Suchergebnisse

Eric Stein, a well-known scholar of international and comparative law and a native of Czechoslovakia, was invited by the Czechoslovak government as a member of an international group to assist in the drafting of a new constitution. This book is based on his experiences during years of work on these negotiations, as well as close to one hundred interviews with political figures, journalists, and academics and extensive research in the primary documents. It is a fascinating story told from a unique perspective in an engaging and readable style. It will appeal to historians, lawyers, and social scientists interested in the process of transformation in Eastern Europe and the study of ethnic conflict, as well as the general reader interested in modern European history

This study of Avery Alder and Benjamin Rosenbaum's Belonging Outside Belonging system for tabletop roleplaying games (ttrpgs) follows in Jacques Rancière's project of ignorance, as set out in The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987) and as continued in The Emancipated Spectator (2008). With Rancière's politics as a framework, this study works backward from Ian Bogost's Persuasive Games (2007) to his Unit Operations (2006), and then to Alain Badiou's Manifesto for Philosophy (1989), in order to recover the radical politics undergirding Bogost's distinct method of game criticism. Badiou's Manifesto, going beyond Bogost's primary philosophical source, Badiou's Being and Event (1988), clarifies the political stakes of Badiou's ontology, allowing us to return to the present with a more robust politics of procedurality motivating our critical work. From here, Alder and Rosenbaum's Dream Askew / Dream Apart (2018) furnishes us with a provocative model of emancipatory procedurality suited not only for radical play but radical design, challenging the limits of Bogost's "persuasion" as an activist paradigm.

What is the role of play at the end of the world? As reports on the climate crisis become increasingly dire, we must ask ourselves what good it is to talk about games, and particularly those games that operate in a fantastic register. The question inevitably arises: why continue to play at all when the world is on fire around us? Indeed, as Emily Rose recently remarked in an article on RE:BIND, not only is the planet on the brink of collapse, but the game industry, as it currently operates, is complicit in many of the unsustainable human practices that have led us to this point. The "abstract theatre of leisure-crafting," as Rose phrases it, is not innocent. So, then, why play? This study takes up these urgent questions through close readings of developer FromSoftware's critically acclaimed Souls series of video games: Dark Souls (2011), Dark Souls II (2014), and Dark Souls III (2016). In these games, the end of the world drives each narrative, but is also the thematic support for the basic gameplay loop that organizes players' traversals of each gameworld. It is the contention of this paper that the Souls trilogy mounts a radical critique of political, epistemological, and ontological regimes that desperately cling to the status quo, proposing in their stead a myriad of new forms of existence that might be able to thrive in and through the apocalypse. These alternatives are born of affinities and agencies entirely other to, and often directly opposed to, the powers that have led the present world to its doom, and through play, the Souls games invite their players to consider such 'minor literatures' as legitimate alternatives to that which claims to be the only legitimate source of authority. In the opening cinematic to Dark Souls, we are told that "the flames will fade, and only dark will remain," but it is precisely in this darkness that a fecund plurality of potentialities is to be found.

"Economy," the opening chapter of Thoreau's Walden, is a lengthy exploration of the conditions of existence of the New England settler. Before encountering his famous wish to "live deliberately" (83), readers of Walden are confronted with Thoreau's sardonic treatment of the so-called "serfs" of Concord, Massachusetts, and immersed in his economic theorizing (7). For one whose thought has influenced the likes of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King Jr., Thoreau's repudiation of his community might come across as aloof and asocial, a privileged detachment from the concerns of 'common' or 'everyday' life. This paper argues, however, that far from being a disavowal of sociality, Thoreau's economic theory operates within a different field of the social, one with roots in the oikonomia or "household management" of Aristotle's Politics, an economy intimately concerned with care and provision. While modern political economy emphasizes entitlement and contract—which is to say, property—the economy that Thoreau depicts in Walden is one of the home, a shared practice of material space. By engaging with the discourse of his contemporaries and his culture, Thoreau is able to provide his readers with a model for resistance that does not reproduce the conditions he seeks to dismantle.

In this essay I suggest a correlation between the integration level of an international institution and the public discourse about the lack of democracy and legitimacy in the institution's structure and functioning. This discourse includes ideas for remedial action at both the national and international levels; it also becomes inevitably intertwined with other reform proposals that may call for an incremental or—particularly in the case of a more integrated organization—a radical restructuring. Having originated in the highly integrated European Community, the debate on the "democracy-legitimacy deficit" has reached other institutions, particularly the World Trade Organization (WTO) and the international financial bodies, and has become one component of the backlash rhetoric against "globalization."