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Guy Oakes, in one of his introductions to his translations of Max Weber, points out that it is surprising that Weber wrote so many epistemological essays, given his principled preference for substantive work. The use of the historical individual and the ideal type specifies the principles of selection of the problem to be investigated, always with reference to the value relevance of a historian and his age. Thus, the historical individual and the ideal type are constructed by the investigator to create a relatively standard criterion for selecting the facts that in total are infinitely richer than the historical individual or the type itself. Their use can only reveal aspects of empirical reality from the standpoint of a value-relevant problem, but they can never reveal the total reality itself.

In a recently published personal reminiscence of Robert E. Park that also contains a subtle critique of his place among the master-thinkers of the sociological discipline, Edward Shils asserts that Park's work would have had a longer life if he had been able to draw on Max Weber's certain writings. and if he had studied and pondered writings of other such thinkers. Of course, Park was not unaware of Weber's verstehende sociology--he referred to it in one of his writings in the 1930s--nor was he ignorant of the contributions of other social thinkers. In the social sciences in general and sociology in particular, research is all too often associated with the transmogrification of knowledge into numbers and the reification of the latter into the simulacra of theory. Park's career as an academician was confounded by this disciplinary hubris. At the turn of the nineteenth century, as sociology emerged from its immersion in German romantic philosophy, its academicians still clung to its baptism in American Protestant thought, seeking to infuse the latter with the trappings of positive science. In any event, a transvalued and secularizing sociology would have to come to terms with the existence of evil in the world.

This paper is an exploration of cinematic memory as a resource for remembering large-scale Keralan migration to the Gulf since the late 1960s. The south Indian state of Kerala, which predominantly speaks Malayalam, is a major contributor to the migrant labour force in the Gulf region for the last five decades. However, until recently, the migrant figured in the public discourse of Kerala as an economic agent alone. There has been increasing instances of memorialising the Gulf in the Malayalam public sphere since the beginning of the 2000s which brings to light the subjective aspects of the Gulf migration. However, what is lost in these accounts is the simultaneity and interlinked nature of the two places. Cinema, on the other hand, offers resources to inscribe the mutuality of the two places in the collective memory of Kerala. Invoking Pierre Nora's concept of places of memory, the paper looks at cinematic renditions of 'Dubai' as one such site of memory in the present when the image of Dubai and the profile of Keralan migrant has undergone a shift. Taking the example of one Malayalam film, Pathemari (Salim Ahamed, 2015), and tracing its cinematic genealogy, this paper analyses the ways in which 'Dubai' is remembered and how this remembrance inscribes the Gulf as part of the collective memory of Kerala. The paper identifies the persistence of filmed space, intertextuality, and the archivality of the star body as the modes in which cinematic memory achieves this collective memorialisation. The mutuality between Kerala and Dubai, offered by cinematic memory, allows it to be an act of affective citizenship on the part of the migrants, i.e. embodied and sensorial acts of claiming the universal right to have rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

For more than a decade, the importance of urban social movements has been systematically increasing in the Polish public sphere. However, available theories of social movements cannot account for the variety of forms of urban mobilization or for the ideological differences between organizations. The aim of this paper is to demonstrate the relevance of Pierre Bourdieu's theory of social class for research on urban movements. Using the concepts of "capital" and "habitus," the paper explores the social vision and process of the emergence of two activist organizations in Warsaw, Poland. The study is based on qualitative research conducted from 2016 to 2019, which included an analysis of secondary resources and individual in-depth interviews with members from each organization. Bourdieu's theory of social class facilitates consideration of different aspects of the functioning of urban social movements, including the role of resources and competences, ideological divisions, and chances of success. The theory also provides an explanation for the importance of class within urban social movements. The article shows that, even though the demands of social movements appear to be values-led, in fact, they are based on the class interests of their members. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite widespread acknowledgement of the value of sustainability, the transition towards more sustainable economies and societies remains a challenge around the world. Civil societies play an important role not only in supporting government efforts on sustainability by 'filling gaps' and raising social awareness, but also in pioneering new practices and disrupting particular governmental or corporate strategies, as well as engaging and empowering previously marginalised individuals and groups. Yet civil society is not always a champion of sustainability nor of democracy; these actors may of course also destabilise innovations, depoliticise sustainability issues by reifying certain concepts or approaches and reinforce social hierarchies and patterns of exclusion that can undermine any transformative potential and bolster the unsustainable status quo. This Special Issue is therefore dedicated to interrogating what we see as the ambiguous, yet critical, role played by civil societies in sustainability politics. This introductory paper intends not only to draw attention to some of the arguments, theories and challenges found in each of the individual papers collected here, but also to pull on the common threads that run through them, as well as to unpick some of the different uses of the key terminology that they employ. We aim, moreover, to highlight the inevitable tension between the 'democratic side' and the 'dark side' of civil society and its politics of sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an exploratory examination of regional think tanks in Japan and outlines the contribution that such an examination can make both as a comparative Asian case for regional think tank research as well as in theorization of regional think tanks on the basis of various constructs of place priority. After briefly outlining the main trends and tensions in the study of think tanks in general and providing an overview of the literature on think tanks in Japan, the paper focuses specifically on the small-scale regional think tanks situated throughout Japan. The conclusions are twofold. First of all, the research builds on previous research in furthering the descriptive characteristics of Japanese regional think tanks. Second, the research outlines various place priority constructs through which regional think tanks can be described, compared, and analyzed. These are the specific dimensions of influence that place priority think tanks bring to their locale: local development through infrastructural advocacy, local development through objective information generation, and local development through knowledge and leadership cultivation. The analysis that leads to these conclusions speaks on a broader level to the contribution that such a focus on small-scale think tanks can make to research on think tanks at large. Case study of such regional think tanks offers insight into a major tension confronting contemporary think tank research: agenda advocacy versus the various other objectives that think tanks aim for. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Why have Singapore's unique developmental state arrangements persisted in a region which has experienced democratic change? This paper argues that this is due to the PAP state's successful legitimation of its unique brand of meritocracy, one which has both competitive and interventionist elements. During the colonial era, a culture of economic meritocracy evolved in a bottom-up process through social and commercial interactions between the British class and Chinese community. This was then transmuted by the PAP's top-down imposition of the institutions and discourses of political meritocracy. This cultural hybrid allows the state to sustain its hegemony in the face of progressive social change. Accordingly, our emphasis on the wider institutional environment within which merit is conceived helps to better illuminate Singapore's challenges of encouraging organic innovation, alleviating social stratification, and opening up its political arena. This paper suggests that the problems in these areas stem not from meritocracy per se, but from the PAP's "monocentric meritocracy" where merit is narrowly defined and singularly imposed in the post-colonial era. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By revisiting three empirical qualitative studies, the paper elaborates on conceptual and methodological issues pertaining to clarification of the use of the concept of politicization and "ordinary relationships to politics." The first study was conducted at the end of the 1990s on voluntary associations of young people of foreign descent in the French suburbs; the second was devoted to ordinary relationships to politics among young people in working-class neighborhoods in France; the third involves ongoing fieldwork examining non-profit organizations and their relationship to the state, focusing notably on evangelical non-profits in the Boston area of the USA. Although the research questions were different, they dealt with ordinary relationships to politics (ORP). This notion encompasses two dimensions. On the one hand, the idea that what determines one's relationship to politics is not only political, but also social: that we need to "embed" the study of relationships to politics into social dimensions. This is related to the study of the determination of relationships to politics. On the other hand, the idea that a relationship to politics is not only a relationship to the institutionalized political field, but that we need to adopt a broader definition of what politicization is, in order to grasp its ordinary forms, especially—but not only—when we deal with the working class. In this case, what is at stake is the definition of politicization. Nowadays, there is relative consensus in the literature regarding the determination of relationships to politics, but the definition of what politicization is remains much more controversial. In this paper, I present the terms of this controversy and the value in and limits of the various perspectives and, more specifically, I elaborate on how the changes in the type of fieldwork I conducted, in the national contexts, and the theoretical questions I asked impacted on the way I chose to define politicization. I suggest combining three definitions of politicization: (i) the legitimist or realist conception based on the relationship to the institutional political sphere; (ii) the conception of politicization as the identification of shared problems calling for collective solutions; and finally, (iii) approaching politicization as the readiness to be moved, to consider points of view other than those initially adopted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As one of the major causes of climate change, there is an urgent need for a fundamental transformation of the food system. Calls for greater sustainability underscore the importance of integrating civil society and the local knowledge of citizens in this transformation process. One increasingly relevant organisation that can actively engage a plurality of actors from across civil society is the Food Policy Council (FPC). In this paper, we explore the potential role of FPCs in sustainability politics to create an alternative food system, with a focus on the co-production of knowledge for policy-making. We propose that the co-production of knowledge requires knowledge inclusion, exchange and transmission, and we focus on the challenges that can arise for FPCs. Our paper shows that bottom-up emerging FPCs constitute a new form of alternative food organisation that can integrate and support the critical capacity of civil society in food system transformation, but also face potential struggles in the co-production of knowledge for sustainable food policy-making. The paper further highlights that co-producing knowledge in and for sustainability transformation is fundamentally a political process, with politics broadly conceived. It not only has relevance for the institutions of formal politics, but emerges in and is intrinsically linked to the grassroots collective action of contentious and prefigurative politics in civil society. FPCs (re)politicise food by combining these various kinds of sustainability politics, which constitutes their transformative potential. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the tension between endorsements of relativism and anti-relativisms in the European historical culture between 2000 and 2020. Relativism, defined as the idea that the authority of a claim is always and only dependent on the context in which it is made, has historically been controversial. In the EU's historical culture, relativism is sometimes endorsed, and sometimes not. This paper finds that in the EU historical culture, anti-relativism should analytically be distinguished from anti-relativizing—even though the terminology of "relativism" and "relativizing" is often used interchangeably. This insight helps to understand what is at stake in EU debates around memory and history and replaces the question of whether (not) to be relativist, with that of when (not) to relativize. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper problematizes the notion of "intent" through the concept of "involuntary resistance". Departing from the narratives of employees in nursing homes in Sweden during the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, we suggest that neoliberal norms and a local management that capitalizes on social hierarchies (sex, age, class, etc.) were the context of the strong biopolitical state management that occurred due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The friction between different forms of governing became a seedbed for an involuntary resistance with an unclear intent against the state recommendations. This sheds light upon the need to (re)frame the current dominance of specific types of knowledge that are constructed in the field of resistance. We suggest that new paths of thought are needed—within social sciences—that work towards a wider conceptualizing of resistance, which embraces practices that lie outside the common thought of dissent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his opening remarks in Economy and Society, Max Weber states that the sociologist converts concepts into types and searches for formal rules of social action. He distinguishes sociology from history as a science by noting that the latter strives for causal analysis and the description of unique historical activities, structures, personalities and cultural phenomena. The concept of "meaning," in the sense of a comprehensive, interpretive sociology, must, however, embrace more than the contemporaneous. The emphasis on conceptualization in neo-Kantian thought follows from this assumption. Weber was reluctant to generalize his findings by postulating principles of history that go beyond concrete historiography. Despite his differences with the neo-Kantians, Weber was fascinated by the methodological clarity and usefulness of their idea of the conceptualization of the historical individual because he understood the necessity of including the concrete historical world in his social environment.

In this paper, I present a case of dispute resolution from Pakistan where kinship leaders play a key role in resolving local disputes. Scholars often cite that such practices provide evidence of a failed state. However, I show how these traditional practices elucidate ongoing processes of boundary management. On the one hand, these practices reveal the efforts by non-state leaders to carve out their autonomy by taking on a role traditionally played by the state. In fact, their ability to management local/state boundaries is linked to how they manage boundaries within their communities. The state, in turn, recognizes or legitimates these boundaries when it is politically convenient or allows them to save face. I document such negotiations in my research and show how they are critical to understanding how villagers see the state and vice versa. The Pakistani case is important as the ubiquity of its alternate dispute resolution system problematizes the taken-for-granted status of the state and makes visible the mechanisms by which the boundaries between the state and society are continually negotiated and the implications for the citizen/state relationship. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a theoretical model for distinguishing between mere popularity and personality cults as there currently is an inflated use of the personality cult concept, especially in news media, attaching it to significantly different phenomena. The model is based on Weber's concept of charismatic authority and consists of three parameters, widespread symbolic elevation, resilience and religious parallels, covering a representational and social practice dimension. Both dimensions are needed to constitute a personality cult. Trump, Putin and Ardern are used as examples of the model's ability to distinguish between cult and non-cult phenomena. The comparison shows that only Trump and Putin have a cult on both dimensions. Mere popular politicians like Ardern are more comparable to celebrities as these do not have the same authority and power over the followers as leaders with a personality cult – despite potentially showing some cultlike tendencies on the representational dimension. Popular politicians are thus especially characterised by lacking the key social practice aspect of personality cults. As they might still exhibit some cultlike characteristics, the different phenomena are best perceived as being on a continuum ranging from mere admiration or popularity to a personality cult. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to characterise the relationship between civil society and mining in Minas Gerais, Brazil, between 2000 and 2020 by observing the actions of three different groups in resisting the expansion of mining. The analysis points to the existence of a plurality of forms of engagement, organisation and ways of establishing relations between civil society and the state and the market. It also reveals tension between different ways of framing the mining problem by civil society, of posing this problem publicly and establishing ways to confront it. Three sets of actors are identified: (i) environmental NGOs, who are market-oriented; (ii) groups with looser ties who are more radical; and (iii) social movements aligned with the identities of a state-orientated traditional left. My analysis suggests that the divergence in framing the context by these three different groups hinders the construction of a substantive public debate on the mining issue in Brazil. The article is divided into three parts. First, it briefly outlines the process of mining expansion in Brazil, starting in the mid-2000s, highlighting its economic impact. Second, it considers the relationship between civil society articulation and deliberation. Third, it characterises the constitution of these different civil society groups who have established interactions with market and state actors that fostered this expansion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While scholarship on the topic of gender and the environment is steadily growing, little is known about the challenges faced and successes seen by women and gender NGOs operating as a central part of environment-focused civil society. In this paper, I offer such an analysis, examining the political strategies—rhetorical and procedural—mobilised by the Women and Gender Constituency (WGC) in the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). I argue that the WGC has seen lots of success in mobilising arguments that foreground women's vulnerability to the effects of climate change. But at the same time, the constituency has seen far more resistance to more intersectional feminist arguments that interrogate the role of masculinised discursive power in shaping climate politics. This is at least in part a result of a wider structure of civil society that pigeonholes different identities (e.g. gender, youth, indigenous peoples) in a way that separates their deeply interconnected struggles. Understanding this structural barrier, or dark side of civil society, is crucial to envisioning a more fruitful integration of civil society in sustainability politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Analyses of the anti-immigration focus of right-wing populism are regularly inhibited by the conventional terminology employed. The 'economic argument' emphasizes competition for economic resources/opportunities/subsidies. The 'cultural preservation argument' emphasizes the need to protect a way of life from the threat overwhelmingly posed by 'others'. And what further hinders comprehension is the motivating dynamic of 'alienation', being an unwieldy term referring to an affliction with multiple causes and multiple manifestations. This paper shows that a complex synthesis of marginalizing economic and cultural factors generate a profound state of social disconnectedness that, for contemporary political analysis, merits recognition. By refining the concept of 'alienation', this paper shows that the disaffection disproportionately experienced by the core of North American right wing populism is a consequence of the contemporary inability to affirm a traditional conception of 'us' in a consumer culture: a condition to be called 'emporia'. The immigrant 'other' as threat is not the elemental cause nor the source of right-wing populist resentment; the immigrant 'other' is the means to momentarily confirm an ephemeral and cathartic sense of 'us'. So as to convey its functioning with respect to identity formation, this conception of a newly reified 'us' can be called an 'exclusion identity'. With a refined conception of alienation, overt contradictions of right-wing populism that are inadequately explained when using the threat-driven 'economic/cultural preservation' duality become more intelligible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasingly, French citizens are prosecuted for the 'crime of solidarity': hosting undocumented migrants in defiance of state laws forbidding it (and subsequently named 'solidarity delinquents'). This paper explores contemporary 'crimes of solidarity' by investigating why indignant subjects defy the state and, in so doing, constitute themselves as citizens. Drawing on the concepts of hospitality and governmentality, the paper examines France's vexed relation with hospitality alongside a particular mode of governing the state as a home ('domopolitics') in relation to citizenship and migrancy. Hospitality as a governmentality rationalises processes of classification and identification that determine which mobile presences in the home are least disruptive to its social and moral order. Yet French 'solidarity delinquents' are savvy to the instrumentalisation and politicisation of hospitality. I show they too have a use for politicising hospitality and themselves. Mobilising these ideas through Isin's (2008) 'acts of citizenship' framework, I capture a citizenly response to domopolitical rule: hospitality becomes the terrain upon which republican citizens demonstrate liberté, égalité and especially fraternité, will not be suspended in the home. More broadly, the hospitality and citizen identity that is at present claimed must be seen in one crucial respect: state and dissident see in hospitality a tactic for realising a conception of Frenchness and citizenship, albeit in two competing, and perhaps irreconcilable, ways. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction aims to present the general outline of the special issue and to elaborate on the context against which most of the studies were conducted. We discuss the political, economic, social, and historical processes that contribute to shape Russia; this helps to understand local activism and protest in contemporary Russia. Since this context is relevant to all the papers, the readers would benefit from reading this introduction first. The second part of this paper introduces the contribution that the special issue makes to the study of activism and politics, with papers analyzing different aspects and kinds of activism in a variety of circumstances and settings. A central question common to all papers is the problem of politicization which is treated at the intersection between social and political inequalities, the experience of everyday life and political imagination. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper studies Hindu untouchable sweepers of Bangladesh, using a case study of two sweeper communities in Dhaka city. Due to their untouchability, Hindu sweepers in Bangladesh have historically been subjected to discrimination and marginalisation, and are deprived of choices such as free selection of occupation, access to housing, education and other benefits. Contending with the conventional notion that Hinduism maintains social order by caste hierarchies and divisions of labour, this shows how the sweepers of Dhaka city respond to the notion of untouchability and show resistance to caste discrimination. This paper also argues that it is not only a Hindu religious ideology but also historical, colonial, economic, political and social aspects of caste-based discrimination that can explain construction of the notion of Dalit and the marginalisation and resistance of Bangladeshi sweepers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the potential of different Preah Vihear temple replicas to resist "discursive orders" that have been used to legitimate war in the border area between Thailand and Cambodia. The replicas of the Preah Vihear temple are embraced as "repeats" of the "original"; by this, we take off from linguistic theorizing of repetitions. The temple replicas could be considered as resistance against the very idea of one, single "original" temple. By consequence, the replicas, understood as "repeats," have contributed to negotiate different relations of power and challenge various heritage discourses. The replicas' appearances and the resistance that they constitute ought to have the potential to contribute to "peace-building." However, instead of contributing to peace, the repeats, as the paper displays, have rather fueled the conflict between the two countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Heritage is increasingly promoted as a tool for economic and social development to help rebuild societies that have suffered conflict and deep social trauma. Heritage diplomacy is an emergent form of cultural relations that forms a 'contact zone' between different stakeholders and divergent expectations. This paper explores some aspects of this field of heritage diplomacy and develops a basic typology by contrasting the tension between the uses of 'charismatic heritage diplomacy' and more 'careful heritage diplomacy'. It examines differences between local realities and international expectations of heritage by bringing together two case studies: one from a Creative Europe–funded project where civil society actors develop strategies for working with the difficult heritage that lies behind nationalist myths, and the other from a British Council–funded programme dealing with endangered heritage in the MENA region. Critical studies of heritage-making often pitch the local against the international, with grassroot activities contrasted with international rhetoric surrounding heritage places, objects and practices. However, this dichotomy can mask other actors and social dynamics, not least the subtleties of how the collective traumas of conflict play out in the cultural field. The idea of heritage diplomacy as a 'contact zone' (Clifford 1997) highlights that heritage-making in (post-)conflict cultural relations is an ontological encounter between international agents and the traumatised communities for whom the stakes are, inevitably, higher. Mediated through the transnational best practices of heritage professionals, and through the visible pragmatism of civil society heritage activists, the impacts of heritage-making nevertheless remain complicated and entangled. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last two decades, we have seen a worldwide expansion of the concept and practice of cultural diplomacy, along with the emergence of a multipolar world. This raises the question of the way in which the notion is mobilized and understood beyond Europe and North America. This paper is based on comparative research carried out in Qatar and Singapore. Both countries have developed ambitious cultural diplomacy strategies, based on the establishment of world-class cultural and educational institutions, and on their integration into regional and global cultural networks. But many have highlighted contradictions between these ambitious strategies and the restrictions and pressures that both countries place on their civil societies. This paper discusses how curators, who have become key global gatekeepers, negotiate their role in their country's global cultural strategy and position themselves with regard to the official national narrative. With their multiple belonging, they shape narratives that make regional and local scenes and can put cities on the world art map. This symbolic power puts them in a strategic position to shape the nation-branding discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disarmament and demobilisation of ex-combatants often involve politicised sequence of activities, and, in turn, they can affect national and local politics and the peace process in question in one way or other. Understanding the interface between transitional politics, and disarmament and demobilisation of ex-combatants is, therefore, vital to explore scope and limitation of how ex-combatants are managed as part of post-conflict recovery in a post-conflict society. Building on this proposition, this paper investigates the impacts of transitional politics to disarmament and demobilisation (D&D) of the Maoist ex-combatants as part of management of the Maoist arms and armies in Nepal. Analysing how a consensus-based political culture between major political parties, including the Maoists, which was a driving force behind the peace negotiation, deteriorated over time, and further exploring strategic needs and interests of key political actors towards D&D, this paper shows that disarmament of the Maoists People's Liberation Army followed a 'blanket disarmament' approach which had limitations to fully disarm the force. Similarly, demobilisation process appeared to be encampment of the force rather than complete demobilisation. This paper warns that faulty disarmament and demobilisation in Nepal can have serious security implications in future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of the current global trends such as polarization of social groups and intensified poverty, there is a serious risk that gender gaps in access to shelter widen among the poor to the detriment of women's social, economic, and personal well-being. Paradoxically, these conditions also provide certain opportunities for women, including their greater community-based mobilization and leadership role. This paper examines these risks and the opportunities they bear upon and stresses the need for intervention in four areas of rights, access, security, and empowerment. The paper draws on a participatory research project carried out by the United Nations Gender and Habitat program in 1992 to 1999 in low-income settlements of Africa, South Asia, and Latin America. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper considers the threats that various kinds of populism might be said to pose to the ideal of a civil society that mediates between 'private' and family life and the state. Although it is difficult to generalise about populisms, just about all—whether on left or right—share a hostility to 'intermediate' powers. Of course civil society is exactly what could be called a forum for intermediate powers. In contrast, populists often tend to emphasise a vision of immediate power in the sense of the possibility of the direct expression of the people's will in political institutions. Populists, of whatever pitch, often tend to invoke a partisan state that will be on the side of the people (however defined) rather than a putatively neutral 'liberal' state that stands over and against civil society. These factors make most populisms more or less generically hostile to liberalism, understood not in ideological terms but more as a doctrine which emphasises the necessity of mediating power through institutions. Very often, populism is a threat to the idea of civil society understood as a concept integral to liberal political theory, as a means of balancing the state and its wider interlocutors. In this paper, various means, largely inspired by the writings of Tocqueville on the one hand and Paul Hirst on the other, are suggested for addressing aspects of this predicament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper assesses the impact of age and ideological identification on the left–right scale on the use of online social networks to acquire political information. Socio-demographic indicators and ideological identification have been found to impact democratic engagement and the access and use of social networks. In countries where the digital divide (access to the internet) and digital inequality (use of the internet) coexist, the impact of socio-demographic indicators is stronger, as those with fewer tools and resources have less access and make less use of social networks for democratic engagement. We postulate three hypotheses on the effect of socio-demographic determinants and ideological identification and test them using 6 national polls conducted between 2017 and 2019 in Chile, a middle-income country with high levels of inequality. Though socio-demographic variables and ideological identification impact the use of social networks to acquire political information, young people who do not identify on the ideological scale are as likely to use social networks to obtain political information as older people who identify on the left–right scale. As generational replacement kicks in, online democratic engagement will become more intense. Even the non-ideological youth is more politically engaged than the ideologically identified older age cohorts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines cross-scale iterations of Sheikh Mujibur Rahman as the "Father of the Nation" of Bangladesh. By documenting local, national, and international memory projects of Sheikh Mujib, the study illustrates the importance of taking seriously the different scales on which memory is institutionalized, and how iterations on different scales give shape to each other. It does so by applying a dual textual and ethnographic lens to iterations of Sheikh Mujib on three different scales. First, it analyses how the Sheikh figures in policies in Bangladesh to legitimize the present-day political order. Second, the paper reveals how these national policies are reinforced and made more meaningful through international heritage-making projects. Here, the paper investigates the inclusion of a speech given by Sheikh Mujib on 7 March 1971 in the UNESCO Memory of the World Register in 2017. Third, the paper evaluates policy decisions made in London around the application of a bust of Sheikh Mujib by long-distance nationalists in the city, and how these need to be understood in relation to national and international projects. Building on these three cases, the paper concludes with a discussion of ethnographic material from the unveiling of the bust of Sheikh Mujib in London to reveal how transnationally intersecting and overlapping policies shape local commemorative practices. In doing so, the paper documents how local memory projects initiated by long-distance nationalists are restricted by lower-level policymaking decisions that take place outside the targeted nation state's political framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 2016 Brazil's Senate ousted the popularly re-elected President Dilma Rousseff, who had been accused of budget mismanagement under the pretense that she committed an impeachable crime that justified the parliamentary coup. This paper investigates the hypothesis that her government was removed once it could no longer sustain a neoliberal pro-finance agenda, which depends on the state, and that the forces that seized power promised to restore and strengthen. Pro-finance policies had been established in the 1990s by the Cardoso government and were maintained by the Lula da Silva government. The latter, nevertheless, was able to raise wages, as did Rousseff, but more slowly. Her government also loosened some neoliberal policies, such as the so-called fiscal austerity. Rousseff's non-elected successor, Michel Temer, tried to limit budget spending by implementing a 20-year ceiling on the real growth of virtually all expenditures except public debt interest. He also began aggressive privatizations and, after curtailing labor protections, proposed a regressive social security reform to further cut state expenditures. Thus, the Temer government promoted dispossessing policies to redistribute economic surpluses—e.g., through future primary fiscal surpluses—and allow the expansion of capital accumulation. The latter is driven by the proletarianization that follows welfare cuts—i.e., cuts in the social wage—due to the budget cap and regressive social security and labor reforms that sought to increase the supply of cheaper labor-power. Capital could also expand because budgets can increase the commodification by private companies of hitherto state-provided pensions and healthcare. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents an account of Gold Coast elite in the nineteenth century and their patterns of interactions with the emerging colonial state. Known as the merchant princes, they acted as intermediaries and played essential roles in colonial administration. Their involvement in government was consistent with the belief among some British administrators that 'allies must be purchased over to our side' in order to evoke 'a friendly spirit favourable to our purposes'. Drawing on archival documents, including petitions, official correspondences and newspaper reports, the paper shows that the relationship between merchant princes and colonial administration was a fundamentally ambivalent one. There was equivocation on both sides, the merchant princes often vacillating in their responses to colonial policy, while colonial officials constantly viewed them with suspicion. This ambivalence shaped political developments on the Gold Coast in the nineteenth and turn of the twentieth century. The merchant princes straddled their natal societies and the emerging colonial order, embodying a nested patriotism. The fundamental roles that they played in the emergent colonial order necessitate revisiting the contentious 'collaboration versus resistance' debate which reduced responses to colonial rule to either opposition to colonial domination or betrayal of one's country. The paper argues that these concepts could be useful analytical tools if employed in the analysis of actions rather than actors. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this paper is to examine Hartmut Rosa's account of 'resonance'. To this end, the analysis is divided into four parts. The first part elucidates the concept of resonance, including Rosa's differentiation between horizontal, diagonal, and vertical 'axes of resonance' and their role in the construction of different 'world-relations'. The second part centres on the concept of alienation, notably the degree to which it constitutes an integral element of modern life forms and, in a larger sense, of the human condition. The third part grapples with the dialectic of resonance and alienation, shedding light on the assumption that they are antithetical to each other, while contending that their in-depth study provides normative parameters to distinguish between 'the good life' and 'the bad life'. The final part scrutinizes Rosa's attempt to defend his outline of a sociological theory of resonance against objections raised by his critics and comprises a point-by-point assessment of his plea for a resonance-focused sociology of world-relations. The paper concludes by suggesting that, notwithstanding its limitations, Rosa's approach represents one of the most promising developments in twenty-first-century critical theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with civil society mobilizations and resistance in relation to a world heritage site-the ninth-century Khmer temple Preah Vihear, which is located in the northern province of Cambodia and borders eastern Thailand. In particular, the paper explores resistance in terms of (re)categorizations from a historical and discursive-materialistic perspective. The field of resistance studies has mainly been preoccupied with entities such as texts, signs, symbols, identity, and language. In this article, however, we bring in physical and material entities in order to display the ways in which matter is of importance in the (re)construction of discourses and thereby for resistance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Disgusted by political institutions, many activists around the world are rejecting normal politics in favor of hands-on, tangible local action. This looks similar all over the world, including in the two countries on which the paper focuses, Russia and the United States. Is it? Scholars and activists alike compare one society's activism to another; this paper suggests ways of asking useful questions in cross-national ethnographic research. Controlling the variables of cultural, political/legal, social, and spatial conditions is impossible. With so many "out of control variables", can comparison make any sense? Activists have varied "styles" (Lichterman & Eliasoph The American Journal of Sociology, 120(4): 798–863, 2014) of coordinating local activism in any country. Each style encounters different frictions, depending on a nation's specific cultural, political, social, and spatial conditions. Local, interest-based, grassroot activism is a typical American "style" and is also venerated in American cultural narratives that celebrate local democracy. American activists encounter friction when trying to enact this style, when, for example, they realize that money brings power. For Russian activists, the very same style is a "surprising discovery". Russians encounter different frictions when trying to enact this style. Examining continual, recursive pragmatic tests shows how activists move towards more, towards less, or towards different kinds of politicization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, drawing on empirical evidence from Russian society, the authors seek to analyze the ways in which ordinary people can overcome a perceived gap between "high" politics and their everyday experiences. We argue that the concept of everyday politics is not enough to prepare the ground for politicization in everyday life, at least in a highly dismantled society. In examining ethnographic case studies of people who consider themselves apolitical, the paper introduces the concept of "pragmatic politics," which is defined as the activity of inscribing the broader world within palpable everyday experience. The case studies examined here speak to four different modes of everyday politics that reveal various modalities of pragmatic politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Wisconsin Green Party, a state affiliate of the US Green Party, is a third party in a two-party system. The US electoral system is not kind to third parties; 1949 was the last time a third party was represented in the US Congress, in the 2016 presidential election, just 1% of voters in Wisconsin voted for the Green Party candidate. Ethnographic fieldwork combined with in-depth interviews for this study finds that the policies and practices of the party may be inhibiting its efforts to grow support and improve its electoral standing. This paper details how the party operates in a narrow window of antiparty sentiment, with the emphasis on the intersection of their four core policy pillars, and party practices of 'being the message' serving to deter their two likeliest sources of new support; the logic of constituency representation given primacy over electoral competition. These issues, though currently acting as constraints on the party, potentially however also afford long-term opportunity for the party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper looks at globalization as a cultural construct that is neither homogeneous nor inclusive of a broad range of perspectives. It does so by analyzing the process of how knowledge claims are legitimated within international non-governmental organizations (INGOs), showing how political globalization likely limits the ability of global civil society to effectively facilitate diverse knowledge, values, and styles of reasoning. Sustainable hunting is the topical focus for understanding what scientific knowledge is promoted by environmental INGOs, how knowledge is legitimated, and what that legitimation process means for globalization and civil society. This exploratory, qualitative analysis of four environmental INGOs identifies the mechanisms for knowledge legitimation, including funding and several aspects of trust. This paper discusses how contradictory conditions of these mechanisms make inclusive and effective decision-making difficult, which may help explain problems INGOs have in adaptively working with local peoples and environments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although the term 'cultural diplomacy' is familiar, it was infrequently used before the end of the Cold War. In fact, practitioners avoided the term and preferred 'cultural relations'. This paper explains the rise of 'cultural diplomacy' via a historical sociology of the broader field of 'cultural statecraft'. The analysis shows that during the Interwar Period, two modes of cultural statecraft emerged with distinct organizational configurations; 'cultural relations' that embedded 'culture' within the field of foreign policy and 'intellectual cooperation' that sought to de-nationalize culture. Within the cultural relations area, the key relationship was between foreign ministries and semi-autonomous implementing agencies. In this context 'cultural relations' served to manage the arms-length relationship between the two sides. At the end of the Cold War, changing policy ideas and the emergence of an organizational model based on projects brought new actors into the field for whom old sensitivities around cultural diplomacy no longer applied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, which is positioned at the intersection of political sociology and the sociology of art, I discuss the implications of political art at the local level. I show how analyzing an existing example of locally engaged political art would contribute to the comprehension of the relationship between art and politics in contemporary societies. I employ a single case study, Freetown Christiania, in order to reveal the role of local artistic engagement in bringing about political outcomes, and in particular, relative autonomy at the local level. Though this study is solely focused on one community which has emerged within a specific context and time, it provides a unique lens to describe the relevance and potential of locally engaged political art for broader society. I utilize Freetown Christiania as an example of Benjaminian and Brechtian utopia in order to showcase how their micro-level artistic engagement has brought about relative autonomy at the local level. In particular, I describe the function of local artistic engagement in Freetown Christiania, especially their theatre group Solvognen (The Sun Chariot), as a unique artistic enterprise which has surpassed Benjamin's and Brecht's elaborations of the role of political art in modern societies through the employment of the elements of the avant-garde and postdramatic theatre. I argue that this peculiar combination of Benjaminian and Brechtian forms of political art on the one hand, and the avant-garde and postdramatic theatre on the other, has enabled them to create and sustain this micro-utopia in a neoliberal capitalist order. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the response of the city government of Durban to the growth of the informal economy. It argues that, unlike the national government of South Africa, Durban's government has been creative in designing policies that favor informal economy workers, particularly women. These progressive policies are the result of an innovative local government and, to some extent, an emerging self-employed women worker's union that has been able to exert influence on informal economy policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I outline an approach to civil society that is in contradistinction to the dominant liberal conception of civil society as a sphere or sector distinct from the state with inherently positive values. Instead, I argue, civil society always exists in the shadow of the state. I propose to advance a conception of civil society through the combination of two thinkers who are not often combined: G.W.F. Hegel and Michel Foucault. From Hegel, I take the conception of the state's regulation of civil society to direct the particular interests towards the universal of the state through the police and, especially, the corporation. By incorporating a specific type of civil society, the state attempts to shape a civil society that advances its own interests. From Foucault, I take the conception of civil society as a transactional reality, as well as the conception of neoliberalism as a form of statecraft and the production of subjects. I propose that neoliberalism can be understood as the promotion of the corporate form to all areas of social life. In neoliberalism, the central wealth-producing subject is the corporation, and as a result, the state privileges the corporation by granting it extensive powers, privileges, and exemptions from law. This happens to the detriment of both individual and other collective subjects, making it the primary subject of neoliberal civil society. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper proposes a process for locating civic action, in its varied forms, wherever it may appear. First, develop a clear, a priori definition of the qualities of action you consider "civic." Simultaneously, observe actors' varied "typifications (Schutz 1962, 1970; Cicourel 1991, 1993; Cefaï 1994)" that include action that you would call "civic." We illustrate how to use this approach, using the case of "empowerment projects (Eliasoph Journal of Civil Society, 12(3), 247–265, 2016):" Observe the typifications that actors themselves experience in empowerment projects, by observing the dilemmas they experience. You will see that actors' typical patterns of navigating those typical dilemmas often have typical unintended consequences, both for their own emotions, and for the researcher's aspirations for civic action. In empowerment projects, typical patterns of navigating typical dilemmas tend to make important kinds of politically oriented civic action difficult to conduct. This kind of back-and-forth examination reveals the "civic landscape (Grubb and Henriksen 2018)" in the making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper seeks to analyze the policies on the cultural field implemented in Chile in recent years, explaining how expertise became fundamental and, more specifically, how this expertise evolved from that of an expert intellectual to that of an expert professional. The paper is based on the general hypothesis that the cultural field needs to be viewed in the context of a growing differentiation and autonomization of Chilean society, but that there are some interesting nuances to its evolution, particularly with regard to the transformation of expertise. This article argues that the expert in culture has a twofold nature, which is illustrated through drawing a timeline from the 1980s to the present, marking certain milestones in Chile’s national and cultural history. This timeline incorporates the intellectual work of two of Chile’s most important contemporary sociologists and experts in culture and cultural policies, Manuel Antonio Garretón and José Joaquín Brunner. A sample of their publications is analyzed and then contrasted to documents on cultural policy since the approval of the country’s institutional framework for culture in 2003, when the National Council for Culture and the Arts was created, gauging the influence of the expert intellectual on this new institutional framework and the thrust of public policies on culture. The paper concludes that the figure of the expert in culture has shifted from the “expert intellectual” to the expert of a professional kind, although the theoretical work of the former has continued to influence the debate around cultural policies to this day. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Policy-oriented expert knowledge is increasingly applied, collaborative and socially accountable, created in a variety of organisations and institutions that display a diversity of funding patterns with a wide range of requirements and expectations. Given the complexities of knowledge production and recent changes in its funding environment (e.g. mode and availability of research funding and evaluation), few existing theoretical elaborations consider tensions between structural funding conditions and intellectual production in policy research contexts. This paper examines the role of funding in shaping the policy issues, format and content of intellectual output across two research contexts (universities, think tanks). It sets out a theoretical and methodological approach to understand the link between funding modalities and the type of knowledge and intellectual interventions they facilitate or thwart. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A prominent name in modern-day philosophy and a true public intellectual, Mohammed Arkoun (1928-2010) enjoys an international academic reputation. The present article aims to analyse the relationship Arkoun maintained with a specific learning space, the Institute of Ismaili Studies (IIS). This research institute, based in London, strives to promote research that focuses on Islam and on Muslims and serves as a junction point for the Ismaili community. This paper will attempt to clarify the processes at play in this collaboration between a thinker and an institution: what are the conditions that influence the institutional ties of an intellectual? How is an affinity formed and negotiated between a specific organisational framework and a personal project? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This bold plan, combined with the almost-joint hiring of Jonathan Fanton as president of the New School and Ira Katznelson as Dean of the Graduate Faculty, sets out what Friedlander calls the school's third founding moment. (p. 30) Quoting Dewey's apology: "'Let the liberal who for expediency's sake would passively tolerate invasions of free speech and action take counsel lest he be also preparing the way for a later victory of domestic Toryism.'" (p. 31) Appearing in I The New Republic i was significant, as Friedlander notes, its early history is so enmeshed with that of The New School, that "it is difficult to disentangle" one from the other. Friedlander takes us behind the scenes using memos and personal correspondence to discussions of a merger with New York University, the "Save the School" campaign launched by a retired Johnson, and ultimately the acquisition of Parsons in 1970, which remains one of the most financially successful divisions of the university. For the record, I am not sure what kind of antisemite Dorothy would have been, but based on accounts that she aided Johnson in the University in Exile, (Cornell University [1]; The Dorothy Whitney Straight Elmhirst Papers [2]) and the fact that Clara Mayer goes to her as a sympathetic character in 1962 to tell the story of the New School, (The Dartington Hall Trust Archives) I suggest she may have not been a very good one. [Extracted from the article]

Political memorials and memorial locations in Cyprus function as 'figures of memory' that regulate political rhetoric, detect (hi)story-telling, and shape identities, both on a collective as well as on an individual level. Although they seem to go unnoticed in the citizens' daily routines, they exert profound influence in Greek Cypriot society where remembering and honoring the dead fighters according to the socially institutionalized religious and social rites constitute fundamental prerequisites of 'belonging.' The paper will argue that the esthetics applied on the memorials along with their density on the island and the commemoration of individual fighters blur the boundaries between private and public and foster the collective awareness of us. At the same time, line us with the awareness of the self because of the emotional impact visual narratives exert on both a collective and an individual level. Memorial narratives secure a 'homogeneous array of reactions' and become powerful propaganda tools because they are the pivotal vehicles in the perception of loss and instruments in the construction of victimhood within the Greek Cypriot society. The paper will sustain that the effect intense exposure causes interacts with the workings of implicit memory, influences dispositions, behaviors, and mental structures and radically intervenes in the process of reality perception. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acknowledging the importance of heroes in the framing of political identities and building on the expanding interdisciplinary scholarship, this paper offers a novel approach by situating the analysis of public choices of heroes within debates on social change, and, specifically, inclusion and diversity politics. Utilising an original dataset of two individual-level, nationally representative surveys of British and US adults, we demonstrate that the landscape of popular heroism in both countries is shaped by limited acceptance of traditionally under-represented groups such as women and ethnic minorities. Using rigorous testing and regression analysis, we highlight the endurance of a white male hero whose dominance is only challenged through preferences for same-sex and same-race/ethnicity hero-figures, with both trends signposting the symbolic boundaries of embracing the difference. Overall, this paper highlights a critical role of popular heroes in advancing inclusion and diversity agendas and urges for further empirical research on the socio-political functions, and gender, race-specific drivers of heroism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Far from activism in formal groups or in visible and vocal demonstrations stands a type of citizen participation observed through everyday practices and daily activities in the public sphere. Targeted citizen actions in urban spaces, dumpster diving, responsible consumption movements or small acts of everyday resistance are all examples of what we call informal modes of participation. Such initiatives are not new, nor do they pertain to a particular geographic arena. However, it is only recently that social scientists have started to pay attention to such activities: scholars from urban studies, development studies, political sociology, and critical geography have started to address this phenomenon. After discussing the existing literature on this topic, this introduction proceeds to define and operationalize the concept of informal participation, while also providing a common analytical framework for dialogue among the six contributions to this special issue briefly described in the last section below. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article ethnographically examines the everyday lives and collective activism of undocumented migrants in Belgium as they await the results of asylum appeals and regularisation applications. We show how the values emphasised by state-led migrant legalisation regimes contrast with undocumented migrants' narratives of their own worthiness. In foregrounding deservingness as a moral and legal threshold, we argue that the Belgian nation-state responds to undocumented migrants by enforcing and implementing citizenship policies that persistently keep them on the fringes of legitimacy and recognition. The discursive constructions of 'good citizens' that undocumented migrants embody and make claims to in Belgium extend to and envelop the lives of undocumented migrants in Europe in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expulsion from the state is approached as a crisis within both human rights and refugee studies, with Hannah Arendt proposing that the 'loss of national rights was identical with the loss of human rights' (Arendt 1976, p. 292). This analysis conceptualises the state as a protective structure and seeks to rehabilitate the refugee into the state system, whether within a reformed natal state (through return) or into a new state (through local integration or resettlement), ultimately restoring the refugee as 'citizen'. This model is rooted in what Nira Yuval-Davis (1997, p. 119) terms 'the "fraternal" enlightenment project' and is both western centric and has a male, purportedly universal-imagined citizen at its heart. Postcolonial feminist scholars have articulated the many ways in which third world/non-western women's relationships to the state are more commonly either distant or repressive. Expulsion from the state may not, for those who have held only notional or marginal citizenship, entail the 'radical crisis' of human rights (Agamben 1998, p. 126) that refugee studies and human rights that theories conceive. Moments of rupture and crisis that disrupt powerful sociocultural norms and break the alliance between constraining state and civil society structures (patriarchal ethnic and religious institutions) can also be moments of social transformation and opportunity. This paper explores the social practices and testimonies of refugees in transit in Indonesia to examine the assumptions underpinning citizenship and to question whether the social good that citizenship aims to deliver needs to be tied to the state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]