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For the first time since the end of the Cold War, the USA faces a geopolitical challenger in the shape of China. According to the National Security Strategy 2017 (NSS 2017), China—alongside Russia—poses a threat to America primacy, a view that reflects a new consensus among national security experts about the need to get tough in relations with Beijing. As of now, however, American public opinion remains ambivalent on the China challenge—opinion polls showing only a modest downturn in views of China recently, despite pronounced anti-China rhetoric in the context of the Trump administration's trade war. The present paper asks why there is such a disparity between elite and popular opinions, and whether the disparity will last. It does so through a historical comparison between the present and the immediate post-WWII period, before a threat from the Soviet Union resonated widely among the American public. Acceptance of a Soviet threat was a product of a rhetoric of anti-communism used in partisan political debate. In turn, anti-communism drew on a conflation of "communism" meaning US-based labor groups and communism meaning the Soviet Union. By showing the immense effort needed to manufacture the resonance of geopolitical competition in the post-war years, the paper highlights the necessary domestic conditions of geopolitical competition, conditions currently absent. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the course of this paper, I examine the concepts of ‘discourse’ and the ‘subject’ in relation to social organization and action. The paper argues that these concepts represent a form of explanation that reduces the complexity of the social. Through a reconnection with processes relating to social organization and action, the paper argues that the current ‘deepening’ of subjectivity can be informed by sociological ideas. Indeed, the paper makes the claim that moves to develop the concept of subjectivity through ‘interiority’ and ‘relationality’ would benefit from a dialogue with interactionist ideas. The paper discusses three programmes of work that illustrate how subjectivity can be informed through a reconnection with interactionist sociology.Subjectivity (2009) 26, 69–86. doi:10.1057/sub.2008.33 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the implications of Lacanian psychoanalytic theory for radical politics today. Focusing on anarchism as a revolutionary alternative to Marxism, the paper develops Lacan's argument about the paradoxical relationship between freedom, transgression and authority, as well as his theory of the four discourses, in order to rethink the antiauthoritarian project in non-utopian and non-essentialist terms. It concludes by calling for a new form of radical politics that seeks to avoid the discourse of the Master through an ethics of contingency, and discusses the contemporary anti-globalization movement as an example. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholars have studied revolutions mostly as domestic events while neglecting their transnational character. From the French to the Chinese Revolution, revolutionary ideologies and networks have never been confined to national boundaries. As transnational events, revolutions can create ruptures in global politics and challenge world order. Some young revolutionary states have perished. Others such as Iran have endured, but tensions persist. Given the importance of the topic, the literature is surprisingly limited. We propose a theoretical framework that explains the evolution of the relationship between anti-Western revolutionary states and the global order and apply it to the case of the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS). Our framework explains why some revolutionary states are accommodated or tolerated, whereas others are opposed, isolated, and destroyed. Using the Islamic State to illustrate our framework, we explain the main reason for the demise of the Islamic State (ISIS): its own radicalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since the onset of the 2008 economic crisis and the resurgence of various forms of transnational radical politics (the Arab Spring, Occupy and so on), several left-wing thinkers have argued that the era of left melancholia is now over. This article examines such claims, paying particular attention to the recent re-engagement with the idea of communism in contemporary critical theory. Foregrounding the recent work of Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek and (especially) Jodi Dean, I suggest that the attempt to re-invigorate and revitalise the academic left is welcome, but I question some of the political and theoretical investments that characterise this (re)turn to communism. In particular, I interrogate the new communists' tendency to contrast a vision of a melancholic and deradicalised left beholden to feminism, anti-racism, single issue politics and identity politics with an alternative vision of an authentically radical left emboldened by the re-emergence of the idea of communism. Such a distinction is not only analytically problematic, but also reflects, and shores up, a range of inequalities and exclusions within academic left theory and practice. These elisions, hierarchies and exclusions, I argue, are testament to much of the academic left's continued unease about, or even outright resistance to, feminism, anti-racism and queer politics. Overall, my intention is to trace some of the effects and consequences of the new communists' claim that they offer a newly radicalised left theory and politics: in so doing, I offer a preliminary rethinking of how we narrate the contemporary history of radical left politics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Income and wealth inequalities in most countries - in the West, the former communist economies and in the developing world -have been on the rise in the last three decades with some notable exceptions. Inequalities in the nineteenth century were much higher than before the Industrial Revolution. Following the rise of workers' movements in the West and the 1917 Bolshevik revolution, the growth of inequalities in the previous century was reversed for over half a century until the 1980s as the threat of the spread of communism inspired welfarist and redistributive reforms, giving capitalism a more human face. Such checks and balances have been greatly weakened in recent decades, even though improved economic performance in many developing countries, including sub-Saharan Africa in the last decade, contributed to some convergence of incomes between rich and poor countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

'Left melodrama' is a form of contemporary political critique that combines thematic elements and narrative structures of the melodramatic genre with a political perspective grounded in a left theoretical tradition, fusing them to dramatically interrogate oppressive social structures and unequal relations of power. It is also a new form of what Walter Benjamin called 'left melancholy', a critique that deadens what it examines by employing outdated and insufficient analyses to current exploitations. Left melodrama is melancholic insofar as its use of older leftist critical methods disavows its attachments to the failed promises of left political-theoretical critique: that it could provide direct means to freedom and moral rightness. Left melodrama is melodramatic insofar as it incorporates the specific melodramatic narrative, style and promise of the text that stands in for its disavowed attachments: the Manifesto of the Communist Party. Whereas the Manifesto's critical power promised radical political transformation, left melodrama incorporates the Manifesto's melodramatic style in an effort to revivify that promise. It thus inhibits the creation of new critical methods appropriate to our current historical moment and occludes Marx and Engels' warning that the possibility of radical transformation is diminished when the past furnishes the vision for the future. Left melodrama can be found in the texts of Giorgio Agamben, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri; their reincorporation of the Manifesto's melodrama both contributes to their widespread success and undercuts their critical capacities to examine and challenge the inequalities, injustices and unfreedom that shape the present moment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The institutional development of political science in Croatia began in 1962 with the establishment of the Faculty of Political Sciences as the first academic institution of its kind in the then communist Central and Eastern Europe. Until the 1990s, this development was underpinned by two major factors. The first was the feud between the partisans and the opponents of political science as an independent discipline, which resulted in a compromise: the faculty was instituted as an organisation for the interdisciplinary study of economics, sociology, philosophy, history and political science. The second factor was the dominance of Marxist political science whose goal was to turn itself into an ‘anti-bourgeois’, that is, anti-Western political science, even into a sort of an anti-political science.European Political Science (2008) 7, 237–246. doi:10.1057/eps.2008.3 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]