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This paper will compare and contrast Visegrád and Southeast European mobility towards (and away from) the European Union (EU) ideal of cohesion, in the process investigating conflicting "core" and "peripheral" assertions of "Europeanness." Though the Visegrád states have exceeded economic expectations, they have to varying degrees stood in opposition to the values of the EU's self-professed "European identity," with Hungary and Poland in particular demonstrating increasing illiberalism. Meanwhile, in Southeast Europe, lacklustre economic performance has tended to contrast with increasingly liberal democratic rule and strong popular support for the EU "project." The EU's cohesion strategy has prioritized economic convergence and, ultimately, this has meant that budgetary considerations, and political rhetoric and scrutiny, have often favoured the rebellious but economically resurgent Visegrád states over the weaker economies of a more compliant Southeast Europe. The EU's integration strategy of constructing "identity hegemony" depends upon both economic and socio-political convergence. This paper questions the congruence of these focuses, given the discriminatory application of integration incentives and the persistence of Orientalism/Balkanism in West European rhetoric. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How does exposure to rebel rule affect citizens' political attitudes after armed conflicts end? We combine original survey data from Côte d'Ivoire with a natural experiment based on the arbitrary location of a ceasefire boundary to estimate the effects of exposure to rebel rule by the Forces Nouvelles (FN) on Ivorians' sense of democratic citizenship. Our findings show that individuals in communities ruled by the FN held more negative attitudes about local government institutions 7 years after the reunification of the country, held weaker commitments to civic obligations, and were more likely to condone extralegal actions. The effects of rebel rule are larger than the effects of extreme lived poverty and appear among both rebel coethnics and non-coethnics. Using qualitative and survey evidence, we propose three theoretical mechanisms to explain why exposure to rebel rule weakened citizen-state relations: disrupted norms of compliance with state-like authorities, the formation of local self-help institutions leading to negative assessments of the redeployed state, and resentment due to unmet expectations of economic recovery. Our study informs debates about the links between war, citizenship, and statebuilding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how economic change after 1989 was perceived and rooted in society through cultural representations, specifically in the film production of Poland and Czechoslovakia (and later the Czech Republic and Slovakia). The starting premise of this investigation is that popular commercial films, alongside the media and discourse of politicians and other key actors of the systemic transformation, also informed ideas about the free market circulating in the public sphere. Filmmakers, faced with the new realities brought about initially by the gradual liberalization of the economy in the late 1980s and later the systemic change of the economic transformation in both countries, immediately turned to capturing and fictionalizing the changes surrounding them. They presented audiences with role models of what it means to be a capitalist, but also tales of warning. This article investigates the "transformation cinema" of the 1990s, focusing on the figure of the entrepreneur and private enterprise. It examines how filmmakers searched for a visual language to critique or affirm the new social order, but also continued to work with inherited modes from the late socialist era. The article asserts that while the economic expectations conveyed through cinema focused largely on structuring the imagination of a new middle class in Poland, Czech(oslovak) cinema adopted a more sceptical outlook, suggesting that the promises of the free market were not available to "ordinary" working people. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This special issue explores why the globalization backlash is roiling rich industrialized countries. But why is the backlash less salient in developing ones? In this piece, we challenge scholars to consider why the backlash has not diffused widely to the developing world. We argue support for globalization depends on citizens' expectations of future economic mobility. This is high in the early phases of globalization which encapsulates many developing economies. Since information about globalization's effects is limited, observed mobility of some sustains optimism that the new economic order will allow everyone to prosper. Over time, unrealized expectations of mobility for less-skilled workers puncture this optimism. Such workers in rich countries are long past the honeymoon phase of globalization and confronting realities of stagnant incomes and job precarity. Barring visionary policies unlikely to emerge from today's polarized politics, their discontent will soon be shared by their developing country counterparts, dooming future globalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article studies the tripartite relationship between the economy, economic news, and public economic perceptions. Our analysis is twofold: We investigate the impact of the real economy on economic news in Dutch newspapers (2002-2015, N = 127,120); second, we analyze the impact of economic news on public economic perceptions. Our empirical approach builds on and contributes to the literature by making nuanced distinctions between (a) economic levels and changes (positive/negative), (b) volume and tone of coverage (positive/negative), and, most importantly, (c) people's retrospective and prospective economic judgments. Our analyses show that the public is presented a version of economic reality that is skewed to the negative, which strongly affects people's economic expectations but not evaluations. Extending media-dependency theory, these results demonstrate the necessity to both conceptually and empirically distinguish between people's retrospective and prospective judgments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an analysis of South Africa's #FeesMustFall protests focusing on young people's concerns around debt, family obligations and social mobility. While the protests have popularly been understood as a generational revolt, there has been insufficient attention paid to the role of debt in young people's lives and how this affects aspirations towards collective social mobility. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork with students from a black working-class township, this article suggests that education reconfigures kinship bonds, generating expectations to support family members by paying a so-called 'black tax'. Drawing on the concept of 'debt ecologies', I highlight how debt articulates with other forms of social inequality, racialized poverty in particular, and can also act as a source of politicization. Finally, I call for greater attention to the role of debt in young people's lives and how it impacts their economic agency, their role in care and familial networks and ability to imagine the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how efforts to understand, present, and act upon the futures of inflation participate in the governance of contemporary economic life. The point of departure is the claim that inflation is both an economic and an affective fact, subsisting as a potentially disruptive event within contemporary liberal democracies whose chief concern is to secure the conditions for the value-activating process of economic growth. Understanding efforts to secure these conditions requires attention to the anticipatory processes through which the futures of inflation are generatively disclosed in the present as matters of public concern. In attending to these processes, this paper focuses on how the problem of inflation, and efforts to fight it, are linked closely with the logics and rhetoric of warfare. First, it outlines how interest in these processes emerged, at least in part, through attempts during the Second World War to render the futures of inflation actionable via public information campaigns. Second, it highlights the role of presidential speeches and addresses in 'the war on inflation' in the US during the 1970s and early 1980s. Third, and finally, the paper considers the importance of the promissory logics of inflation targeting in contemporary liberal democracies, in which inflation figures as a disruptive and generalised threat lurking in economic activity. In each case, efforts to fight inflation are based upon the premise that techniques of disclosure are a necessary element of generating the very futures they seek to make public. To govern inflation is therefore as much about governing orientations towards futures as it is about acting upon a well-defined epistemic object. In concluding, the paper speculates upon the wider implications of this claim for understanding how economic life is governed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]