After 10 years, much has been written about the 2009 coup d'état in Honduras and its effects, both domestically and in relation to the regional geopolitics of Central and Latin America. However, most analysts have favored approaches that focus on institutional, political culture and state capture aspects of the conflict, while paying little attention to the Honduran history and the processes that created the conditions of possibility for the ousting of Manuel Zelaya Rosales. To go beyond these shortcomings, we propose an approach to the coup d'état that understands it as part of the process of implementation of the neoliberal project in Honduras, and the accompanying processes of state and class formation. ; Después de diez años, mucho se ha escrito y reflexionado sobre el golpe de Estado en Honduras del 2009 y sus efectos, tanto a nivel doméstico, como de las dinámicas geopolíticas a nivel Centro y Latinoamericano. Sin embargo, en su mayoría, los y las analistas se han decantado por acercamientos que enfatizan elementos institucionales, de cultura política y captura de Estado, combinada con una mirada poco atenta a la historia hondureña y a los procesos que llevaron a que la expulsión forzada de Manuel Zelaya Rosales se volviera una alternativa viable. Para ir más allá de este acercamiento, proponemos ver el golpe de Estado como parte del proceso de instauración del proyecto neoliberal en Honduras y los procesos de formación de clase y Estado que lo han acompañado.
The involuntary resignation of the first women elected president in Brazil have had negative consequences for the desirable institutional strengthening of the brazilian democracy in such a profound way that needs a reflexive evaluation. This issue – the real overthrowing of the former president – is have been made by using the main responsibility mechanism established in the presidentialism system: the impeachment. The current article defines – by taking into consideration an interdisciplinary method founded on the Political Science as well as the Law science – if there were enough reason for the deposition of the prime minister or, on the contrary, it has meant a violation of the sovereign mandate given by the electorate, supposing the illegitimate removal of a president elected by fifty-four million citizens. ; La dimisión forzada de Dilma Rousseff ha provocado un seísmo institucional cuya profundidad y consecuencias precisan una evaluación reflexiva. Este hecho –la remoción efectiva de la ya expresidenta– se ha llevado a cabo utilizando el mecanismo de exigencia de responsabilidad característico del sistema presidencialista: el impeachment. El presente artículo evalúa –utilizando un enfoque interdisciplinario de ciencia política y derecho– si eran suficientes los motivos esgrimidos para deponer a la presidenta o si, por el contrario, se está ante un atentado contra el mandato soberano del cuerpo electoral que ha supuesto la remoción ilegal de una presidenta elegida por 54 millones de ciudadanos.
This paper considers social marketing from a critical perspective. The paper traces the history of the donation system named 'hometown tax' that the Japanese government introduced to promote local revitalization of relatively marginal communities. Owing to the lavish reciprocal gifts to "donors" by the administrators of these communities, the system resulted in a quasi-market that allowed donors to avoid paying taxes and to receive special benefits. Our analysis reveals the divergence of the intents and effects of this social marketing intervention. The findings indicate that during social marketing attempts to carry out effective and well-intentioned interventions, which social marketing research has always advocated, societal perversions may occur sometimes. This is owing to the neoliberal governmentality, which is behind such interventions, and which causes unintended actions and consequences that distract from the ideal social good, even when interventions are formulated and launched with laudable intentions. This paper indicates the critical issues that social marketing should address and provides a reflective viewpoint on social marketing. It points to pitfalls and problems in effective interventions for individual behavioral change and social change.
This dissertation examines relationships between public festivity and articulations of power through investigation of alternative carnival practices in Rio de Janeiro. I explore the musical and cultural knowledge of Rio's instrumental street musicians as cultural repertoires enacted in and circulating between a variety of scenarios—from carnival to protest and the stage. Through embracing the "alternative carnivalesque," they seek to critique and expand the dominant repertoires available to them. Rather than viewing music as a "resource" of social movements, I argue for a model of "socio-musical movements" that considers such movements' musical and social, as well as aesthetic and ethical, elements as dynamically intertwined.Emerging during Rio de Janeiro's spectacular rise in the first decades of the twenty-first century to hosting the 2016 Olympics, a contemporary brass movement (neofanfarrismo) has articulated itself as an alternative to the neoliberal governance of a global city heavily invested in particular forms of cultural representation. I view the term "alternative" as the movement's theoretical framework, rather than a generic term. It generates a dynamic debate within the community through which participants theorize relations of power, tradition, innovation, and politicization. Based on eighteen months of ethnographic research, I examine the processes of consolidation of neofanfarrismo as it transformed from a culturally nationalist revival of carnival traditions in post-dictatorship Brazil into an internationalist, musically eclectic, and activist movement. Grounding my analysis on my collaborators' rejection of generic theoretical terms, I argue for the exploration of frames used by musicians themselves, such as the local concepts of "cultural rescue" and "cannibalism" in examining musical circulation.This dissertation moves away from the typical focus on lyrical content in studies of musical activism to address instead the instrumental force of loud, mobile, and participatory ensembles in the public commons, reframing sound studies by asking what role acoustic sound plays in shaping senses of the public and private. Embracing an instrumental form of musical activism that promotes social inclusion, occupation of public space, and participation in protest, these musicians theorize carnival as an ethical guide to action and view public festivity as itself a mode of governance. Resisting celebratory narratives, however, this study probes the possibilities, limits, and contradictions of the articulation of alternatives by a middle-class demographic entangled in the privileges of a capitalist city, and I foreground the implications of "alternative whiteness" in the study of Brazilian music. Through examination of feminist, class, and racial critiques of neofanfarrismo, I ask how diversification of the movement has altered its internal hierarchies and expressive practices. Lastly, in discussing the rise of the Honk Rio! Festival of Activist Brass Bands, I explore how this carnivalesque movement has been consolidated as a politically engaged socio-musical movement in global conversation with an international, "rhizomatic" street band network.
This article explores the intersections of gender and centre–periphery relations and calls for theoretical and political involvement in gendered struggles against colonial and capitalist forces across different national contexts. The article raises questions about the possibility of resisting inequality and exploitation arising from capitalist expansion and extraction of natural resources in Sweden and Greece, outside of urban contexts. It does so by highlighting women's role in protest movements in peripheral places and questioning power relations between centre and periphery. The article also argues that making visible women's struggles and contributions to protest movements brings about vital knowledge for realizing democratic worlds that do not thrive on the destruction of natural resources and the institutionalization of inequalities.
This paper offers insights into the referencing of Singapore within the US Obama Administration educational discourse, underscoring the political-material-discursive nexus of international educational benchmarking. Using critical discourse analysis, we find that an objectified Singapore functions as a rhetorical tool of US policymaker agendas, with the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development's (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and other international assessments as basis for truth statements. US policy discourses on Singapore's education system perpetuate, rather than interrogate, PISA's questionable underlying "truths" around socio-economic development, equity, and excellence, and thus on student achievement and underachievement. Singapore's status as an "Asian Tiger" reference society intertwines with international assessments to form part of an emerging transnational regime of truth, homogenizing what to consider as factual or important, holding sway over views of reality by obscuring other more robust data, research, and lived experiences. In the process of constructing "high performance" around the role education plays in the international economic system, the notion of "low performance" is also discursively constituted and a schemata established for the disciplining of "low performing" bodies through neoliberal policy agendas.
In The Gambia, financial sustainability and poverty alleviation have been largely based on the assumption that analysis of macro level growth will bridge the gap between the formal and informal sectors; alleviate poverty and exclusion, ignoring other important factors such as political, social, cultural and religious issues. The government, microfinance outlets and international development agencies have implemented many measures to bring the masses into the formal economy to no avail. This dissertation explores Reliance Financial Service and the role of the Osusus in poverty alleviation, and how the Osusus are the edifice of microfinance and economic sustainability in The Gambia. Firstly, Osusus are small microfinance groups where participants receive substantial amounts of money to meet planned heavy expenditure commitments. To put things into perspective, Osusu is one of the oldest community based microfinance institutions in The Gambia, it has mostly resisted formalization. It is a social and financial system, where members contribute a set sum of money each week or month that is then allocated to one member. This has given some women a degree of independence and solidarity. Secondly, despite women being the largest segment of the Gambian population, disparities in gender roles, illiteracy, high unemployment and the lack of mainstreaming the interest and needs of women in national policy and the system tends to leave many women economically disadvantaged. Hence, this dissertation found that the provision of microfinance services in the form of micro-credit, insurance and micro-savings could be a great sustainability tool to create equity, uplift the economic and social status of women in society. Also, women could use these services towards productive consumption such as feeding their families, sending their children to school, affording healthcare and engaging in productive economic activities to increase their income. Empirically, it examines the microfinance outlook in The Gambia, its impacts on socio-economics ramifications on the country. It also examines the role of microfinance, contextually Reliance Financial Services Kafoo scheme, as a viable alternative poverty-alleviation avenue. ; Ph. D.
Liberal capitalist democracy is a universal socio-political project of our age. But this project is in crisis and in decline. The current crisis of democracy caused by the Darwinist spirit of the late capitalist order only proves that democracy is an instrument for strengthening the dominant positions of the ruling liberal elites. In other words, democracy, in particular liberal democracy as a hegemonic form of the contemporary global democratic project, functions as a formal ideological-instrumental framework for the reproduction of the dominant position of a ruling class serving the interests of the few, not the many. In this way, anti-democratic sentiments among the masses are fuelled almost everywhere in both Western and non-Western cultures where political elites have assumed a formal democratic mask. Furthermore, the existing crisis of the Western liberal democratic project has given crucial benefits for the revival of anti-elitist populism in the contemporary world. The goal of this paper is to critically examine the fate of democracy in modern times as well as to shed light once again on the crisis of the liberal conception of democracy, including its concomitant pathologies, resistances, and political and social consequences.
Selbstoptimierung liegt im Trend. Obwohl ein zunehmendes Körper- und Gesundheitsbewusstsein subjektiv wie gesamtgesellschaftlich durchaus positiv zu sehen ist, herrscht in der sozialwissenschaftlichen Fachliteratur große Einigkeit darüber, dass Selbstoptimierung weder ein naturwüchsiges Phänomen noch alleiniger Ausdruck von ureigener Selbstverwirklichung ist. Vielmehr spiegelt sich im aktuellen körperlichen Verbesserungsstreben ein Machtverhältnis wider. Selbstoptimierung ist demnach das Ergebnis einer bewussten Lenkung. Die Aufforderung zur Selbstoptimierung schreibt sich dabei zusehends in die moralischen Wertvorstellungen der Menschen ein. Im Rahmen dieser Masterarbeit wird das Thema der Selbstoptimierung kritisch analysiert, indem untersucht wird, wie sich das moderne Verbesserungsstreben gesellschaftlich internalisieren konnte. Darüber hinaus wird die Frage aufgeworfen, welche Risiken sich aus dieser Internalisierung für den Einzelnen aber auch für das soziale Gefüge ergeben können. Indem Selbstoptimierung zunehmend zur moralischen Pflicht wird, bedroht das moderne Credo zur Selbstoptimierung nicht nur die Freiheit (und mitunter auch die Gesundheit) des Einzelnen, sondern kann auch das solidarische Selbstverständnis von Gesellschaften nachhaltig verändern. ; Self-optimization has become a trend. However, although an increasing body and health awareness can be seen positively both subjectively and socially, there is great agreement in the social science literature that self-optimization is neither a natural phenomenon nor the sole expression of self-fulfillment. Rather, self-optimization is considered to be the result of power structures and conscious regulatory. The call for self-optimization is becoming more and more part of the peoples thinking and their moral values. In this master thesis, the issue of self-optimization is critically analyzed by examining how the modern drive for physical improvement has internalized in society. Furthermore, the thesis intends to point out the risks that can arise from this internalization for the individual as well as for the social fabric. As self-optimization becomes increasingly a moral duty, the modern credo of self-improvement not only threatens the individual's freedom (and sometimes even health), but can also change the solidary self-conception of societies. ; eingereicht von Julia Gnedt, BSc. ; Universität Linz, Masterarbeit, 2018 ; (VLID)2934218
Liberal capitalist democracy is a universal socio-political project of our age. But this project is in crisis and in decline. The current crisis of democracy caused by the Darwinist spirit of the late capitalist order only proves that democracy is an instrument for strengthening the dominant positions of the ruling liberal elites. In other words, democracy, in particular liberal democracy as a hegemonic form of the contemporary global democratic project, functions as a formal ideological-instrumental framework for the reproduction of the dominant position of a ruling class serving the interests of the few, not the many. In this way, anti-democratic sentiments among the masses are fuelled almost everywhere in both Western and non-Western cultures where political elites have assumed a formal democratic mask. Furthermore, the existing crisis of the Western liberal democratic project has given crucial benefits for the revival of anti-elitist populism in the contemporary world. The goal of this paper is to critically examine the fate of democracy in modern times as well as to shed light once again on the crisis of the liberal conception of democracy, including its concomitant pathologies, resistances, and political and social consequences.
In 1986, the New Zealand government implemented one of the world's first nationally comprehensive private fisheries management systems, or Individual Transferable Quota (ITQ) systems. However, complete implementation was only possible after Māori groups agreed to formally renegotiate their Treaty and Aboriginal Title rights to fisheries. These negotiations resulted in the internationally acclaimed 1992 Treaty of Waitangi (Fisheries Claims) Settlement Act. In the Settlement, Māori groups obtained commercial fishing rights in the form of Individual Transferable Quotas (ITQs). They also received subsistence fishing rights, and later, customary governance rights. Today, Māori groups collectively own some 50% of the nation's Individual Transferable Quota. This should give them unprecedented formal control over national fisheries and related fishing revenues. Yet, few Māori can make a living by fishing. Māori groups' efforts to establish commercial fishing operations and to govern fisheries have been unsuccessful in addressing the uneven development seen in New Zealand's fisheries and Māori communities. This puzzle—of how an indigenous group can hold rights to valuable commercial and subsistence resources, but be unable to fully benefit from them—is what underlies the histories told here.In this dissertation, I identify the barriers blocking Māori fishery management and precluding Māori from realizing the benefits that ITQ ownership should bring them. Drawing on over two years of ethnographic research and extensive interviews in New Zealand's South Island, with Māori and non-Māori fishers, processors, tribal leaders, scientists, and state regulators, I argue that conceptions of property and sovereignty are at the heart of these problems. In the Settlement, Māori groups were not granted sovereignty over natural resource access and trade arrangements. Rather, they have been expected to re-organize hundreds of years of practices to meet entirely new conditions in the current political economic regime. They must also adapt their management strategies to additional restrictions imposed by the government on their fisheries. While the Fisheries Settlement granted property and governance rights to Māori groups, the state retains authority over how, when, and where these property and governance rights can be implemented. While Māori are expected to comply with the "full and final" condition of the Settlement, the New Zealand government continues to change the physical, social, and legal environments within which Māori can operate their fishing rights. Māori groups' restricted control over their fishing practices and rights—the barrier to their development—is made visible in examining the effects of state regulations imposed after the 1992 Settlement. In this dissertation, I analyze three policy, ecological, and practical contexts within which the New Zealand government has created barriers that constrain Māori access to the benefits from the fisheries in which they hold legal rights. First, fish processing regulations have restricted Māori fishers' access to markets, even though they hold the required quota rights needed to sell their fish. Second, government subsidies and programs supporting predominately non-Māori dairy farming operations upstream from Māori fisheries have intensified production and degraded water quality downstream, negatively impacting fishery sustainability and development. Third, the government's establishment of new marine reserves in particular regions has legally excluded Māori from fisheries they previously managed and utilized for subsistence. These findings demonstrate that the creation and allocation of private property rights to indigenous groups, without granting them concurrent authority to amend the regulations affecting the broader economic and ecological contexts in which these rights are realized, is unlikely to redress the consequences of their dispossession from land and marine resources.
The neoliberal policies that were instituted in Mexico from the 90's transformed the relationship of Mexican citizenship with the various public universities of the Aztec country. Whereas in the previous decades the entrance to the public university had been legislated like a right to which all the citizens could accede, the neoliberal policies demanded that from that moment only the candidates who passed the examination with good grades and had good high school or high school grades from those who came. The decision had unexpected consequences for young people of the generation x and millennials since, being unable to access the public university, they turned to private universities, which in general culture were called "Duck University" because they were not considered good institutions for higher education. The emergence of several universities forced them to compete with each other in order to attract new students, based on innovative study programs, which were also profitable at the same time. Ironically, public universities seeing the success of these careers subsequently incorporated them into their enrollment, turning small private universities into experimental knowledge laboratories. ; Las políticas neoliberales que se instituyeron en México a partir de la década del 90 transformaron la relación de la ciudadanía mexicana con las diversas universidades públicas del país Azteca. Mientras que en las décadas anteriores el ingreso a la universidad pública había sido legislado como un derecho al que podían acceder todos los ciudadanos, las políticas neoliberales exigían que a partir de ese momento sólo entraran los candidatos que aprobaran el examen con buenas notas y tuvieran buenas calificaciones de la preparatoria o bachillerato de los que provenían. La decisión tuvo consecuencias inesperadas para jóvenes de la generación x y los millennials ya que al no poder acceder a la universidad pública recurrieron a universidades privadas, que en la cultura general fueron llamadas "Universidades Patito" por no ser consideradas buenas instituciones para la educación superior. El surgimiento de diversas universidades las obligó a competir entre ellas para poder atraer nuevos alumnos, a partir de programas de estudio innovadores, que al mismo tiempo fueran redituables. Irónicamente, las universidades públicas al ver el éxito que tenían estas carreras las incorporaron posteriormente a su matrícula, convirtiendo a las universidades privadas pequeñas en laboratorios experimentales de conocimiento.
El presente artículo sintetiza las principales reflexiones y hallazgos obtenidos a partir de la realización de una investigación que vincula las representaciones discursivas en torno al Ingreso Ético Familiar presentadas tanto por el Estado de Chile como por los principales medios de prensa escrita del mencionado país durante el año 2012. Mediante el Análisis Crítico del Discurso y la construcción de matrices analíticas se visibiliza la presencia de múltiples elementos propios de la gubernamentalidad neoliberal en la representación pública de este programa social. Finalmente, cerramos con una reflexión que nos permite abrir nuevos caminos de investigación en torno a los efectos prácticos de esta política pública. ; This article summarizes the main reflections and findings obtained from an investigation that links the discourse representations on Family Ethical Income presented by the State of Chile and the main written press media in the country during 2012. Through the Critical Analysis of the Discourse and the construction of analytical matrices, the presence of multiple elements of neoliberal governmentality in the public representation of this social program is made visible. Finally, we conclude with a reflection that allows us to open new research paths around the practical effects of this public policy.
