Suchergebnisse

The war in Ukraine has sparked an intense public debate in Italy over NATO's objectives and activities. A significant minority of the Italian public considers the alliance at least partially responsible for the conflict. Early analyses of the public debate over the conflict focused on the influence projected by the Russian state and state-adjacent actors in Italian media and politics. This study shifts the focus towards the interests and agency of Italian actors critical of NATO. It frames criticism of the alliance in mass media and social media as the result of deeply rooted resentment against an organisation perceived—both on the left and on the right of the political spectrum—as a sinew of a network of 'foreign' institutions considered responsible for Italy's socio-economic decline. From these premises it examines how pacifist and 'geopolitical' critiques of NATO have affected the alliance's capability to perform strategic communications in the country. These findings, in turn, suggest the need for renewed attention to how NATO strategic communications could engage domestic audiences of member states.

This article argues that there are four conditions that create a conducive political climate allowing civil society and the media to hold the government accountable during the time of pandemic (2020–2021) i.e., the diagonal accountability: 1) the undemocratic formation of the Muhyiddin Yassin's government that lacked public mandate, which in turn made the government unstable and prone to political pressures; 2) the relative freedom of print and online media in reporting negative news concerning the government; 3) civil society's ability to find creative ways around pandemic restrictions to protest; and 4) socio-economic fallout from strict pandemic measures built up public resentment against the government and contributed to its unpopularity. Analyzed through the lens of political process model, and augmented by interviews with protest participants, the four conditions enable civil society and media to take advantage of the unstable political situation, namely in carving up democratic spaces amidst various restrictions imposed by the pandemic. (JCSA/GIGA)

AbstractThis article is interested in the shift of the object of hostility, which historically fuelled Quebec nationalism. The main targets of discontent have long been the 'rest of Canada' and the lower socio‐economic status of Francophones. After the 1995 independence referendum, the feeling of dissatisfaction with Canada, and even resentment, gradually faded. This retreating within Quebec's borders has led many French‐speaking Quebecers to become concerned about the conditions that make possible the preservation of their cultural and linguistic heritage in North America. This shift has meant that the source of concern is now individuals and groups who do not share this heritage rooted in Western Judeo‐Christian values or who are perceived not to adhere to the concerns related to the preservation and development of the French character and the dominant values within the 'Quebec nation'. The expression of these concerns has manifested itself primarily in debates about the place religion should occupy in public and civic spaces since the mid‐2000s.

AbstractObjectiveIn 2020, for the first time, a VP candidate was a black woman of immigrant parentage. This article asks whether Kamala Harris' vice presidential candidacy may have motivated some white voters and especially those scoring high on racial resentment, anti‐immigrant attitudes, or sexism to vote for Trump instead of Biden.MethodsWe conducted an online priming experiment with non‐Hispanic white voters in August 2020, shortly after Harris was announced as the Democratic vice presidential nominee. Half of the samples were asked about their support for the president–vice presidential tickets, while the other half were asked only about support for a presidential candidate.ResultsOur results show that the Harris' selection may have affected vote choice by pushing many whites, especially among the most racially conservative whites into the Trump column. We find mixed results for anti‐immigrant attitudes and sexism.ConclusionWe conclude that one aspect of Harris' identity—race—dominated the minds of voters relative to other aspects of her identity.

For Adam Smith, a crime is not the result of a rational calculation of loss and gain but the consequence of envy and a vain desire to parade wealth to attract the approbation of others, combined with a natural systematic bias in overestimating the probability of success. Similarly, Smith does not conceive of legal sanctions as a rational deterrent but as deriving from the feeling of resentment. While the prevailing approach of the eighteenth century is a rational explanation of crime and a utilitarian use of punishment, Adam Smith instead builds his theory of criminal behavior and legal prosecution consistently on the sentiments. A well-functioning legal system is thus an unintended consequence of our desire to bring justice to the individual person, not the result of a rational calculation to promote the public good, just like a well-functioning economic system is the unintended consequence of our desire to better our own condition, not the result of a rational calculation to promote public good.

The paper aims to define the psychological foundations of lone wolf activism. The analysis that facilitated attaining this goal was based on the Nietzschean concept of resentment theory of compensatory revaluating values that explain the relationships between inferiority and fundamentalism, fanaticism, and ideologically motivated violence. Based on a phenomenological examination of the phenomenon, the author demonstrates that lone wolf activism is founded on two psychologically and sociologically determined successive processes. The first one occurs when a sense of personal inferiority becomes the source of an envy-based hostile attitude toward the world. Later on, this feeling, due to personality defence mechanisms, which bring about the falsification of "primary desires" and the generation of "secondary desires", transforms into fundamentalism. The second process takes place when, as the result of fundamentalist legitimisation that arise on the level of social rivalry, given fundamentalism is destituted, resulting in fanaticism. The author believes that the knowledge of both processes is necessary to recognise and combat the terrorist activity of lone ideologically motivated individuals.

This article emphasises the role that political leaders' discourse plays in evoking positive emotions among citizens in uncertain times, such as feeling protected, secure and proud in addition to the leaders' (often interconnected) role of encouraging negative feelings such as fear, resentment and anger. The article argues that such discourse frequently involves performances of gendered leadership. It cites examples from a range of countries to illustrate the points being made, but focuses on the 2020 US presidential election which saw a contest between two forms of protective masculinity: Trump's exclusionary, macho, hypermasculinity versus Biden's more socially inclusive, empathetic and softer version. Trump's protective masculinity failure over managing the COVID-19 pandemic was arguably one of the factors contributing to his electoral defeat, while Biden aimed to make voters feel safer and more protected than under Trump. The article also provides examples of protective femininity, with a particular focus on the discourse of New Zealand's prime minister, Jacinda Ardern.

In the spring and summer of 2020, a remarkable number of Americans participated in a remarkable number of protests in support of Black Lives Matter. How did the general public understand these protests, and where does support for the movement stand overall? We answer this question by drawing on several national surveys from 2020 and then examining the results of a framing experiment we conducted in June 2020. We structure the story we find in two parts—the partisans and the persuadables—both of whom are important to understanding public views of Black Lives Matter. Democrats and Republicans differ strongly in their views of the movement but are similar in the firmness of those views, which did not change in response to our framing experiment. Nonpartisans, in contrast, were more persuadable, though their reactions to some of our frames were conditioned by racial resentment. We conclude by setting the movement in historical context and assessing its impact, which we describe as complicated and contradictory but consequential.

AbstractUsing an original demographically representative survey, we estimate the determinants of public support for a set of supportive and punitive policies to combat the opioid epidemic among a sample of 2,131 Americans. Our findings indicate that individuals who attribute blame for the epidemic to the personal choices of individuals, conservatives and those high in racial resentment are consistently more likely to support punitive policies to combat the opioid epidemic and less likely to favour policies to support individuals with substance use disorders. Individuals who have a personal connection to someone struggling with opioid use disorder favour policies to support such individuals but have nuanced attitudes towards punitive policies. Importantly, we find overwhelming support for all supportive policies except supervised injection sites, while roughly 50% of our sample supported the set of punitive policy choices. Our research represents a significant step forward toward understanding public opinion about the opioid epidemic and policies to combat it.

Drawing on their respective ethnographies of urbanisation in Gurgaon (now known as Gurugram) and thwarted industrialisation in Singur, the authors argue that plots of land owned by smallholders are intermittent commodities. Following Igor Kopytoff's lead, they focus on commoditisation as a process and adopt a biographical approach to consider the social life of land. The article contends that individually owned plots potentially go in and out of circulation but never get fully commodified, nor do they remain fully non-commodified. With the rising speculative value of land, neither market price nor monetary compensation fully substitutes land ownership. Hence, the landholders express regret and even resentment on having to part with their land. The ambivalence speaks, in part, to the complex attributes of land and the relations of authority, distinction and status associated with it. To maintain their caste-based status, the landowners use land as leverage. They hold on to land or demand better compensation to reiterate the land–caste–power nexus spatially.

Abstract
Religion played a prominent role in the 2020 presidential campaign. Donald Trump overtly courted white evangelical Protestants and Catholics, while Joe Biden emphasized his Catholicism far more than any Catholic candidate in American history. Did religion play as important a role in electoral behavior in 2020? If so, how and why did religion affect Americans' voting decisions? We take up those questions by analyzing the religious vote in 2020 and the reasons why particular religious and non-religious groups voted as they did. We find that the religious divisions in the 2020 electorate were quite deep, but they were mostly unchanged from those present in 2016. Moreover, some electoral differences between religious groups are based in factors such as racial resentment, support for limited government, and anti-immigration attitudes that are not typically associated with religion. However, a key explanation for religious voting in 2020 was an old standby: the abortion issue. The religion gap in American electoral politics represents an enduring divide. The only changes were at the margins—but where elections are close, margins matter.

National Populists are winning seats around Europe and liberal democracy finds itself increasingly undermined. According to the report Democracy in Crisis (2020)1 , the number of countries that have suffered democratic setbacks surpasses the number having achieved gains in this realm. This dissertation for the MA Program in Governance, Leadership and Democracy Studies will reflect on how the cultural backlash is fueling white identity resentments through the fear of ethnic change. According to Kaufmann (2018), in order to understand the phenomenon of national populism, the issue of migration "is central and ethnic change is the story." (Kaufmann 2018,11). According to Goodwin and Eatwell (2018) the national populist phenomenon reflects deep­rooted fears about immigration and hyper ethnic change (Goodwin and Eatwell 2018,132). People feel instinctively negative about how immigration could threaten their national identity, and consequently lead to the destruction of the wider group identity, calling into question the future of the white majority (Taub 2016; Kaufmann 2018; Eatwell and Goodwin 2018).

It is within this wider debate that conflates gender with far-right resentment that this issue of Anglistica AION pursues its aims. The contributions all contend a common denominator: the need to remain vigilant and steadfast when dealing with the far-right crusade against gender equality. In all the case studies in this issue, the essence of far-right resistance is embodied by a political agenda that aims to preserve heterocisnormative family ethics, traditional gender values, and the naturalised hierarchies of the conventional roles of men and women. It is against this background that the scholars whose work makes up this edited publication have approached the far-right centrality of gendered arguments and gendered policies. Through various well-established approaches in sociolinguistics (such as Corpus Linguistics, Critical Discourse Analysis, Linguistic Anthropology to name but a few), each contribution analyses the importance of gender within far-right rhetoric, yielding subject matter that is both insightful and original.

The National Islamic Alliance (NIA) has evolved as a leading Shia Kuwaiti political group since the 1980s. The NIA participates in electoral politics and Kuwaiti cabinets. While its roots go back to Shia activists in Kuwait, some of whom were linked to Iraq's Islamic Da'wa Party in the end of the 1960s, it is a pragmatic and Kuwaiti nationalist group. The article argues that the NIA shifted from being an active opposition group in the 1990s to a pro-ruling family and government group in 2008. The NIA's transformation was partly a response to the rise of sectarian politics in Kuwait and the opposition's resentment of the NIA's mourning of Imad Mughniyeh, a Lebanese Hezbollah leader. The article includes first-hand and secondary resources, including interviews and the NIA's figures' public statements to unpack the NIA's foundation, structure and changing relationship with the ruling family as well as its political engagement and positions on the Kuwaiti protest movement (2011–2013). (Asian Aff/GIGA)

Exploring the 'organization gap' that exists in Northeast Asia, this article seeks to explain why there is no such minimal, Deutschian security community and discerns four impediments: played up islands disputes as a symptom of deep resentment shaped by histories of war and animosity; the rise of a fervent form of nationalism related to collective memories and projected at 'the other;' the American alliance system and China-US strategic distrust and rivalry; and the nuclear weapons pursuit of North Korea. Contrasting the fatalist logic of the dominant neorealist paradigm, the article goes into the deeper underlying and interconnected obstacles that sustain opposing blocs in Northeast Asia in a spiral of mistrust and arming. Arriving at the 'Concert,' or 'Community' proposed by White and Kissinger means that the structural, power aspect as well as the domestic socio-historic dynamics particular to Northeast Asia should be examined first. In doing so, the article puts forth conditions under which a process of 'desecuritisation' can lead to a viable community in Northeast Asia. (Pac Rev / GIGA)