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The essay traces the trajectory of India's first rural development program, the Etawah Pilot program from 1948, which became part of the country's first five-year plans in 1951 with the support of the US government and the Ford Foundation. With a focus on the project's two central actors, US architect-planner Albert Mayer and Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru, the essay argues that the Etawah Pilot program was a modernizing experiment in citizen assimilation that became a trans-national model for postwar development aid with the international architect-planner as the traveling technocrat set to develop expertise for newly independent nations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, the Ford Foundation funded an urban planning exchange between American academics and Yugoslav urban planners as something of a test case in transferring American planning technology to the socialist world. The American-Yugoslav Project was one of several international urban development projects the Ford Foundation pursued at mid-century as part of its Cold War-era cultural diplomacy efforts. The largely unsuccessful technology transfer at the center of the American-Yugoslav Project was a contributing factor to the Foundation's retreat from international urban development and provides a case study in how one-size-fits-all development models falter when challenged by real-world conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Effective urban planning is said to be crucial for ensuring liveable, equitable and viable urban areas progress towards sustainability. This study combines a review of the relevant literature, key informant interviews and field observations to explore contemporary planning practices in Dhaka, Bangladesh. We problematize ineffective urban planning practice in Dhaka as a prime expression and reproduction of colonial planning, which manifests itself through institutional bureaucracy and centralization, technocracy, and ad hoc planning. We argue that these imprints have rendered planning institutions weak and fostered dependency on imported ideologies and practices. The situation, we further argue, not only stifles local planning creativity but also makes the planning profession unattractive. Apart from limited local innovations and political aspirations for meeting global development targets, urban planning and city management have followed a reductionist approach under neoliberalism. With little to no social resonance, attempts at creating ordered spaces are, instead, contributing to increased spatial fragmentation and segregation, informality, and widespread urban poverty. To promote urban sustainability, this paper urges the contextualization of colonial ideologies and practices against the social, political and economic realities of urban Bangladesh. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Populism and technocracy represent a challenge to pluralist party democracies. The first promotes the rule by 'the people', while the second demands the rule by independent experts. The literature on populism and technocracy as challenges to party democracy is burgeoning. Less is known about citizens' attitudes towards the ideas that underpin both populism and technocracy. In this article these opinions are explored in a survey conducted in Spain using a comprehensive battery of items tapping into technocracy and populism. It is found that populist attitudes correlate with two dimensions of technocracy: anti-politics and pro-expertise sentiments. A latent-class analysis shows that the largest sample group simultaneously endorses rule by the people and the enrolment of experts in political decision making. In the article this group is named technopopulists. The article challenges extant views of populism and technocracy as separate alternatives and spurs works on voter demand for the involvement of experts in politics. Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at: https://doi.org/10.1080/01402382.2022.2027116. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the idea of European unification, a common project that plunges its roots in a travel accident that occurred in the north of France in 1706. Induced by this unforeseen event, the aim of establishing permanent arbitration and ties of cooperation between nations sovereign powers to prevent future dissension is a milestone in European history. The theme is relevant insofar as the project for the unification of Europe comprises an ideal that has shaped European politics and society for centuries. The initial attempt to create a form of supranational political integration remains fundamental for the European Union today, but it cannot be purely and simply reduced to criteria of a geopolitical, macroeconomic or technocratic nature. Faithful to its ecumenical and cosmopolitan tradition, Europe always finds itself again every time it sees itself in others. The article seeks to expose and discuss how far the deepening of the “Europe of the culture(s)” configures the teleological horizon of a task that coimplicates the hermeneutic, political and religious dimensions in the construction of the “common European home”. Keywords: European unification. Permanent Arbitration. Political and Economic Cohesion. Cultural Integration. Teleology. Hermeneutics. Politics. Religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The current pandemic was an announced possibility. Its potential causes were known: destroyed ecosystem niches, declining biological diversity, intensive farming, abuse of genetics, and biological manipulations. This paper deals with some aspects of the biological (and social) history of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic but also with the history of previous epidemics, including the AIDS epidemics, which all have in common to be highly linked, enhanced or even the result of human activities. But now, the myth is setting in that an innovative technique for fast production of vaccines is the only and sufficient response to the crisis in the ecosystem and in health structures, of which this pandemic is a symptom. The reductionist and mechanistic approaches to the ecosystem and human biology are feeding the idea that the natural world may be fully manipulated and controlled ("the power to control Evolution" as in a recent book by a Nobel Award winner). This article calls for a critical thinking about the interfaces between the technosphere and the biosphere, their limits as well as for new frameworks for biology and medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Governance theories consider policy steering as modes sustained in hierarchies, markets, and networks. If governance depoliticizes public management structures, then populism and technocratic forms' emergence in politics is a threat to public governance. This article analyzes governance styles, showing how a reconciliation between the dimensions of policy and politics is necessary to think about policy steering's complexity and its ensuing paths. We develop a typology of governance styles to address policy and political dynamics. This typology shows how different governance styles combine pluralist, populist, and technocratic elements, along with hierarchies, markets, and networks. We illustrate our typology with different policies conceived in distinct political regimes in Brazil. We argue that governance theories must incorporate a perspective of political conflict, path dependence, and contingency. This perspective on political conflict is essential for understanding governance reforms and how they shape public management practices. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article identifies and discusses the country's problems related to cultural expropriation through the imposition of symbolic arrangements and systems that hark back to our colonial condition. From "catechesis in the tabas" to the present day, a subterranean operation of deprivation of knowledge and plundering of memory prevails, which is expressed in new power relations, with the domain of knowledge and information as a new and powerful political instrument. The appropriation and/or deprivation of these codes denounces their antagonistic dimension: the power of large technology companies that exploit personal data; the devices and functionalities that hijack users' attention spans and the massive growth of data and fake news. We seek to demystify the false autonomy of technology and recognize the transversal web of relationships (cultural, social, economic and political) that involves the production, dissemination and social use of information in Brazil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anthropology would seem the discipline least likely to adopt a universalist version of gender identity ideology, as the strongest versions of this ideology are so clearly an epiphenomenon of recent Anglophone internet culture. It is nevertheless the case that this paradigm has been institutionally embraced within anthropology and anthropologist dissenters like myself are subject to cancellation for our vocal skepticism. The present essay argues that this is due in large part to pre-existing disciplinary predilections, so that it is possible to speak of a local culture of anthropological cancellation. Because of this, when anthropologists eject critics of gender identity ideology, they do not see themselves as participating in a recent general "cancel culture" but instead as doing good traditional anthropology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That the End of History is over is no longer in dispute, but drift and decay, rather than a restarting of History proper, is the order of the day. In this article, critical discussions of The End of the End of History by Daniel Zamora, Anton Jäger, Nicholas Kiersey and Richard Sakwa are responded to. Zamora's focus on the displacement of social conflict outside the workplace is discussed as a feature of political disintermediation, creating a boundless sort of politics. An alternative to Jäger's proposed term, 'hyperpolitics', is then advanced, as a means of leaving open the possibility of greater politicisation in the future. A defence of the way left-populist movements are cast as essentially 'anti-political' is then ventured, in opposition to Kiersey. Sakwa's criticisms of our historicism are then turned on their head, before we consider the impact that the Ukraine war may have on History's putative return. By way of conclusion, the dichotomies of resignation versus autonomy, and compliance versus social purpose, are discussed as the pivots on which History's return will be decided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper engages with a central problem in development studies: why is development so depoliticised, and how can this be remedied? It does so by providing a theoretical/conceptual framework of the way that the 'political' and the 'technical' are constructed as a cognitive gap in the inner frame of the development planner. Drawing on Scott, Schmitt, Weber, Horkheimer & Adorno, and the critical development literature, it argues that politics presents itself to the planner as a sphere of uncertainty that can disrupt project outcomes. Knowledge production about development politics, for example through political economy analysis, is thus a compulsion that arises from the need to govern this source of uncertainty. The politics rendered legible and decoded in this way is also ipso facto no longer part of the political unknown, but now belongs to the realm of the technical. The implications of this framework are that the anti-politics machine will perpetually regenerate itself. The work of mitigating technocratic excess is productive, but it is a Sisyphian labour that will not have a clean or satisfying end-date. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Western publics show a sizable support for experts' involvement in political decision making, that is, technocratic attitudes. This article analyzes two key aspects of these attitudes: technocratic attitudes' stability and the heterogeneity in the demand for experts depending on the context. We first analyze how technocratic attitudes have been affected by an external event, the COVID‐19 pandemic, that has placed experts' role at the forefront of the public debate; this allows us to analyze the stability or change in these attitudes. Second, given that the pandemic quickly evolved from being a public health issue to becoming a political issue combining economic and public health dimensions, we examine whether framing the COVID‐19 pandemic exclusively as a public health problem or as including a prominent economic dimension as well affects the type of public officials who are preferred to lead the political management of the crisis (independent experts with diverse professional skills or party politicians belonging to different parties and with a specialization in different policy fields). We pursue these two research goals through a panel survey conducted in Spain at two different time points, one before and another during the pandemic, in which we measure technocratic attitudes using an exhaustive battery; and through a survey experiment combining a conjoint design and a framing experiment. Results show that, first, technocratic attitudes have significantly increased as a consequence of the coronavirus outbreak; second, people's preference for experts prevails against any other experimental treatment such as party affiliation; and, finally, preferences for the type of experts vary depending on the problem to be solved. In this way, this paper significantly increases our knowledge of the factors that affect variation in public attitudes towards experts' involvement in political decision‐making. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Artificial intelligence and machine learning are both a blessing and a curse for governance. In theory, algorithmic governance makes government more efficient, more accurate, and more fair. But the emergence of automation in governance also rests on public-private collaborations that expand both public and private power, aggravate transparency and accountability gaps, and create significant obstacles for those seeking algorithmic justice. In response, a nascent body of law proposes technocratic policy changes to foster algorithmic accountability, ethics, and transparency. This Article examines an alternative vision of algorithmic governance, one advanced primarily by social and labor movements instead of technocrats and firms. The use of algorithmic governance in increasingly high-stakes settings has generated an outpouring of activism, advocacy, and resistance. This mobilization draws on the same concerns that animate budding policy responses. But social and labor movements offer an alternative source of constraints on algorithmic governance: direct resistance from the bottom up. These movements confront head-on the entanglement of economic power, racial hierarchy, and government surveillance. Using three case studies, this Article explores how tech workers and social movements are resisting and mobilizing against technologies that expand surveillance and funnel wealth to the private sector. Each case study illustrates how the intermingling of state and private power has required movements to engage both within and outside firms to counteract the growing appeal of automation. Yet the dominant approaches to regulating the government's uses of technology continue to afford a privileged role to private firms and elite institutions, sidelining movement demands. The fundamental challenge posed by these movements will be whether--and how--law and policy can accommodate demands for bottom-up control. This Article sketches a new vision for algorithmic accountability, with a more vibrant role for workers and for the public in determining how firms and government institutions work together. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In staying on that path, the Communist state drew upon a never publicly acknowledged legacy of Japanese engineering expertise, especially with regard to the Fushun colliery and the carbon technocratic system as a whole. By situating a detailed historical narrative of the Fushun colliery in the big picture of modern Chinese and Japanese history, Seow effectively shows the significance of coal extraction in a transnational context. [Extracted from the article]

This essay locates the concept of sentido pensante or sensible thought within the recent historical events of the coronavirus pandemic to ask the question on the systems of production of epistemology. It invites the reader, at the insistence of Raúl Fornet Betancourt, to incisively investigate our current masked reality of manufactured consent, to cultivate convivencia, and to make room akin to a trench of ideas for the flourishing of a revolutionary love in our time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite anticipated curtailment of their powers, the past decade saw technocratic actors take on an increasingly powerful role in economic governance. Focusing on the EU, I analyse these epochal shifts as a move away from the market liberal paradigm that informed the 1992 European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The 1992 EMU combines a highly restrictive attitude to public money creation with a permissive laissez-faire attitude to private credit money. In the face of the dual crises of COVID-19 and the climate emergency, EU technocrats have abandoned key tenets of the EMU. The European Central Bank provides targeted and large-scale support for pandemic-related fiscal expenditures. Banking regulators and supervisors actively guide the allocation of credit with an eye to its economic and environmental impact. However, constitutional structures lag ideational shifts and the new technocracy is haunted by issues of legality and legitimacy. To pursue the new policies within the old constitutional structures, policymakers engage in strategic ambiguity: the policies are justified in terms of both new economic policy priorities, as well as by reference to the instruments and goals of the earlier market liberal paradigm. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to demonstrate the tension inherent within the Turkish opposition between those favoring technocratic anti-populism and/or pragmatic politics and those calling for a passionate and resolute anti-AKP platform seeking revenge. These competing inclinations offer alternate anti-populist platforms and 'styles.' The article asks whehter opposition to a populist regime inherently generates an anti-populist platform that ideologically confronts it. The article examines three contenders to President Erdoğan as representatives of three alternative anti-populist styles. It also reflects on the debates among various public intellectuals around the ways to electorally defeat populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Bank for International Settlements, as a collective organic intellectual of finance capital, has sought to maintain the hegemony of financial globalization in the context of an increasingly fractured global order following the 2007–2009 financial crisis. I show how the Bank for International Settlements' defence of financial globalization has pivoted around the construction of a new 'economic imaginary' of global capitalism in which the global financial cycle, which culminates in systemic financial crises, threatens economic and political stability. Asserting that this cycle can be 'properly managed', the Bank for International Settlements has advocated a set of formal shifts in macro-policy frameworks. Focusing on the temporality of economic governance as envisioned by the Bank for International Settlements, I highlight two important dimensions of the organization's discourse: the reduction of policy to process and the fetishization of policy innovation. Here, the pursuit of principles of 'good' economic management is prioritized over the achievement of concrete economic or social outcomes. In traversing this economic imaginary, this article offers insights into how global capitalism and its management are envisioned by elites in the current period of hegemonic disorganization and political-economic turmoil. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article weaves together futurist electropop, the neorationalist memescape, neoliberal urban planning, and digital finance to illustrate some of the new epistemological and political challenges facing the growing musicological subfield of critical organology. Drawing upon recent studies of financial technology, it argues that calls to erase theoretical abstraction and return to a “common-sense” concern for “tangible things” come dangerously close to endorsing the neoliberal drive to replace public institutions with entrepreneurial competition. The aims are to show that the “affordances” of music technology today are not necessarily discernible when organologists limit their attention to musical instruments’ ontologies alone, and to propose an alternative focused on “repairing” music technology’s capacity for democratization. The first section presents a reading of the Grimes single “We Appreciate Power,” situating the music in relation to an ethnographic account of the scene where Grimes first emerged. The second section seeks a definition of affordance that makes sense of the technological politics at work in things like rationalist meme economies and neoliberal innovation hubs. The concluding section outlines the case for a reparative organology that would both account better for materiality and resolve anxieties around theoretical abstraction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study of science popularization in dictatorships, such as Franco's regime, offers a useful window through which to review definitions of controversial categories such as "popular science" and the "public sphere." It also adds a new analytical perspective to the historiography of dictatorships and their totalitarian nature. Moreover, studying science popularization in these regimes provides new tools for a critical analysis of key contemporary concepts such as nationalism, internationalism, democracy, and technocracy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

From 17 to 22 October 1955, Madrid hosted the UNESCO Festival of Science. In the early years of the Cold War, in a dictatorial country that had recently been admitted into the international community, the festival aimed to spread science to the public through displays of scientific instruments, public lectures, book exhibitions, science writers professional associations, and debates about the use of different media. In this context, foreign visitors, many of whom came from liberal democracies, seemed comfortable in the capital of a country ruled by a dictatorship that had survived after the defeat of fascism in the Second World War and was struggling to gain foreign recognition after years of isolation. This article analyzes the political role of science popularization in Madrid at that time. It approaches the apparently puzzling marriage between UNESCO's international agenda for peace and democracy and the interests of the Francoist elites. Shared views of technocratic modernity, the fight against communism, and a diplomacy that served Spanish nationalism, paved the way for the alliance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technocratic intergovernmentalism has undermined the preconditions for its own success as a democratic project of transnational cooperation. It has triggered populist reactions within nation states and helped to discredit the intermediary institutions (parties and parliaments) that connect democratic will-formation and joint decision-making. This rise of populism and its alignment with nationalism, in consequence, hampers joint decision-making in the international realm. We argue that representative democracies can overcome the negative spiral between technocratic intergovernmentalism and nationalist populism by mutually granting their citizens the right to elect representatives not only in their domestic parliament, but also in the parliaments of 'consociated democracies'. Such a system of horizontally expanded and overlapping national democracies can serve three functions: it re-empowers citizens in a world of cross-border flows, it curbs the self-destructive polarization of party systems and it facilitates cooperation among democracies within the European Union (EU) and beyond. Finally, we discuss three competing approaches: Liberal Multilateralism, Deliberative Transnationalism and Republican Intergovernmentalism. We point to common ground, but also show how our approach avoids their main pitfalls. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the last five years, the Indian right-wing has been discrediting left-liberal experts and encouraging pseudo-scientific religious knowledge systems. Yet, crucially, it has also cultivated its own institutional networks of those it considers to be intellectuals and experts: an ostensibly anti-colonial alternative authority to challenge the "hegemony of the progressives" and the "erstwhile custodians of discourse." This article examines the evolution of a shifting network of experts and elites, interrogating what is considered to be expertise in the context of governance. Through a study of Indian think tanks, this article shows how two forms of political legitimacy govern contemporary India: (i) populist politics, which appeals to the masses/majority by defining nationalism through rigid boundaries of caste, class and religion; and (ii) technocratic policy,which produces a consensus of pragmatism and neutralises charges of hyper-nationalism. Using data from participant observation and over 50 interviews in New Delhi, before and after the Bharatiya Janata Party's election victory in 2019, this article emphasises the relational dynamic between the two: they function through different, often contradictory, logics and content yet are able to work towards the same goals in key moments of mutual reinforcement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the pandemic, science became one of the most salient issues in European polities. At the same time, relevant sectors of European societies were sceptical about science-driven policy to contain the pandemic (e.g., lockdowns or vaccine mandates). The literature so far has analysed the relevance of trust in experts and trust in science in determining compliance to pandemic-related policies. However, we still do not know what are the drivers that lead to (dis)trust science. In this paper, we contribute to fill this gap, by analysing the association between technocratic and populist attitudes and trust in science. Using a novel survey, fielded in Italy, among a sample of 5.000 respondents, we show that populism and technocracy are strongly related with (dis)trust in science in opposite directions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the war, the Nationalist regime created the National Resources Commission (NRC), which focused on developing coal mines to meet the energy needs of a society at war and of relocated industries (p. 232). The two and half years the Chinese Nationalist regime controlled Fushun and the subsequent Communist takeover after 1949 replicated the same top-down control of the carbon resources the Japanese empire had enacted. In the 1950s a newly established Chinese Communist regime continued similar patterns of development based on resource extraction established in earlier regimes. [Extracted from the article]

As it emerged in the late twentieth century, Empire promised a new era of global cooperation and stability through a seamless integration of late capitalism and neoliberal technocracy. Premised as an end to history itself, all that was left to accomplish was to tinker at the margins, stimulate corporate enterprise, embrace financialization and technological innovation, and encourage liberal rights and inclusion. As we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, the narrative fictions sustaining Empire have broadly collapsed at the level of symbolic identification and belief. Empire has entered into a period of global emergency and mutation. Engaging with Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri's work, this paper considers what might emerge when we read education into the circuitry of Empire's decay. First, we locate Empire within foundational tensions in modernity, using Kantian philosophy and colonialism as examples, to foreground the idea of education as immanent to historical processes of creativity, resistance, and innovation. Second, we highlight dead-end responses, from space colonization to neo-fascism, as representations of how modes of education circulate to stabilize and contain Empire's crises, specifically in relation to capitalism, nationalism, and identity. Lastly, the paper develops a political ontology of education after Empire. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In an earlier paper published in a neutrosophic math journal (IJNS), we discussed a new approach to technology, which may be called as 'opti-realism' or 'pess-optimism' as alternative to utopianism based on technocracy, which may lead the world into global technototalitarianism. In this article, we submit a new approach to Nature and technology, which is more modest and humble, rather than a techno-utopianism version of reality that most futurists argue for. Our proposed approach resembles more to Myer-Briggs 16 types of personality, including IJNS, IFNS etc. In our scheme, there are 8 characters of approach toward technology which can lead to many variations or we call it 'Permutation." Of course, if the readers ask one variation that we prefer, we would answer: Small Tech, High Touch. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The public debt in Colombia between 1990 and 2020 has become a structuring axis of the country's political economy and under its maintenance has generated a number of laws, decrees, and norms, which have largely determined the dynamics of investment and social spending. Likewise, the rights of the Colombian population have been subordinated to the macroeconomic stability established under neoclassical theory. Although the public debt has a great relevance in the configuration of the State in Colombia, the analysis of the problem of public debt and its service is vague, and it does not structure the fiscal crisis of the State with that of public indebtedness. Thus, this article aims to show the configuration of the public debt in the last 30 years and its relationship with the fiscal crisis of the State. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The influential Naitō-Hartwell hypothesis of middle period Chinese history posits an economic and social transformation from the aristocratic-led early Tang (618–907 CE) period to the literati and gentry-led governance of Song (960–1279 CE). Fundamental to this thesis is the drastic economic expansion that unfolded during these centuries. However, scholars have devoted less attention to how these larger economic and demographic trends relate to both continuity and change in the monarchies of this period. In the aftermath of the An Lushan 安祿山 (753–763 CE) rebellion, the Six Dynasties (220–589 CE) and early Tang conception of emperorship as a ritual primus inter pares among aristocratic peers gave way to a new conception of the monarchy as the command center of a technocratic corporation. This article describes the late Tang and Five Dynasties (907–979 CE) institutional and political structures that the Song founders, descendants of the independent and entrepreneurial Hebei military administrators of the ninth century, inherited and adapted to develop this new model of imperial governance. As the Song moved into the eleventh century, only this new entrepreneurial monarchy, an imperial technocracy, possessed the administrative capacity and technological competencies necessary to capitalize and harness the period's transformative economic forces. Résumé: L'influente hypothèse de Naitō et Hartwell sur l'histoire de la Chine prémoderne postule une transformation économique et sociale entre le début de la période Tang (618–907), dirigée par l'aristocratie, et la période Song (960–1279), dominée par les lettrés et la gentry. L'expansion économique spectaculaire qui s'est produite au cours de ces siècles est un élément fondamental de cette thèse. Cependant, les historiens ont accordé moins d'attention à la manière dont ces grandes tendances économiques et démographiques sont liées aux continuités et aux changements dans les régimes monarchiques de cette période. À la suite de la rébellion d'An Lushan 安祿山 (753–763), la conception propre aux Six Dynasties (220–589) et au début des Tang de l'empereur comme primus inter pares rituel parmi ses pairs aristocratiques a cédé la place à une nouvelle conception de la monarchie comme centre de commandement d'une corporation technocratique. Cet article décrit les structures institutionnelles et politiques de la fin des Tang et des Cinq Dynasties (907–979) dont les fondateurs des Song, descendants des administrateurs militaires du Hebei du IXe siècle, indépendants et à l'esprit entrepreneurial, ont hérité et qu'ils ont adapté pour développer ce nouveau modèle de gouvernance impériale. À l'aube du XIe siècle, seule cette nouvelle monarchie entrepreneuriale, une technocratie impériale, possédait la capacité administrative et les compétences technologiques nécessaires pour capitaliser et exploiter les forces économiques transformatrices de l'époque. 摘要: 中國中古著名的 "內藤湖南—郝若貝假說" 認為，唐宋之間經歷了一場由貴族統治轉變為文人與士紳統治的經濟和社會變革。在這數世紀中，劇烈的經濟擴張是其論點的根本依據。然而，學者們很少關注這些大規模的經濟和人口趨勢，與該時期君主統治的延續和變化之間的關係。安史之亂之後，六朝和初唐所信奉的皇權理念，即皇帝作為貴族階級禮儀元首的概念，逐漸讓位於一種新的理解，即皇室實為一個技術專家統治集團的指揮中心。本文描述宋代的建國者，即九世紀獨立自主，且有企業家性質的河北軍統的繼承人，所承襲的晚唐和五代之制度與政治結構。他們在此基礎上調整並發展出這個新的中央統治模式。當宋朝步入十一世紀，只有這個具企業精神的君主政體，或說是這個技術統治集團，才擁有駕馭和利用該時期充滿變革的經濟力量所需要的行政和技術能力。 [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the institutional arrangements in place to investigate prison suicides in England and Wales, focusing on inquiries by the Prisons & Probation Ombudsman and coroners' inquests. The first half of the article is empirical, and draws on a set of elite interviews with Prisons & Probation Ombudsman investigators, senior coroners and other professionals involved in prison oversight. The latter half of the article is theoretical, and interprets prison suicide investigations as an example of broader trends of counter-democracy and depoliticisation. I provide a general theoretical overview of these concepts, and argue that Prisons & Probation Ombudsman investigations and coroners' inquests operate according to a technocratic logic of independence, neutrality and rationality. The article concludes that prison suicide investigations are narrowly concerned with the factual details and administrative minutiae of individual cases, at the expense of more open ended, less manageable questions about the politics of punishment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The complex relationship between science and politics has been a perennial issue in public administration. In this debate it is important to distinguish between 'good' and 'bad' politics, and between 'good' and 'bad' science. The Covid-19 pandemic has valorised the importance of science in shaping governmental responses, and has tended to contrast politics negatively with science. However, technocratic approaches to policymaking downplay the importance of politics in policymaking. Two case studies, of countries where there have been markedly different pandemic outcomes are used to illustrate the relationship between science and politics during this public health crisis – New Zealand and Brazil. In New Zealand there has been a positive and effective, if technocratic, relationship between science and politics, while in Brazil the relationship between the two domains has been fraught. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Within Western criminal justice traditions, the 'risk' paradigm has become the defining logic of contemporary laws and policies on sex offender management. This article critically examines the limitations of current technocratic and algorithmic approaches to risk in relation to sexual offending and how they might be addressed. Drawing on nearly two decades of theoretical and empirical research conducted by the author, it applies the learning on sex offender reintegration and desistance to advance a 'humanistic' paradigm of sexual offending. The paper attempts to counter some of the dangers of algorithmic justice and shift risk-based discourse away from its predominantly 'scientific' origins. It argues that such a move towards a more expansive and progressive version of risk within criminal justice discourses would better capture the realities of sexual offending behaviour and its real-world governance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines how the Pacific Alliance constitutes a multilevel state project to lock-in neoliberal reforms in each member country. Using a strategic relational approach to institutions that emphasizes the interconnection between institutional and social dynamics, it demonstrates that the AP is a state project that is both a regional market access strategy and a domestic disciplinary mechanism. Notably, it represents an attempt to reinforce the neoliberal economic export models that predominate in each member country: Chile, Mexico, Peru, and Colombia. Buttressed by dominant domestic and transnational social forces in each country, technocrats in each member countries seek to reproduce institutional strategies of depoliticization that were successfully employed in their countries at a regional level in the AP in view of growing political instability and discontentment with neoliberalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the epistemic politics of hegemonic humanitarianism by building on agnotology theories. I unpack the idea of "professional authority" with the purpose of showing how the Global North's humanitarian agencies thrive on both a technocratic and an unpredictability approach. This epistemic politics is used to absolve humanitarianism of its failures and to blame "Southern" politics and technical deficiencies in the Global South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay displays the central factors which animate the cyclical attempts to renew Marxism, which also had in Latin America noteworthy representatives. These attempts generally follow the way started by Georg Lukács. He separated the methodological core of Marxism from the concreteresults of Marxist analyses. The core rests always valid and true, while the specific results may contain errors which do not affect the essential quality of Marxism. The danger lies in legitimizingthe intellectuals who master the Marxist method and thus can build a political and technocratic elite, which would be armoured against any critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on the welfare state has devoted considerable attention to social policy expansion. However, little is known about why governments expand social policies serving groups with limited power on issues with low visibility. I call these "benevolent policies." This class of social policies improves population well-being but produces minimal political gains for the governments enacting them. Why do governments expand benevolent policies if political incentives for reform are weak? I investigate this question by focusing on government responses to malnutrition. Drawing on nine months of fieldwork, including 71 interviews, I argue that the origins of policy expansion can be found in the government bureaucracy. Bureaucrats with technical expertise—technocrats—can play a defining role, deploying international pressure to court executive support and orchestrate policy change. Their actions help explain the Indonesian government's unexpected expansion of nutrition policies, which serve low-income women and children and address micronutrient malnutrition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anti-politics has emerged as an important concept for analysing the effects of distrust on liberal democratic politics. However, it is unclear why democrats should trust individuals who distrust politics to help them in renewing democracy. This article addresses this puzzle by defining four types of anti-politics: technocratic, elitist, populist and participatory. It then compares the political thought of four democratic thinkers associated with each type, to discern the extent to which they are 'productive' or 'unproductive' for representative democracy. The article argues that participatory and technocratic types of anti-politics, illustrated by the thought of Carole Pateman and, to a lesser extent, Friedrich Hayek, are productive for representative democracy because they prompt reflexivity in how representative institutions work. By contrast, populist and elitist types of anti-politics, illustrated by the thought of Ernesto Laclau and Joseph Schumpeter, are less productive. The article concludes that scholars need to carefully discern the logic underlying populist and technocratic 'solutions' to our contemporary democratic crisis because those solutions can themselves be advocated by 'false friends' who are unreflexive about what should be considered ideal sources of 'expert knowledge' or 'popular will'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Current trends in humanitarian accountability are unpacked through the examination of an accountability system put in place after the 2010 monsoon floods in Pakistan. Humanitarian accountability, when narrowly understood as a technical and procedural tool, can undermine local self-advocacy efforts, silence community dissent, and supress broader equity claims. Reframing humanitarian accountability as a political and ethical project can inspire innovation, support frontline aid workers, and ignite the radical revisioning of the humanitarian contract itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While delegation of policymaking authority from citizens to parliament is the most defining characteristic of representative democracy, public demand for delegating such authority away from legislature/government to technocrats or back to citizens appears to have increased. Drawing on spatial models of voting, we argue that the distance between individuals' ideal policy points, the status quo, experts' policy positions and aggregated societal policy preferences can help explain whether individuals prefer to delegate decision-making power away from parliament and, if so, to whom. The effects of individual's preference distance from these ideal points are likely to be stronger the more salient the policy issue is for the respective individual. We test this argument using survey experiments in Germany, Switzerland and the United Kingdom. The analysis provides evidence for the empirical implications of our theoretical arguments. The research presented here contributes to better understanding variation in citizens' support for representative democracy and preferences for delegating policymaking authority away from parliament. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What are the shape(s) of warfare and conflict in the allegedly post-historical, post-human, technocratic age? In a world altered by the technocratic paradigm, has our realist optic, founded on a witnessing that focuses on the surface appearance of things and a rhetoric framed by neo-liberal epistemology and desires, blinded us to the current changeable nature(s) and layerings of war and conflict? War is either seen as an abnormal happening in a faraway country, often defined as a dispute and not a war, or else it alters from a spectacular coordination of brute violence to a socio-economic inducement of fear, panic, social mobilisation/dispersion, and control in the particles of everyday life. During long periods of slow conflict nations leak away, people become metronomes, cultures are sapped of resilience, languages evaporate, existences are rendered irrelevant. How does writing bear witness to this spectrum of violence and reveal the technocratic paradigm underlying the sutures? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The trajectory of the Indian National Congress is often narrated as one of progressive and terminal decline. This article focuses on a largely neglected period in the history of the INC from the 1980s when the party was subject to techno-managerial reforms intended to revitalise the party. Launched under Rajiv Gandhi, this modernisation project entailed the use of large-scale data collection, computerisation, and technocrats for managing intra-party affairs. By exploring the interface between technology and politics, this article demonstrates the impact that the reforms had on India's political culture and helps contextualise contemporary processes of intra-party organisational change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Technocratic cabinets and expert, non-political ministers appointed in otherwise partisan cabinets have become a common reality in recent decades in young and older democracies, but we know little about how citizens see this change and what values, perceptions and experiences drive their attitudes towards technocratic government. The article explores the latter topic by drawing on recent comparative survey data from nine countries, both young and consolidated democracies from Europe and Latin America. Two individual-level characteristics trigger particularly strong support for the replacement of politicians with experts: low political efficacy and authoritarian values. They are complemented by a third, somewhat weaker factor: corruption perception. At the macro level, technocracy appeals to citizens of countries where the quality of democracy is deficient and where technocratic cabinets are a part of historical legacy. Surprisingly, civic activism and, partially, satisfaction with democracy enhance technocratic orientation, indicating such attitudes are not expressions of alienation or depoliticisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Do citizens welcome the involvement of independent experts in politics? Theoretical and empirical work so far provides conflicting answers to this question. On the one hand, citizens may demand expert involvement in political decision‐making processes in order to ensure efficient and effective governance solutions. On the other hand, citizens can be distrustful of experts and reject the unaccountable and non‐transparent nature of expert‐based governance. This note investigates citizen preferences for the involvement of experts in different stages of political processes and across 'hard' and 'easy' political issues. Results show that, in the absence of explicit output information, respondents prefer independent experts over national elected representatives in the policy design and implementation stages, across political issues. For the crucial stage of decision making, respondents show no difference in their evaluation of processes that delegate decisions to experts or to elected representatives, with the exception of environmental policy, where expert decision making is preferred. These findings are relevant for ongoing discussions on how to incorporate independent experts in political decision making in a way that citizens find legitimate and on how to address increased citizen dissatisfaction with the representative democratic functions performed by political parties, governments and politicians. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Calls for organizational change have pervaded wildlife conservation in recent decades, driven by a shift in values that is reshaping the social landscape of wildlife management. As this process unfolds, wildlife agencies in North America seek new ways to remain relevant, focusing primarily on how they might expand support for their ongoing work. Less attention, however, has been given to expanding opportunities for a value‐diverse public to directly shape what that work might entail. As citizen ballot initiatives, lawsuits, and other forms of political intervention continue to complicate wildlife management, we ask whether agencies—who have historically shied away from value‐based conflict in pursuit of apolitical scientific management—can remain relevant without fundamental changes to their governance structures. Using data from a 2018 survey of wildlife values among the American public (n = 24,393) and state wildlife agency employees (n = 10,191), we explore the extent to which public values are mirrored within wildlife agencies and examine the implications of a "values gap" on the long‐term sustainability of technocratic wildlife management. Findings suggest that as the public's perspectives on wildlife conservation change, governance reform may become a growing area of focus in the years ahead. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]