Suchergebnisse

Les analyses économiques ignorent la guerre, les conflits, les menaces armées ou les investissements nécessaires à la dissuasion et à la défense d'un territoire. Dans ce contexte, deux hypothèses sont présentes ; d'une part la guerre est supposée être un état normal, et d'autre part le développement économique conduit inéluctablement à une paix durable. Si les prédations primitives, esclavagistes ou colonialistes ont été progressivement condamnées, les rapports de force militaires, économiques ou culturels restent bien présents dans le monde moderne. Les antagonismes entre les systèmes économiques ont été violemment ou progressivement résolus par les révolutions, les guerres ou les contestations idéologiques ou religieuses. Au début des années 1990, le communisme propre à l'Union soviétique s'est effondré et l'essor mondial de l'économie de marché a laissé, un temps seulement, imaginer que les guerres allaient disparaître 1. Aujourd'hui, dans un monde tourné vers le marché et l'intérêt individuel, une société « consumériste » se développe, avec un essor des frustrations matérialistes provoquées par l'importance des choix offerts par les marchés et les moyens réduits au regard de salaires relatifs déclinants. Il en résulte une production croissante « d'oubliés du système », dont une part non négligeable d'entre eux s'inscrivent dans un combat idéologique ou religieux. La cupidité extrême comme forme sociale de la performance ne peut constituer le but ultime des êtres humains. L'espoir matérialiste, porté par les démocraties, d'un développement continu favorable à la « masse » des vivants se conjugue aujourd'hui avec l'essor d'une pauvreté relative et de la précarité. Il en résulte aussi un rejet des valeurs démocratiques et un retour vers des formes d'intolérance et de refus de la liberté individuelle et collective de penser. Les Grands classiques du début du XIXe siècle, Ricardo, Malthus et Marx étaient pessimistes ; selon eux les salaires ne pouvaient pas s'élever durablement au-dessus du minimum vital, celui ...

Les analyses économiques ignorent la guerre, les conflits, les menaces armées ou les investissements nécessaires à la dissuasion et à la défense d'un territoire. Dans ce contexte, deux hypothèses sont présentes ; d'une part la guerre est supposée être un état normal, et d'autre part le développement économique conduit inéluctablement à une paix durable. Si les prédations primitives, esclavagistes ou colonialistes ont été progressivement condamnées, les rapports de force militaires, économiques ou culturels restent bien présents dans le monde moderne. Les antagonismes entre les systèmes économiques ont été violemment ou progressivement résolus par les révolutions, les guerres ou les contestations idéologiques ou religieuses. Au début des années 1990, le communisme propre à l'Union soviétique s'est effondré et l'essor mondial de l'économie de marché a laissé, un temps seulement, imaginer que les guerres allaient disparaître 1. Aujourd'hui, dans un monde tourné vers le marché et l'intérêt individuel, une société « consumériste » se développe, avec un essor des frustrations matérialistes provoquées par l'importance des choix offerts par les marchés et les moyens réduits au regard de salaires relatifs déclinants. Il en résulte une production croissante « d'oubliés du système », dont une part non négligeable d'entre eux s'inscrivent dans un combat idéologique ou religieux. La cupidité extrême comme forme sociale de la performance ne peut constituer le but ultime des êtres humains. L'espoir matérialiste, porté par les démocraties, d'un développement continu favorable à la « masse » des vivants se conjugue aujourd'hui avec l'essor d'une pauvreté relative et de la précarité. Il en résulte aussi un rejet des valeurs démocratiques et un retour vers des formes d'intolérance et de refus de la liberté individuelle et collective de penser. Les Grands classiques du début du XIXe siècle, Ricardo, Malthus et Marx étaient pessimistes ; selon eux les salaires ne pouvaient pas s'élever durablement au-dessus du minimum vital, celui ...

Many commentators suggest that the Middle East political turbulence was foreseeable and it cannot be said it had been unexpected. However, the diplomatic and intelligence establishments in the United States and the European Union, which have the most crucial stakes in this region, seemed to have been so preoccupied with focusing on Al Qaeda, Hezbol-lah, Hammas, and the Taliban that in a narrow picture they seem to have lost sight of the revolutionary wave, which has altered the governments in Tunis and Cairo and shaved off some of the most hated and oppressive regimes with the sheer example of Hosni Mubarak and Muammar Qaddafi . The spectacular fall of such dictators as Mubarak, has led to the question, whether the "Arab Awakening" was a transformation or a revolution. There are also questions concerning the idea of democratisation of the third world and corruption, which change the Arab governments into "bad apples". According to the western view, democracy is a Janus-faced ideological god, pulling the strings of both politics and economics. One cannot exist without the other, therefore, when we reconsider the political aspect of the Arab uprising, we should not forget about the economy.

International audience ; Biographers have a strong impact on our perception of history. For they offer narratives of the lives of political leaders that necessarily defend a thesis of one sort or another, whether they pretend to strive to comprehend how their individual character has underpinned their political responses to particular crises, or present an overtly biased portrait of historical figures. Biography scholars Hans Renders and Binne de Haan contend that biography designates "the study of the life of an individual, based on the methods of historical scholarship, with the goal of illuminating what is public, explained and interpreted in part from the perspective of the personal" (Theoretical Discussions of Biography. Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, 2014). Since the early nineteenth century, journalists have often played the role of political biographers, turning such figures as Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln into "champions and guardians of American character ideal, attending to the virtues, vices and 'flaws' of their subjects" (Shawn J. Parry-Giles, Hillary Clinton in the News, 2014). Journalistic reporting has influenced political biography by spotlighting the incongruous gossip that sells newspapers, endowing the media with the power to shape a politician's public image through calling attention to eye-catching images and sound bite pieces that simplify the political debate into visual clichés and stereotypical phrases. This issue of Biography aims to further reflection on the evolution of political biography in a media-saturated context, turning political figures (present and past) into celebrities. It has also become a custom for statesmen to write their own autobiography — and more often in fact to have these ghost-written as first-person biographies of sorts (see Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, 2010) — during, before and after their terms of office, thus incorporating their personal path into their political career and vice versa. It is our purpose to question the ...

International audience ; Biographers have a strong impact on our perception of history. For they offer narratives of the lives of political leaders that necessarily defend a thesis of one sort or another, whether they pretend to strive to comprehend how their individual character has underpinned their political responses to particular crises, or present an overtly biased portrait of historical figures. Biography scholars Hans Renders and Binne de Haan contend that biography designates "the study of the life of an individual, based on the methods of historical scholarship, with the goal of illuminating what is public, explained and interpreted in part from the perspective of the personal" (Theoretical Discussions of Biography. Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, 2014). Since the early nineteenth century, journalists have often played the role of political biographers, turning such figures as Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln into "champions and guardians of American character ideal, attending to the virtues, vices and 'flaws' of their subjects" (Shawn J. Parry-Giles, Hillary Clinton in the News, 2014). Journalistic reporting has influenced political biography by spotlighting the incongruous gossip that sells newspapers, endowing the media with the power to shape a politician's public image through calling attention to eye-catching images and sound bite pieces that simplify the political debate into visual clichés and stereotypical phrases. This issue of Biography aims to further reflection on the evolution of political biography in a media-saturated context, turning political figures (present and past) into celebrities. It has also become a custom for statesmen to write their own autobiography — and more often in fact to have these ghost-written as first-person biographies of sorts (see Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, 2010) — during, before and after their terms of office, thus incorporating their personal path into their political career and vice versa. It is our purpose to question the ...

International audience ; Biographers have a strong impact on our perception of history. For they offer narratives of the lives of political leaders that necessarily defend a thesis of one sort or another, whether they pretend to strive to comprehend how their individual character has underpinned their political responses to particular crises, or present an overtly biased portrait of historical figures. Biography scholars Hans Renders and Binne de Haan contend that biography designates "the study of the life of an individual, based on the methods of historical scholarship, with the goal of illuminating what is public, explained and interpreted in part from the perspective of the personal" (Theoretical Discussions of Biography. Approaches from History, Microhistory, and Life Writing, 2014). Since the early nineteenth century, journalists have often played the role of political biographers, turning such figures as Andrew Jackson and Abraham Lincoln into "champions and guardians of American character ideal, attending to the virtues, vices and 'flaws' of their subjects" (Shawn J. Parry-Giles, Hillary Clinton in the News, 2014). Journalistic reporting has influenced political biography by spotlighting the incongruous gossip that sells newspapers, endowing the media with the power to shape a politician's public image through calling attention to eye-catching images and sound bite pieces that simplify the political debate into visual clichés and stereotypical phrases. This issue of Biography aims to further reflection on the evolution of political biography in a media-saturated context, turning political figures (present and past) into celebrities. It has also become a custom for statesmen to write their own autobiography — and more often in fact to have these ghost-written as first-person biographies of sorts (see Roman Polanski's The Ghost Writer, 2010) — during, before and after their terms of office, thus incorporating their personal path into their political career and vice versa. It is our purpose to question the ...

Political theorists have long argued that political participation has been a minimal requirement of democratic political systems. More recently, social scientists have turned their attention to understanding the factors that impede or promote participation. This paper examines several such hypotheses which lie within the framework of personality and social-psychological theory. Briefly stated, this author's contention is that: (1) each individual has a need to have sufficient control over relevant aspects of his life-space, which, under specified conditions, includes the political system; (2) the attempt to satisfy this need in the social world generates basic assumptive beliefs about personal control; and (3) these beliefs have important implications for political participation and the support of regimes.To examine these contentions more fully, we first must consider the concept of political efficacy, especially as it relates to the motivation to participate in political life. It will then be possible to present a theory that links feelings of personal control in the political arena with more basic psychological needs that help to organize the personality system. Finally, we will present some exploratory data on the relation between beliefs in personal control and political participation. While these data do not directly contradict previous empirical studies, they do suggest the possibility that a substantial reorganization of the way in which political efficacy is conceptualized may be in order.

Founded in 1888, James Hardie Industries is one of Australia's oldest, richest and proudest corporations. And its fortunes were based on what proved to be one of the worst industrial poisons of the twentieth century: asbestos. Asbestos House, the name of the grand headquarters that Hardie built itself in 1929, tells two remarkable tales. It relates the frantic financial engineering in 2001 during which Hardie cut adrift its liabilities to sufferers of asbestos-related disease, the public and political odium that followed, and the extraordinary deal that resulted. It is also the story that the

Frontmatter -- Content -- Forms and Functions of Political Humor in Arab Societies -- Beyond Tanfis -- Humor, Mockery and Defamation in Western Sahara -- "We Started to Celebrate Being Egyptian" -- From Equanimity to Agony -- A Festival of Resistance -- Towards an Understanding of the Role of Political Satire in Sudan -- "Candies from Eastern Ghouta" -- If a Duck is Drawn in the Desert, Does Anybody See It? -- Dealing with Politics in Palestine -- From Kuwait's Margins to Tolaytila's Mainstream -- A Critique of Religious Sectarianism through Satire -- Authors

Founded at the turn of the twentieth century, the irrigated colony at Mexicali, Baja California was established by Chinese farmers and merchants as a cotton-growing enclave. This dissertation recuperates the marginalized history of this community's development and uncovers why this historical narrative has been erased. I use a diverse array of U.S. and Mexican archival sources to examine the frontiers of U.S. imperialism, explore Mexican racial formations, and trace changes to a trans-national Chinese community.Through different types of historical evidence I make four arguments. First, that a trans-Pacific conceptual framework helps to better understand the role that Chinese communities played in the formation of the U.S.-Mexico border. I details how the conquest of Mexico and imperial aggression in East Asia allowed the U.S. to usurp the colonial circuits of the trans-Pacific Spanish Galleon trade. Through the simultaneous assault in Asia and Mexico the Pacific became crossed with pathways that encouraged the Chinese to settle in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands. Second, that migrating Chinese merchants and farmers were central to the development of Mexicali. I illustrate how their expertise in China's cotton industry prepared them well to turn the desert border region into an irrigated colony. I trace their transnational geographies and social networks of this diasporic Chinese community in order to show how Mexicali became a Chinese place. Third, I contend that the racial boundaries of post-Revolutionary Mexican nationalism considered the Chinese community in Mexicali an immanent threat. I describe how definitions of what the one-time president, Abelardo Rodriguez, called "genuine Mexican colonization" racially segregated the economic development and political integration of Baja California. Lastly, I demonstrate how a series of racial programs of Mexicanización sought to undermine the Chinese community and expunge them from historical narratives of the region. Baja California historiography, Mexicali's public spaces, and a museum illustrate different modes of erasure and reconfiguration in narratives about the history of Mexicali's Chinese community.

An FBI investigation of county purchasing activities in the mid 1980s resulted in the conviction of 55 of Mississippi's 410 county supervisors. Analyzing data from the state's 1987 county supervisor elections and hypothesizing that candidates' demands for votes increase as the gains from holding public office increase, we predict larger voter turnouts in the 26 of the state's 82 counties where supervisor corruption was exposed. Holding constant average voter turnout in the preceding U.S. presidential election and controlling for the competitiveness of supervisor races, we find that more Mississippians indeed voted in corrupt than in non-corrupt counties.

The historiography of race is usually framed by two discontinuities: the invention of race by European naturalists and anthropologists, marked by Carl Linnaeus's (1735) Systema naturae and the demise of racial typologies after World War II (WWII) in favor of population-based studies of human diversity. This framing serves a similar function as the quotation marks that almost invariably surround the term. "Race" is placed outside of rational discourse as a residue of outdated essentialist and hierarchical thinking. I will throw doubt on this underlying assumption, not in order to re-legitimate race but in order to understand better why race has been, and continues to be, such a politically powerful and explosive concept.