Search

In recent years, scholarship on postfunctionalism in European integration has drawn attention to how processes of Europeanisation are not restricted to policymakers, but exist equally (if not more significantly) in the quotidian. The 2016–2020 Brexit process and debates on the relationship between national identity and 'Europeanness' urge a new consideration of how Europeanisation is narrated in everyday discourses. This paper analyses British fictional portrayals of the EEC and EU and posits a new theoretical framework of 'Imperial Gothic 2.0'. Pre-2016 representations of the EU were entirely dystopian. But post-2016, Brex-Lit fiction has reversed this trend and the EU now appears as a flawless utopia. Early twentieth-century 'Imperial Gothic' saw popular fiction defined by themes of British decline and oppression by foreign powers; a century later, Brex-Lit has resurrected these themes by narrating Britain in terminal decline, reflecting cultural anxieties, a reversal of Self and Other, and a loss of identities. This 'Imperial Gothic 2.0' reveals anxieties which reflect and influence political action, and reveals the extent to which imaginations and narratives of the EU have transformed from depictions of a distant, technocratic entity used for comedy or conspiracy, into a site of intense emotional affiliation, nostalgia, anticipation, and regret. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the context of growing nationalisms and Euroscepticism, this paper develops the original concept of 'Everyday Europeanhood' on a theoretical level, building on related concepts, such as Skey and Antonsich's 'Everyday Nationhood', Billig's 'Banal Nationalism', Anderson's 'Imagined Communities' and Beck's 'Cosmopolitan Vision'. It applies the concept to the European Universities Initiative (EUI), seen as a tool to promote European identity, based on a common sense of belonging conveyed through everyday practice, among students and staff in European University Alliances. It is argued that, in the light of previous top-down European initiatives designed to symbolically reinforce a sense of shared European identity, the EUI seems more in phase with bottom-up 'everyday' processes of identity development. Taking the European University Alliance 'FORTHEM' as an example, core features, aspects, actions and outputs achieved so far within this alliance are categorised in the light of four dimensions of 'Everyday Europeanhood': 'Talking Europe', 'Choosing Europe', 'Performing Europe' and 'Consuming Europe'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper will investigate whether or not intercultural philosophy conceived as a cooperative activity can be used to reflect and broaden the horizon of philosophy through reciprocal engagements by different socio-cultural blocs. We argue that the concept of social integration is met with so much uncertainty in a world where the influences of colonialism and coloniality bid to impose the cultural particular of the West on the rest of the world. This has created a divisive world of insider and outsider, superior and inferior forms of cultural othering. As a result, people often focus on the differences that exist among worldviews and experiences while overlooking the importance of social collaboration between different socio-cultural blocs. Our aim in this paper is to tap into intercultural philosophy, and use the framework of complementary reflection to illustrate how social collaboration can be attained by undermining cultural hegemony. To achieve this aim, we employ an understanding of intercultural philosophy as a cooperative activity and explore how it can help broaden the horizon of diverse worldviews with the purpose of reciprocal enlightenment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early hours of 1 January 1994, Josef Ng concluded his 25-minute performance artwork Brother Cane (1994) by snipping his pubic hair. The performance created a public furore, resulting in the cessation of public funding towards performance artworks for ten years. Undeterred by the backlash, Tang Da Wu created and performed Don't Give Money to the Arts (1995) to protest the no-funding rule: during the opening of a state-sponsored exhibition, the artist approached the president of Singapore while wearing a jacket embroidered with the words "Don't Give Money to the Arts". Although it was as explicit in its criticism of the government and its policies, Tang was not penalised for his performance. In this paper, I conduct a comparative analysis of these two works to examine how protest art – with a focus on the performance art form – navigates the cultural hegemony in Singapore by comparing the tactics used in both performances by analysing how and why Tang managed to escape punishment for his scathing performance while Ng did not. Specifically, I look at how the performances navigated the "out-of-bound markers" and concealed their dissent, and how the artists controlled the documentations produced. The answers to this question provide us with important insights into how protest art continues to adapt to and resist the mutating systems of control within authoritarian states. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on theorisations of popular culture as a site of cultural hegemony and Bourdieu's sociology of taste, this paper is an analysis of social media discourses about Skhosana Buhlungu's song Dlala ntethe. Our main thesis is that the song became the locus of expression and contestations about ethnic identity. We demonstrate how the song, like all forms of popular culture, became implicated in the ideological battle for cultural hegemony in a highly ethnicised Zimbabwean society. The paper is based on purposively sampled Facebook and Twitter posts gathered via manual web crawling using the hashtags #Dlala ntethe and #Ntethe. A thematic analysis of the data reveals that aesthetic endorsement of the song became a marker of ethnicity. Findings demonstrate that taste for Dlala ntethe was subordinated to the logic of an essentialist Ndebele ethnic solidarity. Additionally, it emerged from the analysis that when it was expedient to do so, Ndebele identity was framed as a fluid cultural construct that is conferred or revoked depending on one's disposition towards Dlala ntethe. Relatedly, debates about the aesthetic quality of Skhosana's music reveal an ethnic double standard where similar musical offerings by Shona and South African musicians are not subjected to the same standard. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The literary trope of the shark has been exploited as a symbol of monstrosity in classic Western literature, from the great sea novels by Herman Melville, Jules Verne, and Ernest Hemingway to Peter Benchley's iconic Jaws. However, the demonisation of sharks in Western literature stands in sharp contrast to the cultural reverence and nuanced literary trope of the shark in Hawaiian narrative traditions such as moʻolelo (myths and legends) and 'ōlelo no'eau (proverbs and poetical sayings). This paper examines the reciprocal associations between sharks and humans in Hawaiian culture in two novels set in contemporary Hawai'i, Kiana Davenport's Shark Dialogues (1994) and Kawai Strong Washburn's Sharks in the Time of Saviors (2020). These novels resist Western cultural hegemony by portraying sharks according to indigenous Hawaiian epistemologies and narrative traditions as ʻaumākua (ancestral guardians) and symbols of deep, oceanic genealogies. The analysis of the shark trope in Washburn's and Davenport's novels draws on the ethnographic studies by Martha Beckwith, Mary Kawena Pukui and Noelani Puniwai; traditional folktales and legends; as well as Oceanic cultural critics Epeli Hau'ofa and Albert Wendt. Considering the alarming 70% decline in sharks since the 1970s and the ensuing collapse of oceanic ecosystems, it is time to rethink the portrayal of sharks as monsters in Western literature and popular culture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The following paper explores the funerary epigraphy of contemporary Galician rural societies to contextualise it within social, historical, and linguistic dynamics. This hypothesis suggests an apparently contradictory record, with diverse primary sources offering apparently conflicting versions of the same process: while funerary memorials show an absolute predominance of Castilian as the vehicular language, sociolinguistic and historical studies suggest an absolute predominance of Galician. Considering these contextual discordances, different questions arise: how are these ambiguous contexts generated? Is it a methodological problem or are they real representations of ambivalent social dynamics? How can we identify them and in what kind of social processes? Accordingly, this work develops a twofold approach: firstly, an analytical methodology that collects relevant data from epigraphic evidence is provided, aiming to expose the funerary record and identify possible contextual ambiguities in relation to other available sources. All analytical procedures will be described, and the results obtained will be presented. Moreover, a broad historical and sociolinguistic perspective is presented, with the aim of contextualising what dynamics define and explain this apparently contradictory phenomenon. Secondly, a discussion about the problems of these discordances, their relationship with the discourses of power, and their analysis from the material register has been considered. Different theoretical and methodological approaches are explored to study these ambiguous records, considering their role in different power relations. The main objective is to reflect on how we approach ambiguous records in order to provide terminological tools to understand material and social contexts entangled in power dynamics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Educational "inclusion" has led to a debate about the appropriateness of special and mainstream schools. This paper adds to this debate by drawing on the concept of cultural hegemony to analyse the nature, purpose and value of special school physical education (PE). Eighteen individual interviews explored the perceptions of PE teachers, senior leaders and learning support assistants. The findings suggest that common sense cultural norms in special school PE are underpinned by an aspiration to develop the "whole child": physically, socially and cognitively. This involved the delivery of a broad curriculum that is guided by a needs-based approach. Special schools appeared to be taking a more open view about what constitutes PE, when compared to mainstream schools, which was also accompanied with a desire to embrace cross-curricular possibilities. We end by offering questions requiring further consideration, and by highlighting opportunities for mutual learning within and across special and mainstream schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines teachers' (mis)understandings of culturally relevant pedagogy (CRP) in one school district in a socially conservative area of the U.S. Midwest. The central concern of this paper involves interrogating the way teacher conceptualizations of CRP maintain inequalities in urban schools by normalizing, reproducing, and protecting White cultural hegemony, including the colorblind notion that racism plays no factor in schooling. As the findings of this study demonstrate, a significant difference exists between what teachers in this district publicly assert as their proficiency in CRP and what they actually understand, believe, and practice. Ultimately, teacher attachments to deficit narratives hamper CRP's usefulness for critique of dominant knowledge, oppressive social structures, and racism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores nineteenth-century U.S. foreign policy towards Hispaniola, particularly Haiti, and investigates Frederick Douglass' controversial stance on U.S. expansion on the island. Indeed, U.S. interest in the island started to take shape after years of non-recognition of Haiti and demonization of its revolution. After the Civil War, the U.S. government reassessed its policy towards the island and entered into negotiations to annex the Dominican Republic and a significant Haitian territory. Drawing on Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony, this paper examines how the U.S. intertwined its narrative of exceptionalism with racial ideology to legitimize its nineteenth-century expansionist zeal. Of particular interest is Douglass' evolving response to U.S. hemispheric expansionism. The leading abolitionist, who firmly opposed U.S. interventions in the antebellum period, altered his views and strikingly aligned himself with Gilded Age expansionist schemes. This discussion traces the reasons for Douglass' shifting positionality towards U.S. cultural hegemony. It brings to light Douglass's aspirations to de-Other Haiti and put an end to its hemispheric exclusion and isolation. Therefore, Douglass' espousal of U.S. interventionist policy was contingent on the extent to which this expansionist policy advanced racial integration and diasporic egalitarianism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The discourse on translation in Manipuri literature – the first Tibeto-Burman language listed in the 8th Schedule of the Indian Constitution – is primarily descriptive in nature and has focused on the central narrative that Manipuri literature enriched itself through translation, oblivious to the question of linguistic and cultural hegemony that preoccupied twentieth-century Manipur. The issue of asymmetrical transaction and dominance between the source languages and the target language remains ignored and shrouded in obscurity. Through mapping out two trajectories of translation projects in Manipur during the colonial era (1891–1945), this article aims to explain this asymmetrical transaction and argues that translation served as a modernising agent via projecting the Indo-Aryan culture as modern/legitimate as opposed to the indigenous culture as traditional/outdated. The first trajectory traces the implications of the translations of textbooks as a direct result of the introduction of modern education in colonial Manipur, while the later discusses the translations of Sanskrit religious texts as an indication of the merging of the Indo-Aryan hegemony within the tradition of colonial modernity in Manipur. Thus, this article explores the role of translation in a marginal state (Manipur), where colonial modernity was constituted via non-native hegemonic languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Narratives of wartime suffering, communist evils, and maltreatment by the 'West' have started featuring prominently in the political discourse across eastern Europe in the past decade and half. Permeating the public sphere, such narratives imply complex victimhood and often gain a hegemonic status. Why have such victimhood narratives become so pervasive? And what has been their purpose across eastern Europe? This interdisciplinary article provides a conceptual and empirical explanation of how hegemonic narratives of victimhood have been used to enhance ontological security and as an instrument of power-seeking political leaders, especially (but not exclusively) right-wing populists. It shows that although the local attachment to memory and history is often portrayed as irrational, victimhood as a narrative has clear benefits regarding national ontological security as the self-understanding of a state and a tool to justify policies. Using concrete examples, the articles identify three main sub-narratives of direct, historical and structural victimhood linked to World War II, communism and the precarious relationship with the 'West', arguing that the combination of historical traumas and the post-1989 transformations explain the pan-regional proliferation of victimhood. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Enlightenment thought and its contemporary followers usually support two contradictory principles simultaneously. The first is universality. Truth is universal because it is truth for all. Claims to universality are made in logic and science, but also in areas that are culturally or politically controversial. Recently, universalism has become a key term to express a fundamental critique of identity politics. For much of European history, Christianity provided such a universal truth. But with the decline of its cultural hegemony and the rise of particular nation-states, conflicting truth claims became weapons in violent conflicts, leading Hobbes to argue that dangerous truth claims must be neutralized by robust political power. In the eighteenth century, rationalism became more optimistic, interpreting universalism as cosmopolitanism based on universal reason and progress through history. The second principle is historicism, which is the self-reflexive look at the historical origins of universal claims and theories. Historicism emerged in the nineteenth century as a response to the application of rationalism to history. It challenged the universal claims of the French Revolution, emphasizing instead the unique value of each historical entity. This revealed a fundamental paradox: when universalism becomes self-reflexive, it recognizes that it has non-universal historical origins, thereby undermining itself. After the devastation of World War II and the Holocaust, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (1948) represented a significant effort toward a new universalism. It sought to establish human rights as universal principles for the emerging world order. But history repeated itself: Historicism once again weakened confidence in human rights. The enemies of human rights take advantage of this weakness. We therefore have to live with the paradox that universalism is necessary because humanity shares a single world, but that historical self-reflection is also unavoidable. In other words, the Enlightenment principle of universalism must accept historicism as an integral part of itself. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When disaster occurred in Qing Dynasty, some of the rich people, say gentry and merchants, were willing to make great contributions on relief. According to sources, donations for relief had some benefits for them. Not merely can they gain official titles with self-identity and superiority, but can convert “cultural capital” into upwardly mobile political chances and strengthen a say in local politics, propelling them into positions of power. Therefore, when making a substantial payment on relief, in exchange, contributors using symbols paid attention on the importance of cultural hegemony in maintaining their positions in local society. The observation of the relief donation in the Qing Dynasty made it a site to study not just how people dealt with the famine policy within structure and what the social mechanism at the time developed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The number of children educated within maintained Special Educational Needs (SEN) Schools, known as special schools, in England has continued to rise since 2006, yet the 'pupil voice' of children and young people with severe learning difficulties and those attending special schools remains limited in current research. Drawing on Gramsci's theory of cultural hegemony (see Jones, 2006), this study aimed to provide an under-represented group with the opportunity to express attitudes and opinions towards their physical education (PE) lessons. The research adopted a participant-focused methodology and used a task-based approach, where participants could complete a series of activities suitable to individual needs. The tasks included a drawing activity, a PE likes and dislikes activity and a storyboard with the following sentence starters: 'I like', 'I don't like', 'I feel', 'I want to' and 'I think'. PE took on multiple forms, including therapy sessions and team games, thus suggesting that PE was not narrowly defined as one specific form of education for the pupils. Participants were able to express strong opinions towards the type of activities they liked and disliked and were able to demonstrate a basic understanding of the benefits of PE in relation to health. Results indicate that team-based sports were popular and culturally valued. However, participants were often bored of repetitive PE lessons and well-liked therapy-related exercise often replaced PE classes. Older participants (16 years +) attending sixth form were frustrated that PE or the ability to be physically active during the school day was no longer part of their education, suggesting that perhaps PE lessons were not always culturally valued within the school. Finally, due to the lack of opportunities for adults with special education needs in the wider community, participants no longer had access to the types of physical activity they had enjoyed in school. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

School–based placements have been identified as important for personal and professional development, supporting prospective teachers to critically (re)consider and disrupt normative and ableist practices. Antonio Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony was used in this research to explore the influence of a special school placement on prospective teachers' beliefs about the nature, purpose, and value of physical education (PE) for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND). Twenty-six prospective teachers from England participated in focus groups prior to and after placement in a special school. Focus group audio recordings were transcribed verbatim and analyzed thematically. Our findings suggest that special school field experiences can contribute toward disrupting hegemonic beliefs about the nature, purpose, and value of PE, and allow prospective teachers to develop more critical, diverse, and nuanced understandings of PE, which may be crucial for providing more inclusive PE experiences for pupils with SEND in both special and mainstream settings. Saying that, we end by offering a note of caution about the transferability and permanence of ideological change, calling for future research that explores the long-term influence of special school placements and transfer to mainstream schools. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chiang Mai is home to approximately 400 diasporic Punjabis, some of whom are sixth-generation residents of Thailand. While their transnational orientation, distinct sartorial choices and cultural practices might present them as outsiders to essential Thainess, Northern Thai Punjabis transgress the national image of Thainess and subjectively consider themselves to be Northern (Lanna) Thais. At the same time, these Thai citizens avail themselves of Overseas Citizenship of India (OCI) status for privileged access to economic, cultural and educational resources in India. Based on 51 in-depth interviews and 17 focus group studies among resident Hindu, Sikh and Namdhari Sikh communities in Northern Thailand, this research explores family histories, selective transnationalism, and regional Lanna identities among these overseas Punjabis. As this article will argue, while Punjabi Thais maintain their networks and cultural connections with an historic ancestral homeland, they also cultivate forms of local cultural intimacy in ways which leapfrog the linguistic and cultural hegemony of Thai national identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the editor and public intellectual Henning Fonsmark as a prism through which to explore critiques of democracy in late twentieth-century Denmark. It shows how Fonsmark innovatively combined criticism of the welfare state with opposition to the left-wing dominance in the fields of culture and education and the left's conception of democracy as a way of life. After describing Fonsmark's contribution to criticism of the welfare state from the 1970s onwards, the article argues that an important part of Fonsmark's legacy was his construction of a concept of democracy that ran counter to the social democratic understanding of democracy as pitting the people against the elite. Moreover, the article stresses that, in interpreting the ideological takeover of the Danish welfare state by the left, Fonsmark helped to mobilize opposition to the allegedly cultural and educational hegemony of the left, which was to become an important element of the Danish right's culture wars at the end of the twentieth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores ways to better understand corruption in Vietnam and the nature of Vietnamese capitalism. Given the current state of research, its arguments are not conclusive and focus upon empirics and issues in existing research. Regarding empirics, good data imply that corrupt payments by firms to Party officials are now so large – perhaps a quarter of gross domestic product – that their macro-systemic impacts must be, whilst still unclear, substantial. At such levels they likely have been allowing their recipients rapidly to build large asset-holdings. But the Party's generalised protection of demands for corrupt payments remains muted. Importantly, 2007 Party Directive #15 has been protecting Party members from corruption investigations, so that in effect they are not illegal. The research available, however, commonly treats Vietnamese corruption mainly as an indicator of state dysfunctionality, which fails to embrace the possibility that it is central to contemporary accumulation processes. The speculative argument is that at some point "pirates become businessmen" and the Vietnamese state will then shift, historically, from protecting corruption to protecting capital. In this framing, the decentralised nature of asset accumulation conditions political change. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Turkish economy is in freefall with rising inflation, unemployment, poverty and income inequality. Yet, the incumbent Justice and Development Party (JDP) continues to get the support of roughly one-third of the voters according to the latest surveys. Although this is a long way from the peak of the party when it was getting half the overall votes a decade ago, it is nevertheless a significant proportion of the voter base. What explains such a vote? More generally, why do people vote against their own material interests? Looking at the JDP's twenty-year incumbency, it can be argued that the JDP created party identification amongst a particular set of Turkish voters by utilising religious institutions, the education system, the media and civil society to construct its cultural hegemony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article uses the qualitative 'narrative analysis' method to explore and reflect upon the post-retirement issues faced by a small sample of Fiji elite ex-national-league soccer players. The sample consists of one Indo-Fijian and six indigenous Fijians. All experience lives of practical poverty and, for the indigenous men, their lives are defined by village customary routines and obligations. Perhaps surprisingly, the experiences of the Indo-Fijian ex-player are not too dissimilar because he shares social-class affiliation with his interviewed ex-teammates. The bonds between these ex-players remain strong and the ex-legend Joe Tubuna, killed in a motor-vehicle accident in 1984, still casts a presence which links them to the past, to the land, and to each other via the medium of shared localized memories. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article argues that coloniality of power poses a challenge for globalisation as a component of modernity. The challenge necessitates a programme of decoloniality for globalisation. The inherent potential of globalisation to elevate one culture as dominant and to residualise the rest is sufficient to warrant its problematisation despite its positive features. A review of the literature shows that some decolonial thinkers present globalisation as one of the phenomena associated with the coloniality of power. Indeed, as a form of global cultural hegemony, globalisation elevates one culture as an absolute while marginalising others. At the same time, globalisation has an inherent capacity to bring cultures into a conversation; potentially creating a less lopsided and more accommodating world. This article will discuss how the coloniality of power constitutes a problem for this more positive role for globalisation, and how this might be remedied. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

When scholars talk about an ancient Chinese "urban culture," they distinguish between the "citizens" of the time with the citizen class of medieval Europe, but their emphasis is often still on identifying the "freedom" and "modernity" made possible by "urban culture." This article treats Song-era urban residents as an aggregate group, to explore the characteristics of "urban culture" or "urban market culture" (shijing wenhua). On the surface, Song urban culture seems to feature the coexistence of elite and common culture. Deeper analysis shows that political, economic, and cultural capital became concentrated in urban areas as cities grew, making urban areas much more culturally influential relative to rural areas. Furthermore, because the scholar-gentry class wielded core political power, they continued to exert cultural hegemony. The key influencers of urban culture were public officials rather than private merchants. This was largely due to the popular imitation of upper-class culture by commoners. The urban cultural growth during the Tang and Song dynasties is politically significant because it continued and strengthened the phenomenon since the Tang dynasty of the dynastic state's increasingly unprecedented cultural control, as more scholar-gentry began living and concentrating cultural resources in cities. Thus, from the Song period on, the center of society and culture shifted firmly from rural to urban areas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The transformation of Musée Guimet and the transition of museums in the 'countries of origin' of its collections elucidates how white-cube crystallises Western cultural hegemony by erasing the colonial past of the objects and by representing the physical form of modernity. It contributes as well to nullifying the demand of repatriation, which seems to merely raise new power struggles rather than to recover indigenous beliefs (or identities). Through such a muséographie, the deities of the Other are 'elevated' from ethnographic specimen into art in the West while 'diminished' from sacred icons into art or historical artefacts in Asia. Museumification as such constitutes a whitening (Westernisation) heritage process that physically and epistemologically secularises non-Western faiths. Although the temple-simulated design is applied and limited Buddhist practice allowed in certain exhibition milieu or tourism destination, the phenomenon of museum coloniality is to be further studied should cultural diversity be indispensable for better heritage futures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Studies of amaXhosa ('Xhosa') men focus predominantly on Xhosa men attaining manhood through ritualised initiation (ulwaluko) and heterosexual homemaking through the building of a homestead (ukwakha umzi). Based on over a year of ethnographic research in Peddie, Eastern Cape, South Africa (2013–2014) with primarily young Xhosa men and women, I show the importance of looking pre-and-post the initiation and homestead centric focus prevalent in the literature. Using anthropological methods and techniques, I challenge initiation as the primary precursor to manhood for Xhosa men. I contest hegemonic theorisations and conceptualisations of Xhosa manhood that place primacy on the initiated phallus by showing the dynamic nature of Xhosa masculinities and the role of factors such as class, location and economic marginality. The young Xhosa men forming part of this study live in contexts of unemployment, structural exclusion and marginalisation. While initiation enjoys cultural hegemony, socially the picture is more complex. Rather than initiation status, employment and class assume importance in demarcating social status and relations among men. These tough conditions in Peddie are changing the political economy of sex in Peddie as well as contemporary meanings of traditions such as ulwaluko and heterosexual homemaking through ukwakha umzi. I argue for considerations of Xhosa masculinities that consider the role of economic marginality and socio-economic factors in influencing men's desires and experiences concerning ubudoda (manhood). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modern Turkey's emergence was a nationalist struggle that aimed to cultivate youth as secular citizens. Almost a century later, the ruling Justice and Development Party (AKP) attempts to re-model youth through a new ethno-religious nationalist project. This study argues that different from the secular Kemalist social engineering that dominated the state's youth policy for decades, the AKP relies on the intermediary agency of Islamist-conservative and government-oriented civil society to shape young generations and convey ethno-religious nationalism to youth. Seventeen government-oriented youth organizations illustrate the extent of the Justice and Development Party's (AKP) quest for a new national identity and cultural hegemony within the broader context of Turkey's steady decline into an authoritarian regime. The findings—based on original fieldwork conducted between October 2017–June 2019—demonstrate youth organizations' country-wide grassroots engagement in four categories: indoctrination, extra-curricular training, service provision in the education sector, and street activism and humanitarian work. Their self-defined goals, ideological roots and grassroots reach inject a new disciplinary ethos and statist values in youth towards shaping them as Muslim and nationalist 'ideal citizens'. The study offers insights on the societal aspects of authoritarian regime building and cautions that crafting 'successful' authoritarian regimes is not a one-way process that takes place only at the formal institutional level. A broad range of societal players and coalitions, including civil society, play a critical role in authoritarian regime building. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]