nature of geography and ecology, along with human artifacts and infrastructures. Within this frame, I posit as rooted in human biological nature, a set of 'natural needs,' most notably for security-from-violence and habitat services. Then I pose questions of functionality, by which I mean: which combinations of material practices, political structures, ideas and identities are needed to achieve these ends in different material contexts? Answering this question requires the formulation of various 'historical materialist' propositions, which in turn entails the systematic formulation of typologies and variation in both the practices, structures and ideas, and in material contexts. These arguments are not centered on explaining what has or what will happen. Instead they are practical in the sense that they are attempting to answer the question of 'what is to be done' given the fixed ends and given changing material contexts. I think this is what advocates of arms control and environmental sustainability are actually doing when they claim that one set of material practices and their attendant political structures, identities and ideas must be replaced with another if basic human needs are to going to continue to be meet in the contemporary planetary material situation created by the globalization of machine civilization on earth.
Since this set of arguments is framed within a mixed ontology, ideas and identities are a vital part of the research agenda. Much of the energy of postmodern and many varieties of critical theory have focused on 'deconstructing' various identities and ideas. This critical activity has produced and continues to produce many insights of theorizing about politics. But I think there is an un-tapped potential for theorists who are interested in ideas and identities, and who want their work to make a positive contribution to practical problem-solving in the contemporary planetary human situation in what might be termed a 'constructive constructivism'. This concerns a large practical theory agenda—and an urgent one at that, given the rapid increase in planetary problems—revolving around the task of figuring out which ideas and identities are appropriate for the planetary world, and in figuring out how they can be rapidly disseminated. Furthermore, thinking about how to achieve consciousness change of this sort is not something ancillary to the greenpeace project but vital to it. My thinking on how this should and might be done centers the construction of a new social narrative, centered not on humanity but on the earth.
Is it easy to plug your mixed ontology and interests beyond the narrow confines of IR or even the walls of the ivory tower into processes of collective knowledge proliferation in IR—a discipline increasingly characterized by compartimentalization and specialization?
The great plurality of approaches in IR today is indispensible and a welcome change. The professionalization of IR and the organization of intellectual life has some corruptions and pitfalls that are best avoided. The explosion of 'isms' and of different perspectives has been valuable and necessary in many ways, but it has also helped to foster and empower sectarian tendencies that confound the advance of knowledge. Some of the adherents of some sects and isms boast openly of establishing 'citation cartels' to favor themselves and their friends. Some theorists also have an unfortunate tendency to assume that because they have adopted a label that what they actually do is the actually the realization of the label. Thus we have 'realists' with limited grasp on realities, 'critical theorists' who repeat rather than criticize the views of other 'critical theorists,' and anti-neoliberals who are ruthless Ayn Rand-like self aggrandizers. The only way to fully address these tendencies is to talk to people you disagree with, and find and communicate with people in other disciplines.
Another consequence of this sectarianism is visible in the erosion of scholarly standards of citation. The system of academic incentives is configured to reward publication, and the publication of ideas that are new. This has a curiously perverse impact on the achievement of cumulativity. One seemingly easy and attractive path to saying something new is to say something old in new language, to say something said in another sect or field in the language of your sect or field, or easiest of all, simply ignore what other people have said if it is too much like what you are trying to say. George Santyana is wide quoted in saying that 'those who forget the past are condemned to repeat it.' For academics it can unfortunately be said, 'those who can successfully forget what past academics said are free to say it again, and thus advance toward tenure.' When rampant sectarianism and decline in standards of citation is combined with a broader cultural tendency to valorize self-expression and authenticity, academic work can become an exercise in abstract self expressionism.
Confining one's intellectual life within one 'ism' or sect is sure to be self-limiting. Many of the most important and interesting questions arise between and across the sects and schools. Also, there are great opportunities in learning from people who do not fully share your assumptions and approaches. Seriously engaging the work and ideas of scholars in other sects can be very very valuable. Scholars in different sects and schools are also often really taking positions that are not so different as their labels would suggest. Perhaps because my research agenda fits uncomfortably within any of the established schools and isms, I have found particularly great value in seeking out and talking on a sustained basis with people with very different approaches.
My final question is about normativity and the way that normativity is perceived: In Europe and the United States, liberal Internationalism is increasingly considered as hollowed out, as a discursive cover for a tendency to attempt to control and regulate the world—or as an unguided idealistic missile. Doesn't adapting to a post-hegemonic world require dropping such ambitions?
American foreign policy has never been entirely liberal internationalist. Many other ideas and ideologies and approaches have often played important roles in shaping US foreign policy. But the United States, for a variety of reasons, has pursued liberal internationalist foreign policy agendas more extensively, and successfully, than any other major state in the modern state system, and the world, I think, has been made better off in very important ways by these efforts.
The net impact of the United States and of American grand strategy and particularly those parts of American brand strategy that have been more liberal internationalist in their character, has been enormously positive for the world. It has produced not a utopia by any means, but has brought about an era with more peace and security, prosperity, and freedom for more people than ever before in history.
Both American foreign policy and liberal internationalism have been subject to strong attacks from a variety of perspectives. Recently some have characterized liberal internationalism as a type of American imperialism, or as a cloak for US imperialism. Virtually every aspect of American foreign policy has been contested within the United States. Liberal internationalists have been strong enemies of imperialism and military adventurism, whether American or from other states. This started with the Whig's opposition to the War with Mexico and the Progressive's opposition to the Spanish-American War, and continued with liberal opposition to the War in Vietnam.
The claim that liberal internationalism leads to or supports American imperialism has also been recently voiced by many American realists, perhaps most notably John Mearsheimer (Theory Talk #49). He and others argue that liberal internationalism played a significant role in bringing about the War on Iraq waged by the W. Bush administration. This was indeed one of the great debacles of US foreign policy. But the War in Iraq was actually a war waged by American realists for reasons grounded in realist foreign policy thinking. It is true, as Mearsheimer emphasizes, that many academic realists criticized the Bush administration's plans and efforts in the invasion in Iraq. Some self-described American liberal internationalists in the policy world supported the war, but almost all academic American liberal internationalists were strongly opposed, and much of the public opposition to the war was on grounds related to liberal internationalist ideas.
It is patently inaccurate to say that main actors in the US government that instigated the War on Iraq were liberal internationalists. The main initiators of the war were Richard Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld. Whatever can be said about those two individuals, they are not liberal internationalists. They initiated the war because they thought that the Saddam Hussein regime was a threat to American interests—basically related to oil. The Saddam regime was seen as a threat to American-centered regional hegemony in the Middle East, an order whose its paramount purpose has been the protection of oil, and the protection of the regional American allies that posses oil. Saddam Hussein was furthermore a demonstrated regional revisionist likely to seek nuclear weapons, which would greatly compromise American military abilities in the region. Everything else the Bush Administration's public propaganda machine said to justify the war was essentially window dressing for this agenda. Far from being motivated by a liberal internationalist agenda the key figures in the Bush Administration viewed the collateral damage to international institutions produced by the war as a further benefit, not a cost, of the war. It is particularly ironic that John Mearsheimer would be a critic of this war, which seems in many ways a 'text book' application of a central claim of his 'offensive realism,' that powerful states can be expected, in the pursuit of their security and interests, to seek to become and remain regional hegemons.
Of course, liberal internationalism, quite aside from dealing with these gross mischaracterizations propagated by realists, must also look to the future. The liberal internationalism that is needed for today and tomorrow is going to be in some ways different from the liberal internationalism of the twentieth century. This is a large topic that many people, but not enough, are thinking about. In a recent working paper for the Council on Foreign Relations, John Ikenberry and I have laid out some ways in which we think American liberal internationalism should proceed. The starting point is the recognition that the United States is not as 'exceptional' in its precocious liberal-democratic character, not as 'indispensible' for the protection of the balance of power or the advance of freedom, or as easily 'hegemonic' as it has been historically. But the world is now also much more democratic than ever before, with democracies old and new, north and south, former colonizers and former colonies, and in every civilizational flavor. The democracies also face an array of difficult domestic problems, are thickly enmeshed with one another in many ways, and have a vital role to play in solving global problems. We suggest that the next liberal internationalism in American foreign policy should focus on American learning from the successes of other democracies in solving problems, focus on 'leading by example of successful problem-solving' and less with 'carrots and sticks,' make sustained efforts to moderate the inequalities and externalities produced by de-regulated capitalism, devote more attention to building community among the democracies, and make sustained efforts to 'recast global bargains' and the distribution of authority in global institutions to better incorporate the interests of 'rising powers.'
Daniel Deudney is Associate Professor and Director of Undergraduate Studies in Political Science at Johns Hopkins University. He has published widely in political theory and international relations, on substantive issues such as nuclear weapons, the environment as a security issue, liberal and realist international relations theory, and geopolitics.
Related links
Deudney's Faculty Profile at Johns Hopkins Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Democratic Internationalism: An American Grand Strategy for a Post-exceptionalist Era (Council on Foreign Relations Working Paper, 2012) here (pdf) Read Deudney et al's Global Shift: How the West Should Respond to the Rise of China (2011 Transatlantic Academy report) here (pdf) Read the introduction of Deudney's Bounding Power (2007) here (pdf) Read Deudney's Bringing Nature Back In: Geopolitical Theory from the Greeks to the Global Era (1999 book chapter) here (pdf) Read Deudney & Ikenberry's Who Won the Cold War? (Foreign Policy, 1992) here (pdf) Read Deudney's The Case Against Linking Environmental Degradation and National Security (Millennium, 1990) here (pdf) Read Deudney's Rivers of Energy: The Hydropower Potential (WorldWatch Institute Paper, 1981) here (pdf)
What is a radical? Somebody who goes against mainstream opinions? An agitator who suggests transforming society at the risk of endangering its harmony? In the political context of the British Isles at the end of the eighteenth century, the word radical had a negative connotation. It referred to the Levellers and the English Civil War, it brought back a period of history which was felt as a traumatic experience. Its stigmas were still vivid in the mind of the political leaders of these times. The reign of Cromwell was certainly the main reason for the general aversion of any form of virulent contestation of the power, especially when it contained political claims. In the English political context, radicalism can be understood as the different campaigns for parliamentary reforms establishing universal suffrage. However, it became evident that not all those who were supporting such a reform originated from the same social class or shared the same ideals. As a matter of fact, the reformist associations and their leaders often disagreed with each other. Edward Royle and Hames Walvin claimed that radicalism could not be analyzed historically as a concept, because it was not a homogeneous movement, nor it had common leaders and a clear ideology. For them, radicalism was merely a loose concept, « a state of mind rather than a plan of action. » At the beginning of the nineteenth-century, the newspaper The Northern Star used the word radical in a positive way to designate a person or a group of people whose ideas were conform to those of the newspaper. However, an opponent of parliamentary reform will use the same word in a negative way, in this case the word radical will convey a notion of menace. From the very beginning, the term radical covered a large spectrum of ideas and conceptions. In fact, the plurality of what the word conveys is the main characteristic of what a radical is. As a consequence, because the radicals tended to differentiate themselves with their plurality and their differences rather than with common features, it seems impossible to define what radicalism (whose suffix in –ism implies that it designate a doctrine, an ideology) is. Nevertheless, today it is accepted by all historians. From the mid-twentieth century, we could say that it was taken from granted to consider radicalism as a movement that fitted with the democratic precepts (universal suffrage, freedom of speech) of our modern world. Let us first look at radicalism as a convenient way to designate the different popular movements appealing to universal suffrage during the time period 1792-1848. We could easily observe through the successions of men and associations, a long lasting radical state of mind: Cartwright, Horne Tooke, Thomas Hardy, Francis Burdett, William Cobbett, Henry Hunt, William Lovett, Bronterre O'Brien, Feargus O'Connor, The London Society for Constitutional information (SCI), The London Corresponding Society (LCS), The Hampden Clubs, The Chartists, etc. These organizations and people acknowledged having many things in common and being inspired by one another in carrying out their activities. These influences can be seen in the language and the political ideology that British historians name as "Constitutionalist", but also, in the political organization of extra-parliamentary societies. Most of the radicals were eager to redress injustices and, in practice, they were inspired by a plan of actions drawn on from the pamphlets of the True Whigs of the eighteenth-century. We contest the argument that the radicals lacked coherence and imagination or that they did not know how to put into practice their ambitions. In fact, their innovative forms of protest left a mark on history and found many successors in the twentieth century. Radicals' prevarications were the result of prohibitive legislation that regulated the life of associations and the refusal of the authorities to cooperate with them. As mentioned above, the term radical was greatly used and the contemporaries of the period starting from the French Revolution to Chartism never had to quarrel about the notions the word radical covered. However, this does not imply that all radicals were the same or that they belong to the same entity. Equally to Horne Tooke, the Reverend and ultra-Tory Stephens was considered as a radical, it went also with the shoemaker Thomas Hardy and the extravagant aristocrat Francis Burdett. Whether one belonged to the Aristocracy, the middle-class, the lower class or the Church, nothing could prevent him from being a radical. Surely, anybody could be a radical in its own way. Radicalism was wide enough to embrace everybody, from revolutionary reformers to paternalistic Tories. We were interested to clarify the meaning of the term radical because its inclusive nature was overlooked by historians. That's why the term radical figures in the original title of our dissertation Les voix/voies radicales (radical voices/ways to radicalism). In the French title, both words voix/voies are homonymous; the first one voix (voice) correspond to people, the second one voies (ways) refers to ideas. By this, we wanted to show that the word radical belongs to the sphere of ideas and common experience but also to the nature of human beings. Methodoloy The thesis stresses less on the question of class and its formation than on the circumstances that brought people to change their destiny and those of their fellows or to modernize the whole society. We challenged the work of E.P. Thompson, who in his famous book, The Making of the English Working Class, defined the radical movements in accordance with an idea of class. How a simple shoe-maker, Thomas Hardy, could become the center of attention during a trial where he was accused of being the mastermind of a modern revolution? What brought William Cobbett, an ultra-Tory, self-taught intellectual, to gradually espouse the cause of universal suffrage at a period where it was unpopular to do so? Why a whole population gathered to hear Henry Hunt, a gentleman farmer whose background did not destine him for becoming the champion of the people? It seemed that the easiest way to answer to these questions and to understand the nature of the popular movements consisted in studying the life of their leaders. We aimed at reconstructing the universe which surrounded the principal actors of the reform movements as if we were a privileged witness of theses times. This idea to associate the biographies of historical characters for a period of more than fifty years arouse when we realized that key events of the reform movements were echoing each other, such the trial of Thomas Hardy in 1794 and the massacre of Peterloo of 1819. The more we learned about the major events of radicalism and the life of their leaders, the more we were intrigued. Finally, one could ask himself if being a radical was not after all a question of character rather than one of class. The different popular movements in favour of a parliamentary reform were in fact far more inclusive and diversified from what historians traditionally let us to believe. For instance, once he manage to gather a sufficient number of members of the popular classes, Thomas Hardy projected to give the control of his association to an intellectual elite led by Horne Tooke. Moreover, supporters of the radical reforms followed leaders whose background was completely different as theirs. For example, O'Connor claimed royal descent from the ancient kings of Ireland. William Cobbett, owner of a popular newspaper was proud of his origins as a farmer. William Lovett, close to the liberals and a few members of parliament came from a very poor family of fishermen. We have thus put together the life of these five men, Thomas hardy, William Cobbett, Henry Hunt, William Lovett and Feargus O'Connor in order to compose a sort of a saga of the radicals. This association gives us a better idea of the characteristics of the different movements in which they participated, but also, throw light on the circumstances of their formation and their failures, on the particular atmosphere which prevailed at these times, on the men who influenced these epochs, and finally on the marks they had left. These men were at the heart of a whole network and in contact with other actors of peripheral movements. They gathered around themselves close and loyal fellows with whom they shared many struggles but also quarreled and had strong words. The original part of our approach is reflected in the choice to not consider studying the fluctuations of the radical movements in a linear fashion where the story follows a strict chronology. We decided to split up the main issue of the thesis through different topics. To do so, we simply have described the life of the people who inspired these movements. Each historical figure covers a chapter, and the general story follows a chronological progression. Sometimes we had to go back through time or discuss the same events in different chapters when the main protagonists lived in the same period of time. Radical movements were influenced by people of different backgrounds. What united them above all was their wish to obtain a normalization of the political world, to redress injustices and obtain parliamentary reform. We paid particular attention to the moments where the life of these men corresponded to an intense activity of the radical movement or to a transition of its ideas and organization. We were not so much interested in their feelings about secondary topics nor did we about their affective relations. Furthermore, we had little interest in their opinions on things which were not connected to our topic unless it helped us to have a better understanding of their personality. We have purposely reduced the description of our protagonists to their radical sphere. Of course we talked about their background and their intellectual development; people are prone to experience reversals of opinions, the case of Cobbett is the most striking one. The life of these personalities coincided with particular moments of the radical movement, such as the first popular political associations, the first open-air mass meetings, the first popular newspapers, etc. We wanted to emphasize the personalities of those who addressed speeches and who were present in the radical associations. One could argue that the inconvenience of focusing on a particular person presents a high risk of overlooking events and people who were not part of his world. However, it was essential to differ from an analysis or a chronicle which had prevailed in the studies of the radical movements, as we aimed at offering a point of view that completed the precedents works written on that topic. In order to do so, we have deliberately put the humane character of the radical movement at the center of our work and used the techniques of biography as a narrative thread. Conclusion The life of each historical figure that we have portrayed corresponded to a particular epoch of the radical movement. Comparing the speeches of the radical leaders over a long period of time, we noticed that the radical ideology evolved. The principles of the Rights of Men faded away and gave place to more concrete reasoning, such as the right to benefit from one's own labour. This transition is characterized by the Chartist period of Feargus O'Connor. This does not mean that collective memory and radical tradition ceased to play an important part. The popular classes were always appealed to Constitutional rhetoric and popular myths. Indeed, thanks to them they identified themselves and justified their claims to universal suffrage. We focused on the life of a few influent leaders of radicalism in order to understand its evolution and its nature. The description of their lives constituted our narrative thread and it enabled us to maintain consistency in our thesis. If the chapters are independent the one from the other, events and speeches are in correspondences. Sometimes we could believe that we were witnessing a repetition of facts and events as if history was repeating itself endlessly. However, like technical progress, the spirit of time, Zeitgeist, experiences changes and mutations. These features are fundamental elements to comprehend historical phenomena; the latter cannot be simplified to philosophical, sociological, or historical concept. History is a science which has this particularity that the physical reality of phenomena has a human dimension. As a consequence, it is essential not to lose touch with the human aspect of history when one pursues studies and intellectual activities on a historical phenomenon. We decided to take a route opposite to the one taken by many historians. We have first identified influential people from different epochs before entering into concepts analysis. Thanks to this compilation of radical leaders, a new and fresh look to the understanding of radicalism was possible. Of course, we were not the first one to have studied them, but we ordered them following a chronology, like Plutarch enjoyed juxtaposing Greeks and Romans historical figures. Thanks to this technique we wanted to highlight the features of the radical leaders' speeches, personalities and epochs, but also their differences. At last, we tried to draw the outlines and the heart of different radical movements in order to follow the ways that led to radicalism. We do not pretend to have offered an original and exclusive definition of radicalism, we mainly wanted to understand the nature of what defines somebody as a radical and explain the reasons why thousands of people decided to believe in this man. Moreover, we wanted to distance ourselves from the ideological debate of the Cold War which permeated also the interpretation of past events. Too often, the history of radicalism was either narrated with a form of revolutionary nostalgia or in order to praise the merits of liberalism. If the great mass meetings ends in the mid-nineteenth-century with the fall of Chartism, this practice spread out in the whole world in the twentieth-century. Incidentally, the Arab Spring of the beginning of the twenty-first-century demonstrated that a popular platform was the best way for the people to claim their rights and destabilize a political system which they found too authoritative. Through protest the people express an essential quality of revolt, which is an expression of emancipation from fear. From then on, a despotic regime loses this psychological terror which helped it to maintain itself into power. The balance of power between the government and its people would also take a new turn. The radicals won this psychological victory more than 150 years ago and yet universal suffrage was obtained only a century later. From the acceptance of the principles of liberties to their cultural practice, a long route has to be taken to change people's mind. It is a wearisome struggle for the most vulnerable people. In the light of western history, fundamental liberties must be constantly defended. Paradoxically, revolt is an essential and constitutive element of the maintenance of democracy. ; Die radikalen Strömungen in England von 1789 bis 1848 Formulierung der Problematik Was ist ein Radikaler? Eine Person die vorgefassten Meinungen zuwiderhandelt? Ein Agitator, der die Gesellschaft verändern will und dabei das Risiko eingeht, sie aus dem Gleichgewicht zu bringen? Im politischen Kontext, in dem sich die britischen Inseln am Ende des 18. Jahrhunderts befanden, hatte dieser Begriff eine negative Konnotation. Er erinnert nämlich an die levellers und an den Bürgerkrieg. Diese historische Epoche, die als traumatisches Erlebnis empfunden wurde, hat bei den politischen Führern Stigmata hinterlassen, die immer noch vorhanden sind. Die Herrschaft Cromwells hatte bestimmt einen direkten Einfluss auf die Aversion der Engländer gegen jede heftige Form des Protestes gegen die herrschende Macht, vor allem wenn er politisch vereinnahmt wird. Im politischen Kontext in England versteht man unter Radikalismus verschiedene Versuche, eine Parlamentsreform durchzusetzen, die das allgemeine Wahlrecht einführen sollte. Natürlich bedeutet dies nicht, dass die Befürworter solch einer Reform eine gesellschaftliche und ideologische Nähe verband. In der Tat waren sich die reformistischen Verbände oft untereinander nicht einig und ihre jeweiligen Führer hatten wenige Gemeinsamkeiten. Edward Royle und Hames Walvin erläutern, dass der Radikalismus historisch nicht wie ein Konzept analysiert werden kann, da er keine einheitliche Bewegung war, da sich die Führer untereinander nicht einig waren und da keine eindeutige Ideologie vorhanden war. Der Radikalismus war ihrer Meinung nach nur eine vage Ansammlung bunter Ideen. Er sei « eher eine Einstellung als ein Aktionsplan» gewesen. Am Beginn des 19. Jahrhunderts verwendete die Zeitung Northern Star den Begriff « radikal » in einem positiven Sinne, um eine Person oder eine Gruppe zu bezeichnen, deren Ideen mit den Ihrigen im Einklang standen. Gegner der Parlamentsreformbewegungen haben diesen Begriff im negativen Sinne verwendet. Der Radikale wurde dann also als Bedrohung wahrgenommen. Der Gebrauch des Begriffes radikal scheint kein semantisches Problem darzustellen im Vergleich zur Verwendung des Wortes Radikalismus dessen Suffix -ismus eine Doktrin bzw. eine Ideologie voraussetzt. Die Tatsache, dass die Radikalen so unterschiedliche Gesinnungen vertraten, scheint eine Definition des Radikalismus unmöglich zu machen. Trotzdem wird sein Gebrauch heute von allen Historikern akzeptiert. Man könnte also behaupten, dass es seit der Mitte des 20. Jahrhunderts gängig wurde, mit dem Begriff Radikalismus jede Bewegung zu bezeichnen, die Ideen durchsetzen wollte, die nach unserem heutigen Verständnis als demokratisch verstanden werden. Wir können den Begriff Radikalismus zwischen 1792 und 1848 also erst einmal als eine praktische Bezeichnung für die verschiedenen radikalen Volksbewegungen, die das Ziel verfolgten, das allgemeine Wahlrecht einzuführen, betrachten. Diese radikale Einstellung findet man bei einer ganzen Reihe von Menschen und Organisationen wieder. Cartwright, Horne Tooke, Thomas Hardy, Francis Burdett, William Cobbet, Henry Hunt, William Lovett, Bronterre O'Brien Feargus O'Connor, die London Society for Constitutional information (SCI), die London Corresponding Society (LCS), die Hampden Clubs, die Chartisten, usw. Man kann viele Gemeinsamkeiten zwischen den Protagonisten erkennen, die sie sich auch eingestanden haben. Auβerdem wird auch der Einfluss erkennbar, den sie aufeinander ausgeübt haben, um ihre Aktionen zu gestalten. Diese Einflüsse findet man sowohl in der Sprache und in der politischen Ideologie wieder, die von den britischen Historikern als « konstitutionalistisch » bezeichnet wurden, als auch in der politischen Organisation von auβerparlamentarischen Gruppierungen. Alle Radikalen wollten die Ungerechtigkeiten beheben, und in der Praxis haben sie sich von einem Aktionsplan anregen lassen, den sie im 18. Jahrhundert in den Pamphleten der true whigs gefunden haben. Wir müssen teilweise das Argument zurückweisen, dass die Radikalen nicht kohärent und einfallsreich waren, oder dass sie nicht genau wussten, wie sie ihre Ziele umsetzen konnten. Ganz im Gegenteil: Die innovativen Formen des Protestes, die ihnen zuzuschreiben sind, waren bezeichnend und haben eine Spur in der Geschichte hinterlassen. Das Zaudern der Radikalen war erstens auf die prohibitive Gesetzgebung zurückzuführen, der die Verbände unterlagen und zweitens auf die kategorische Ablehnung der Behörden zu kooperieren. Die Zeitgenossen der Epoche, die sich von der Französischen Revolution bis zum Chartismus erstreckt, haben nie über den Sinn des Begriffs radikal debattiert. Dies bedeutet allerdings nicht, dass alle Radikalen gleich waren, oder dass sie zu derselben Einheit gehörten. Horne Tooke und der Priester Stephens waren beide Radikale, so wie der Schuster Hardy und der extravagante Burdett. Ob man ein Adliger, ein Mitglied des Bürgertums, ein Handwerker, ein Gutsbesitzer oder ein Mann der Kirche war: Nichts hinderte einen daran, ein Radikaler zu sein. Jeder konnte auf seine Art ein Radikaler sein. In dem Radikalismus gab es in der Tat eine groβe Bandbreite, die sich vom revolutionären Radikalismus bis zum paternalistischen Torysmus erstreckte. Wir waren daran interessiert, genau zu verstehen, was der Begriff radikal bedeutet, denn sein integrativer Charakter wurde von Historikern übersehen. Wir haben uns deshalb so genau mit der Bedeutung des Begriffs « radikal » beschäftigt, weil dieses Adjektiv im Plural im Titel die radikalen Strömungen enthalten ist. Mit dem im französischen Titel enthaltenen Gleichklang zwischen den Wörtern « voie » (Weg, Strömung) und « voix » (Stimme) wollten wir zeigen, dass sich der Begriff « radikal » sowohl auf ein Ideenbündel als auch auf eine Person bezieht. Die methodische Vorgehensweise In dieser Arbeit richtet sich unser Augenmerk weniger auf die Frage, wie eine Gesellschaftsschicht entstanden ist, als auf die Umstände, die die Menschen dazu bewogen haben, ihrem Schicksal und dem Ihresgleichen oder gar der ganzen Gesellschaft eine andere Wendung zu geben. Wir stellten das Werk von E.P.Thompson in Frage, welcher in seinem bekannten Buch "The Making of the English Working Class" radikale Bewegungen, entsprechend einer Vorstellung von Klasse, definiert. Wie kam es, dass ein einfacher Schuster wie Thomas Hardy, während eines Prozesses, in dem er beschuldigt wurde, eine moderne Revolution anzuzetteln, im Zentrum der Öffentlichkeit stand? Wie kam es, dass ein Autodidakt und ein Anhängiger der Ultra- Tories wie William Cobbett sich nach und nach für das allgemeine Wahlrecht einsetzte, zu einer Zeit, in der es unpopulär war? Wie kam es, dass sich die ganze Bevölkerung in Massen um Henry Hunt scharte, einen Gutsbesitzer, der nicht gerade dazu bestimmt war, sich für die Belange des Volkes stark zu machen? Unser Ziel ist es, das Universum, in dem die wichtigsten Beteiligten lebten, wiederzugeben, so als wären wir ein privilegierter Zeuge dieser Epochen. Die einfachste Art diese Fragen zu beantworten und die Beschaffenheit der Volksbewegungen zu verstehen besteht unserer Meinung nach darin, das Leben jener Männer zu studieren, die sie gestaltet haben. Wir hatten den Einfall, mehrere Männer, die in einem Zeitraum von mehr als 50 Jahren gelebt haben, miteinander in Verbindung zu bringen, als uns aufgefallen ist, dass Schlüsselmomente der Reformbewegungen miteinander korrespondieren, wie z.B der Prozess von Thomas Hardy und das Massaker von Peterloo 1819. Je mehr wir uns mit diesen Ereignissen beschäftigten, desto mehr weckte dies unsere Neugier auf das Leben jener Menschen, die sie verursacht haben. Schlussendlich konnte man sich fragen, ob radikal zu sein nicht eher eine Frage des Charakters als eine Frage der Klassenzugehörigkeit war. Die verschiedenen Volksbewegungen für eine Parlamentsreform haben in der Tat viel mehr unterschiedliche Menschen vereint und waren um einiges vielfältiger als es die Historiker behauptet haben. So war es zum Beispiel Thomas Hardys Vorhaben, die Führung des Verbandes einer intellektuellen Elite unter Horne Tookes Kommando zu überlassen, nachdem er es geschafft haben würde, genug Mitglieder der Arbeiterschicht zu versammeln. Auβerdem haben die Sympathisanten mit Freude Führer akzeptiert, deren Schicksal sehr wenig mit dem Ihrigen gemeinsam hatte. O'Connor z. B erhob den Anspruch, der Nachkomme eines irischen Königs zu sein. Cobbett, der Besitzer einer bedeutenden Zeitung, erinnerte daran, dass er aus einer Bauernfamilie stammte. William Lovett, der den Liberalen und einigen Parlamentsmitgliedern nahe stand, stammte aus einer armen Fischerfamilie. Wir haben diese fünf Männer Thomas Hardy, William Cobbett, Henry Hunt, William Lovett und Feargus O'Connor in Verbindung gebracht, um gewissermaßen eine Saga der Radikalen zu erstellen. Dies erlaubte es uns, uns ein genaueres Bild zu machen von den Merkmalen der verschiedenen Bewegungen, an denen sie teilgenommen haben, von dem Kontext, in dem die Bewegungen entstanden sind, von ihren Misserfolgen, von der besonderen Atmosphäre, die in diesen unterschiedlichen Epochen herrschte, von den Männern, die diese Bewegungen beeinflusst haben und zuletzt von dem Zeichen, das sie gesetzt haben. Diese Männer waren im Mittelpunkt eines Netzwerkes und standen in Verbindung mit anderen Akteuren, die an peripheren Bewegungen beteiligt waren. Sie waren umgeben von treuen Weggefährten, mit denen zusammen sie viele Kämpfe ausgetragen haben, oder mit denen sie sich heftig gestritten haben. Unsere Vorgehensweise ist insofern neu, als wir die Fluktuationen der radikalen Bewegungen weder linear bzw. chronologisch beleuchten, noch in einer zersplitterten Weise, indem wir die Problematik in mehrere Themen unterteilen. Wir sind ganz einfach dem Leben der Männer gefolgt, die am Ursprung dieser Bewegung standen. Jedes Kapitel behandelt eine historische Person und die gesamte Abhandlung ist chronologisch aufgebaut. Manchmal war es notwendig, Rückblenden einzubauen oder die gleichen Ereignisse mehrmals zu erwähnen, wenn verschiedene historische Personen daran beteiligt waren. Die radikalen Bewegungen wurden von Menschen aus verschiedenen Horizonten beeinflusst. Verbunden waren sie vor allem durch ihr Bestreben, eine Normalisierung der politischen Welt zu erreichen, gegen die Ungerechtigkeiten zu kämpfen und eine Parlamentsreform durchzusetzen. Wir haben uns auf die Momente konzentriert, in denen das Leben der Männer mit einem aktiven Handeln in der radikalen Bewegung oder mit einer Veränderung ihrer Ideen oder in ihrer Organisation einherging. Ihre emotionalen Beziehungen und ihre Einstellung zu belanglosen Fragen interessierten uns nicht. Ihre Meinungen zu Fragen, die unser Studienobjekt nicht betreffen, waren auch nicht Gegenstand dieser Abhandlung, es sei denn sie ermöglichten es uns, ihre Persönlichkeit besser zu umreiβen. Unser Augenmerk richtete sich ausdrücklich und vor allem auf die radikale Tätigkeit der Beteiligten. Natürlich haben wir auch die Lebensumstände und die geistige Entwicklung dieser Männer geschildert, denn wir wissen, dass Meinungen sich im Laufe eines Lebens ändern können, wie es der bemerkenswerte Fall von Cobbett verdeutlicht. Das Leben dieser Personen fiel zeitlich mit markanten Momenten in der radikalen Bewegung zusammen, wie z. B die ersten politischen Organisationen der Arbeiterschichten, die ersten Massendemonstrationen oder die ersten politisch ausgerichteten Volkszeitungen. Wir wollten die menschlichen Züge jener Männer wiedergeben, die Reden gehalten haben und die in den radikalen Verbänden anwesend waren. Man könnte uns vorwerfen, dass wir- wenn wir uns auf eine historische Person konzentriert haben- andere Fakten oder Personen, die nicht zu ihrem Umfeld gehörten aber dennoch an der Bewegung beteiligt waren, ausgeblendet haben. Uns schien es aber wesentlich, die analytische Methode oder die historische Chronik, die die Studien über die radikalen Bewegungen maßgeblich prägt, aufzugeben. Unser Ziel war es nämlich, diese Schilderungen zu vervollständigen, indem wir den menschlichen Aspekt in den Vordergrund stellten. Dazu haben wir die biografische Perspektive gewählt und unserer Studie angepasst. Schluss Jeder Mann, dessen Rolle wir hervorgehoben haben, lebte in einer bestimmten Phase der radikalen Bewegung. Der Vergleich der Reden, die sie in verschiedenen Epochen gehalten haben, hat aufgezeigt, dass die radikale Ideologie sich im Laufe der Zeit verändert hat. Die Verteidigung der Menschenrechte verlor an Bedeutung und die Argumentation wurde konkreter: Es ging z. B mehr und mehr um das Recht, die Früchte seiner Arbeit zu genieβen. Dieser Wandel fand in der chartistischen Epoche Feargus O'Connors statt. Die Traditionen des Radikalismus und die Erinnerung daran spielten jedoch weiterhin eine wichtige Rolle. Die Rhetorik des Konstitutionalismus und der Volksmythos waren Themen, mit denen die Arbeiterschichten sich immer identifiziert haben, und die ihre Forderung nach dem allgemeinen Wahlrecht gerechtfertigt haben. Wir haben uns auf das Leben einiger einflussreicher Männer des Radikalismus konzentriert, um seine Entwicklung und sein Wesen zu verstehen. Ihre Lebensläufe haben uns als Leitfaden gedient und haben es uns ermöglicht, eine Kohärenz in unserer Abhandlung zu wahren. Zwar sind die Kapitel unabhängig voneinander, aber die Ereignisse und die Reden korrespondieren miteinander. Man könnte manchmal den Eindruck haben, dass sich Fakten, Handlungen und die Geschichte im Allgemeinen endlos wiederholen. Allerdings ist der Zeitgeist im ständigen Wandel begriffen, so wie dies auch beim technischen Fortschritt der Fall ist. Wir sind der Ansicht, dass diese Besonderheiten fundamentale Elemente sind, die es ermöglichen, historische Phänomene zu begreifen, die nicht auf philosophische, soziologische oder historische Konzepte reduziert werden können. Die Geschichte als Wissenschaft weist die Besonderheit auf, dass die physische Realität und die erwähnten Phänomene auch eine menschliche Realität sind. Daher ist es wesentlich, bei der intellektuellen Auseinandersetzung mit einem historischen Phänomen den menschlichen Aspekt nicht aus den Augen zu verlieren. Wir wollten einen Weg einschlagen, der dem vieler Historiker entgegengesetzt ist. Unser Augenmerk richtete sich zunächst auf die Männer, die ihre jeweiligen Epochen maβgeblich geprägt haben, bevor wir uns mit Konzepten beschäftigt haben. Die Männer, die wir auserwählt haben, gaben uns einen neuen und frischen Blick auf den Radikalismus und brachten uns diesen näher. Natürlich sind wir nicht die ersten, die sich mit diesen historischen Personen beschäftigt haben. Durch die chronologische Anordnung unserer Abhandlung, wollten wir- so wie Plutarch, der griechische und römische historische Personen miteinander in Verbindung brachte- die Wesensmerkmale ihrer Reden, Persönlichkeiten und Epochen aber auch ihre Unterschiede in den Vordergrund rücken. Wir haben also versucht, eine Bewegung zu umreiβen und im Kern zu erfassen und die Wege nachzuzeichnen, die zum Radikalismus führten. Wir behaupten nicht, dass wir eine neuartige und ausschlieβliche Definition dieser Bewegung geliefert haben. Wir haben nur versucht, die Wesensmerkmale eines Radikalen zu begreifen und herauszufinden, aus welchen Gründen tausende Männer an diesen Mann geglaubt haben. Wir wollten uns von der ideologischen Debatte über den Kalten Krieg losmachen, die sogar auf die Interpretation zurückliegender Ereignisse abgefärbt hat. Zu oft wurde die Geschichte des Radikalismus mit einer Art revolutionären Nostalgie erzählt, oder mit der Absicht, die Vorzüge des Liberalismus zu preisen. Der Chartismus leitete zwar im 19. Jahrhundert das Ende der groβen Massenbewegungen in England ein, aber diese Methode hat sich im 20. Jahrhundert überall auf der Welt verbreitet. In der Tat zeigt der arabische Frühling am Beginn des 21. Jahrhunderts, dass die zahlenmäβige Überlegenheit das beste Druckmittel des Volkes ist, um seine Rechte einzufordern und das bestehenden Regime zu destabilisieren. Ein Volk, das demonstriert, zeigt, dass es keine Angst mehr hat. Von dem Moment an, in dem ein autoritäres Regime diese psychologische Waffe, die es ihm ermöglicht hat, an der Macht zu bleiben, verliert, kehrt sich das Machtgefälle zwischen der autoritären Staatsgewalt und dem unterworfenen Volk um. Diesen psychologischen Sieg haben die englischen Radikalen vor mehr als 150 Jahren errungen. Jedoch wurde das allgemeine Wahlrecht erst ein Jahrhundert später eingeführt. Damit es also nicht bei Prinzipienerklärungen bleibt, sondern die Freiheiten in die Wirklichkeit umgesetzt werden, bedarf es einer Bewusstseinsänderung, die nur durch eine langwierige Arbeit zustande kommen kann. Für die Schwächsten ist dies ein langer Kampf. In Anbetracht der abendländischen Geschichte muss man die Freiheiten als Rechte betrachten, die es immer wieder zu verteidigen gilt. Paradoxerweise scheint die Revolte also eine grundlegende und unabdingbare Bedingung zu sein, um die Demokratie zu erhalten.
This book follows a new path of describing the Alps from the years 500 to 800. Instead of running through this mountain range from east to west (or reverse) and writing one local history after the other, relevant patterns were captured: patterns of control, borders, communication routes, Christendom, settlement, economy, local methods to establish power and traces of local identity. Comparing theses structures on an interregional level made it possible to establish a new view on the early medieval alpine regions. By the year 500 the inhabitants of this central European mountain range were typically roman-provincial. Some regional differences existed, yet the main factors were quite similar: language, laws, religion (Christendom) and social structures. From the 6th c. on this changed. New political developments made a large part of the alpine provinces turn northwards to the Frankish realms. As a consequence borders were created within the Alps. Many hilltop settlements and strongholds in the valleys were built to guarantee the security both of population and borders. Militia was installed to control these boundaries; they were either recruited from the local population or got especially settled for these means. This change of view made some Roman topoi disappear: the Alps were no longer regarded as hostile and as the walls of Italy. The routes through the Alps changed. One reason for this was the growing number of pilgrims from the British Isles made the passage through Maurienne and over the Mont Cenis more important than the ancient route via Montgenèvre. The central Alps in Curia remained a highly important point to cross the mountains, whereas more eastwards the once important crossing points became mere backroads. Farther east the Avarian-Slavic conquest caused the sources to silence, nevertheless the communication routes remained visible through archaeological findings and place names. A big change for the alpine population was the transformations in settlement patterns, first of all the diminishing importance of Roman cities. Some of them disappeared completely, such as Teurnia, Aguntum and Octodurum. Nevertheless, the wider settlement areas around these former towns always remained important. New centres emerged. Some had roman roots, for example Iuvavum/Salzburg, others were new foundations, like the numerous cloisters from the 8th c. The church played a significant role in this transformation, as a bishop's see or the burial church of a saint constituted a point of attraction for the local population. The antique transalpine and alpine networks of trade underwent some transitions. Goods like olive oil, high quality pottery and sea salt were no longer brought over the Alps. The eastern alpine ore deposits were not exploited on a grand scale anymore. New natural resources became important, for example the salt deposits in the northern Alps. There are some traces of exported products. The vineyards of the Southern Alps produced vine for export to the north-alpine regions and the central alpine soapstone production supplied the population of the whole mountain range with high quality cookware. In addition to this, products like cheese, wool, honey and lumber might have been exported. Alpine agriculture did not change much. Farming was based on subsistence and the surplus was sold locally to travellers or given to the owners of the land. The use of alpine pastures roots in pre-roman times and was practised continually, although the intensity of the pastoralism is difficult to estimate. Local power structures emerged out of late antique roots. In the 8th and beginning of the 9th c. the population of these parts of the Alps still spoke a roman language, were Christian and lived in a very differentiated social structure whose legal habits were based on roman law. Contrary to that, the eastern Alps saw a major cultural shift that resulted in the Slavic reign of Carantania. - Diese Arbeit wählte einen neuen Ansatz, um die Alpen in den Jahren 500 bis 800 zu beschreiben: Anstatt die einzelnen Regionen von Ost nach West - oder umgekehrt - durchzugehen und eine Herrschaftsgeschichte nach der anderen zu schreiben, wurden die relevanten Strukturen erfasst - also Zugriff, Grenzen, Verkehrsrouten, Christentum, Besiedlung, Wirtschaft, regionale Methoden der Machtentfaltung und Identitätsspuren der Bevölkerung. Diese Strukturen wurden miteinander verglichen. Dadurch war es möglich, einen neuen Zugang zu der Transformation der römischen Welt in eine frühmittelalterliche auf alpinem Gebiet zu erlangen. Um das Jahr 500 war die Bevölkerung der Alpen noch eine typisch provinzialrömische, die zwar regionale Unterschiede aufwies, sich aber in wesentlichen Punkten ähnelte: Sprache, Recht, Religion (Christentum) und Sozialstruktur. Ab dem 6. Jh. änderten sich diese Verhältnisse. Zunächst schufen die neuen politischen Bedingungen neue Zugehörigkeiten, die die Alpenprovinzen ab dem 6. Jh. an den Norden, an die Reiche fränkischer Herrschaft angliederten. Es entstanden zahlreiche Grenzpunkte Richtung Süden und später auch Osten, wo sich ab etwa 600 das awarisch-slawische Reich erstreckte. Zeuge der nun entstandenen Grenzen sind zahlreiche Höhenfestungen, eigens eingesetzte Grenztruppen und Talsperren zur Sicherung des Territoriums und der Bevölkerung. Der geänderte Blick brachte auch einige römische Alpen-Topoi zum Verschwinden, etwa den Topos der lebensfeindlichen Alpen oder von dem Gebirge als Mauern Italiens. Weitere Änderungen betrafen die Übergänge. Aus unterschiedlichsten Gründen entstanden neue Wege und alte verloren an Wichtigkeit. Ein Beispiel ist der Mont Cenis, der vor allem aufgrund der wachsenden Pilgerströme von den britischen Inseln den wichtigen römischen Alpenübergang Montgenèvre ersetzte. In den zentralen Alpen erfreute sich Churrätien, nicht zuletzt durch die stabilen politischen Verhältnisse, einer großen Beliebtheit, während Übergänge östlich davon lediglich als Nebenwege wahrgenommen wurden. Ein großer Bruch für die alpinen Menschen bedeuteten die spätantiken Veränderungen der Siedlungsstrukturen, die in allen Provinzen des ehemaligen römischen Reiches stattfanden und auch in den Alpen beobachtet werden können: die alten römischen Städte verloren ihre Substanz und verschwanden teilweise ganz, währenddessen neue Zentren erschaffen wurden, allen voran die Klöster. Einst weniger wichtige Siedlungen, wie das antike Iuvavum/Salzburg, gewannen massiv an Bedeutung, während andere römische Städte wie Teurnia, Aguntum aber auch Octodurum vergingen. Allerdings blieben die jeweiligen Siedlungskammern stets bedeutend - es ging nur die antike Stadtstruktur unter. Eine große Rolle in der Veränderung dieser Siedlungsmuster spielte die Kirche, da Bischofssitze und Kirchen von bedeutenderen Heiligen einen Anziehungspunkt für die lokale Bevölkerung darstellten. Die großen Umwälzungen der spätantiken Wirtschaft betrafen vor allem den transalpinen Handel, da viele Produkte, wie Olivenöl, hochwertige Keramik, Salz und Getreide kaum mehr über die Alpen gebracht wurden. Die lokale Landwirtschaft hingegen, die nur wenig Überschuss für Grundbesitzer und Reisende produzierte, änderte sich zunächst noch wenig. Die Bewirtschaftung mehrerer Höhenstufen bis hin zu den Almen oberhalb der Baumgrenze wurzelt in römischer und vorrömischer Zeit und blieb auch im frühen Mittelalter bestehen. Eine Spezialisierung betraf nur ganz wenige landwirtschaftliche Produkte, beispielsweise Wein und vielleicht Käse oder Wolle. Die lokalen Herrschaftsstrukturen konnten sich in den West- und Zentralalpen kontinuierlich aus ihren spätantiken Wurzeln weiterentwickeln. Im 8. und beginnenden 9. Jh. sprachen die Menschen aus diesem Teil der Alpen immer noch eine romanische Sprache, waren christlich und lebten in einer stark geschichteten Gesellschaftsstruktur, die sich laut Quellen nach spätantiken Rechtsgewohnheiten richtete. Im Gegensatz dazu erlebten
The article seeks to demonstrate that the changing and diverse ideas of "freedom" allow us to see and contrast the historical change in the social representation of (referred as) "black" people. First, we start with the analysis of the differentiation that existed in the 15th and 16th centuries between the black and Ethiopian voices that were not synonymous, and whose differentiation and historical change invites us to look more carefully at the social images of the Spanish Golden Age, and establish contrasts with the American Baroque. Then we analyze the enlightened and romantic representations constructed throughout the 18th century, that injected the factor of "passions" and the absence / presence of "spirit" into the ideas of humanization / dehumanization of "blacks"; the existence of people with overflowing passions and spiritual poverty would lead to the emergence of new legitimizing factors to exercise government, control, and enslavement. Next, it will be suggested that the development of natural history, zoology, anatomy, and human and animal physiology converged with the postcolonial transition, leading to the construction of an image of the "black" increasingly related to the manumission, but also with the re-presentation of a neo-savage black, and with the role that this same outburst would have in the colonial wars in America and in the liberation of the new nations. The political liberation is inseparable from corporal, spiritual, and passionate liberation, and in this way the autonomous government of the body and the spirit would affect the construction of a national project that tended to see an exuberant, animalistic and neo-savage (black) body. Through this long-term historical panorama, we want to demonstrate that the image of "the black" has been a stage of "struggles of representation" where new meanings, uses, and functions of "the black" were constantly released and captivated, and that at the same time they were (are they?) generating new ideas on how to liberate and captivate that Other –said- black whose freedom has been (from various, diverse, hegemonic, and contradictory points of view) historically questioned. ; El texto busca demostrar que las ideas cambiantes y diversas de libertad permiten ver y contrastar el cambio histórico de la representación social de la gente denominada "negra". Como primera medida se analiza la diferenciación que existió en los siglos xv y xvi de las voces negro y etíope, que no sinónimos, y cuya diferenciación y cambio histórico nos invita a mirar con más atención las imágenes sociales del siglo de oro español y a establecer contrastes con el barroco americano. Después se analizan las representaciones, ilustradas y románticas, construidas durante el siglo xviii que inyectaron el factor de las "pasiones" y de la ausencia/presencia de "espíritu" en las ideas de humanización/deshumanización de "los negros"; la existencia de gentes de pasiones desbordantes y de pobreza espiritual conllevaría a la emergencia de nuevos factores de legitimación para ejercer gobierno, control y esclavización. A continuación, el texto sugiere que el desarrollo de la historia natural, la zoología, la anatomía y las fisiologías humana y animal, convergieron con el tránsito postcolonial, llevando a la construcción de una imagen del "negro" cada vez más relacionada con la manumisión; pero también con la representación de un negro neo-salvaje, y el papel que ese exabrupto habría de tener en las guerras coloniales en América y en la propia liberación de las nuevas naciones. La liberación política es inseparable de la liberación corporal, espiritual y pasional, y de esta manera el gobierno autónomo del cuerpo y del espíritu iría afectando la construcción de un proyecto nacional que tendía a ver un cuerpo (negro) exuberante, animalesco y neosalvaje. A través de este panorama histórico de larga duración quiere demostrarse que la imagen de "el negro" ha sido un escenario de luchas de representación en las cuales constantemente se liberaban y cautivaban nuevos significados, usos y funciones de "el negro", que a su vez iban (¿van?) generando nuevas ideas del cómo liberar y cautivizar a ese otro negro cuya libertad ha sido —desde varios, diversos, hegemónicos y contradictorios puntos de vista— históricamente puesta en duda. ; O texto procura demonstrar que a comutação e a diversidade das ideias de liberdade permitem ver e contrastar a mudança histórica na representação social das pessoas referidas como "negras". Em primeiro lugar, analisa-se a diferenciação que existiu nos séculos xv e xvi entre as vozes negras e etíopes, que não eram sinônimos, e cuja diferenciação e mudança histórica nos convida olhar de perto para as imagens sociais da Idade de Ouro espanhola, e estabelecer contrastes com o barroco americano. Segue-se uma análise das representações construídas ao longo do século xviii, ilustradas e românticas, que injetaram o fator "paixões" e a ausência/presença de "espírito" nas ideias de humanização/desumanização dos "negros"; a existência de pessoas com paixões desbordadas e pobreza espiritual levaria à emergência de novos fatores de legitimidade para exercer governo, controlo e escravização. A seguir, sugere-se que o desenvolvimento da história natural, da zoologia, da anatomia e das fisiologias humana e animal, convergiram com o trânsito pós-colonial, levando à construção de uma imagem do "negro" cada vez mais relacionada com a alforria, mas também à representação de um negro neo-selvagem, e ao papel que esse mesmo exabrupto teria nas guerras coloniais na América e na própria libertação das novas nações. A libertação política é inseparável da libertação corporal, espiritual e apaixonada, e desta forma o governo autónomo do corpo e do espírito afetou a construção de um projeto nacional que tendia a ver um corpo exuberante, animalesco, e neo-selvagem (negro). Através deste panorama histórico de longo prazo, quer-se mostrar que a imagem do "negro" tem sido um cenário de lutas de representação em que novos significados, usos e funções do "negro" eram constantemente libertados e cativados, e que, por sua vez, geravam (agora também?), novas ideias de como libertar e cativar aquele outro "negro" cuja liberdade tem sido historicamente questionada desde pontos de vista diversos, hegemônicos e contraditórios.
В статье рассмотрен феномен «информация» через призму определений, которые даются различными науками. Посредством диаграммы сродства выделяются основные категории-смыслы этого термина. Так, в ходе анализа были получены следующие категории: процесс, переход, алгоритм, отображение, код, выбор, знания (сведения). Обобщение этих категорий дает возможность дефинировать понятие «информация» как феномена «системной связности». Такой подход позволяет анализировать современное общество, которое подвержено постоянным кризисам (экономическим, политическим, экологическим, энергетическим, экзистенциальным и пр.), как общество непрекращающегося информационного кризиса. Информационный кризис позволяет продуцирование ложной связности в обществе, что затрудняет как общее управление, так и индивидуальную ориентацию человека в окружающем мире. Ложная связность повышает уровень общей запутанности в различных сферах жизнедеятельности общества. В статье показано, что воспринятая ложная связность порождает ошибочные решения, а в долгосрочной перспективе – и кризисные явления в обществе. Указывается, что индивидуальная способность к пониманию окружающего мира имеет очень большое значение с точки зрения развития человеческого общества. Чем меньше человек способен к прогнозированию своих действий, тем больше ошибочных результатов следует ожидать от него и его деятельности. В статье предлагается формула смысла информации, которая показывает вариативную природу этого явления. А также она позволяет понять, каким образом можно снижать вариативность смысловой нагрузки информации. Сама работа с информацией представляется как сложный процесс, направленный на выявление связности объектов посредством детализации информации об объекте. Более подробно этот способ работы с информацией рассматривается в подходе «инфоведения», задача которого совершить деконструкцию смысла и произвести своеобразную очистку информации. При этом «очистка» информации от ложной связности рассматривается как инструмент, позволяющий увидеть мир иначе, то есть выйти за рамки привычных парадигм. А также это возвращает человеку функцию прогнозирования с высокой степенью вероятности исполнения прогноза. Исполняющиеся прогнозы для человека являются важной составляющей его динамичного развития, подкрепленного системой внутреннего «вознаграждения». Таким образом, может преодолеваться внутренний (экзистенциальный) информационный кризис человека, а также различные другие внешние кризисы, развивающиеся в обществе. ; The article deals with the "information" phenomenon, which was considered through the lens of definitions given by various sciences. With the help of the affinity diagram, the main semantic categories of this term, such as process, transition, algorithm, reflection, code, choice and knowledge (data), were obtained. In order to give a general definition of the "information" term as the "system coherence" phenomenon the generalization method was used. This approach makes it possible to analyze modern society that is prone to constant crises (economic, political, ecological, energy and existential one, etc.) as a society of an ongoing crisis of information. The crisis of information potentiates false coherence in the society that makes both general management and individual orientation of a person in the world around more complicated. False coherence increases the level of general confusion among various groups of society. It is shown that perceived false coherence gives rise to wrong decisions and crisis phenomena in the society in the long run. The author points out that the individual ability to understand the outside world is very important from the human society development point of view. The less a person can predict their actions, the more misguided should be the results expected from them and their activities. In the article the formula for the information meaning that shows the variable nature of this phenomenon is proposed. It also explains how to reduce the variability of the information semantic load. The work with information is presented as a complex process aimed to identify the coherence of objects through the detalization of the information about them. In more detail this method of work with information is considered in the "infology" approach, which is aimed to deconstruct the meaning and make a kind of information cleaning. At the same time, information "cleaning" from false coherence is considered as a tool that makes it possible to see the world differently, that is, go beyond the usual paradigms. What is more, it returns a forecasting function to a person with a high probability of forecast completion, which is an important component of person's dynamic development supported by the internal "reward" system. Thus, the internal (existential) information crisis of a person, as well as many other external crises developing in the society, can be overcome. ; У статті розглянуто феномен «інформація» через призму визначень, які надаються різними науками. За допомогою діаграми спорідненості виокремлюються основні категорії-смисли даного терміна, були отримані наступні категорії: процес, перехід, алгоритм, відображення, код, вибір, знання (відомості). Узагальнення цих категорій дає можливість дефініювати поняття «інформація» як феномену «системної зв'язності». Такий підхід дозволяє аналізувати сучасне суспільство, яке схильне до постійних криз (економічних, політичних, екологічних, енергетичних, екзистенціальних та ін.), як суспільство інформаційної кризи, що не припиняється. Інформаційна криза спричиняє продукування в суспільстві неправдивої зв'язності, що ускладнює як загальне управління, так й індивідуальну орієнтацію людини в навколишньому світі. Помилкова зв'язність підвищує рівень загальної заплутаності в різних сферах життєдіяльності суспільства. Показано, що сприйнята помилкова зв'язність породжує помилкові рішення, а в довгостроковій перспективі – і кризові явища в суспільстві. Вказується, що індивідуальна здатність до розуміння навколишнього світу має дуже велике значення з точки зору розвитку людського суспільства. Чим менше людина здатна до прогнозування своїх дій, тим більше помилкових результатів слід очікувати від неї та її діяльності. У статті пропонується формула сенсу інформації, яка показує варіативну природу цього явища. Також вона дозволяє зрозуміти, яким чином можна знижувати варіативність смислового навантаження інформації. Сама робота з інформацією представляється як складний процес, спрямований на виявлення зв'язності об'єктів за допомогою деталізації інформації про об'єкт. Більш детально цей спосіб роботи з інформацією розглядається у підході «інфознавства», завдання якого – здійснити деконструкцію сенсу і зробити своєрідне очищення інформації. При цьому «очищення» інформації від помилкової зв'язності розглядається як інструмент, що дозволяє побачити світ інакше, тобто вийти за рамки звичних парадигм. А також це повертає людині функцію прогнозування з високим ступенем ймовірності виконання прогнозу. Прогнози, які виконуються, є для людини важливою складовою її динамічного розвитку, підкріпленого системою внутрішньої «винагороди». Таким чином, може долатися внутрішня (екзистенціальна) інформаційна криза людини, а також різні інші зовнішні кризи, що розвиваються в суспільстві.
During COVID-19, early-childhood school closings led to higher levels of stress in parents when compared to childless adults. In addition, lack of time to prepare, as well as mental-health problems, worry, and stress in parenting, may have hampered parents' ability to support their children's educational needs. The research aims to solve the problem of early childhood parenting during learning from home and improve the quality of early childhood parenting. The research method uses the research and development stage of the Borg & Gall model. Participants are mothers who have children aged 5-6 years. The data collection technique was done through expert validation and effectiveness testing with a quasi-experimental design. The data analysis used paired t-test statistical analysis. The findings show that the validity of the results of the material expert's test is 96%, and the media expert's test is 94% in the very good category. The effectiveness test based on the pre-test and post-test results showed that Sig. (2-tailed) <0,05 (α), which means that the parenting e-book media significantly increases mothers' understanding of parenting well-being practices in early childhood. The implications of this multimedia-based anyflip e-book can be downloaded via gadgets, android, laptop, practical, easy to read and repeated to accompany childcare activities from home. Keywords: Anyflip E-book, Early Childhood, Parenting References Banerjee, A., Hanna, R., Kyle, J., Olken, B. A., & Sumarto, S. (2019). Private Outsourcing and Competition: Subsidized Food Distribution in Indonesia. Journal of Political Economy, 127(1), 101–137. https://doi.org/10.1086/700734 Borg, W. R., & Gall, M. D. (2007). Educational Research an Introduction. Fourth Edition. Bacon Publishing. Bruni, O., Sette, S., Fontanesi, L., Baiocco, R., Laghi, F., & Baumgartner, E. (2015). Technology Use and Sleep Quality in Preadolescence and Adolescence. 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This thesis starts with the premise that to address ecological and climate crises, we need to understand their psychological and cultural roots found in the separation of modern societies from the natural world. This separation permeates mainstream approaches to sustainability that either sustain business-as-usual of the unbridled economic growth, or reform it with greener markets and technologies. At the same time, there is an emerging interest in alternative transitional ecopreneurs who have a different relationship with the natural environment and an agency with potentially more radical consequences for societal change. I look at ecopreneurs within the contemporary back-to-the-land movement, asking the following question: How do ecopreneurs reconnect with the land, and what does this mean for degrowth? My exploration was grounded in a dialogue between the literature on degrowth, ecopreneurship, critical organisational studies, and ecological embeddedness; and the ethnographic study of eleven back-to-the-landers who started small-scale ecological farms and permaculture enterprises in Sweden. I adopted a critical, narrative, and ethnographic research approach. The empirical research consisted of two studies that relied on narrative interviews and deep observations. The result was four essays that together, with the help of stories of back-to-the-land ecopreneurs, develop a process theory of ecological embedding. Ecological embedding is a process by which an ecopreneur is becoming more rooted in the land that provides the ecological conditions for life and economic activity. This process may be catalysed by psychological suffering in modern societies – an inner revolt – with examples of burn-out from the "rat race", experiential deprivation of the office work, and ecological anxiety. The way back-to-the-land ecopreneurs develop, nurture, and negotiate their physical, emotional and spiritual ties with the land shapes the ongoing sensemaking and organising that is central to the formation of their alternative livelihoods and enterprises. It is also established that ecological embedding requires physical and psychological work on behalf of the back-to-the-land ecopreneur who navigates the contested terrain between the mainstream economy and alternative degrowth futures. The overall contribution consists in using the voices of back-to-the-landers in order to present their everyday experiences and critical knowledges about ecological embedding and transitions to a society that lives within planetary boundaries. Back-to-the-landers practice alternative forms of ecopreneurship that depart from the discursive and material conditions of the modern growth economy, and that revolve around a different set of values and objectives such as a more grounded life, non-materialist conceptions of well-being, regenerative ethos, post-capitalist relations, conviviality, resilience, alternative food economies and forms of local development. It is important to recognise the critical role of this new generation of individuals and families who enter alternative agriculture based on environmental and lifestyle aspirations, and who work hard to realise these aspirations on a daily basis, in spite of immense personal challenges and systemic hurdles that come from lacking institutional and political support. If we take seriously the ecopsychological crises of the modern civilisation and growth capitalism, to reconnect with local ecologies and to creatively downscale our economies becomes crucial. And this is not going to be an easy task. ; Denna avhandling börjar med premissen att vi för att möta de ekologiska kriserna, inklusive klimathotet, behöver förstå krisernas psykologiska och kulturella rötter som återfinns i separationen mellan moderna samhällen och naturen. Denna separation genomsyrar de konventionella hållbarhetsstrategierna som antingen upprätthåller den eviga ekonomiska tillväxten eller reformerar den med grönare marknader och teknik. Samtidigt växer det fram ett intresse för alternativ omställning genom ekoprenörer som har en annorlunda relation till naturen och ett agentskap med potentiellt mer radikala konsekvenser för samhällsförändring. Jag betraktar ekoprenörer inom den nya gröna vågen genom följande fråga: Hur återanknyter ekoprenörer till jorden, och vad betyder detta för nedväxt? Mitt utforskande grundade sig i en dialog mellan, å ena sidan, litteraturen inom nedväxt, ekoprenörskap, kritiska organisationsstudier och ekologisk inbäddning, och, å andra sidan, en etnografisk studie av elva "gröna vågare" som startat småskaliga ekologiska jordbruk och företag inom permakultur i Sverige. Min forskningsansats var kritisk, narrativ och etnografisk. Den empiriska forskningen bestod av två studier som baserades på narrativa intervjuer och djupa observationer. Resultatet blev fyra essäer som tillsammans, med hjälp av berättelser av ekoprenörer inom den nya gröna vågen, utvecklar en processteori av ekologisk inbäddning. Ekologisk inbäddning är en process genom vilken en ekoprenör förstärker sin relation, och återanknyter till jorden och platsen som ger de ekologiska förutsättningarna för liv och ekonomisk verksamhet. Denna process kan katalyseras av psykologiskt lidande i moderna samhällen – ett inre uppror – med exempel som utbrändhet genom ekorrhjulets krav, kontorsarbetets alienering och klimatångest. Hur ekoprenörer i den gröna vågen utvecklar, vårdar och förhandlar sina fysiska, emotionella och andliga band med jorden formar deras pågående meningsskapande och organisering som är centrala för alternativa livsstilar och verksamheter. Det visar sig även att ekologisk inbäddning kräver fysiskt och psykologiskt arbete av gröna våg-ekoprenören som navigerar i den omstridda terrängen mellan tillväxtekonomin och alternativa framtider bortom tillväxt. Huvudbidraget är att använda röster av gröna vågare för att presentera vardagliga erfarenheter och kritisk kunskap om ekologisk inbäddning och övergång till ett samhälle som lever inom planetens gränser. De utövar alternativa former av ekoprenörskap som avviker från den moderna tillväxtekonomins diskursiva och materiella förhållanden, och som kretsar kring en annan uppsättning av värden och mål, som ett jordat liv, icke-materialistiska uppfattningar om välbefinnande, regenerativt etos, post-kapitalistiska relationer, resiliens, alternativa matekonomier och former av lokal utveckling. Det är viktigt att erkänna den kritiska roll som en ny generation individer och familjer kan spela; de som kommer in i alternativt jordbruk utifrån sina miljö- och livsstilsambitioner, och som dagligen arbetar hårt för att förverkliga dessa ambitioner trots enorma personliga utmaningar och systemhinder på grund av avsaknat institutionellt och politiskt stöd. Om vi tar den moderna civilisationens och tillväxtkapitalismens ekopsykologiska kriser på allvar kommer det vara avgörande att återanknyta till lokala ekologiska förhållanden och att skala ner våra ekonomier på kreativa sätt. Och det kommer inte att vara lätt.
