Suchergebnisse

Neville Bolt investigates how today's revolutionaries have rejuvenated the 19th century 'propaganda of the deed' so that terrorism no longer simply goads states into overreacting, thereby losing legitimacy.

This is not as abstruse a question as might first appear at a time when many governments around the world are enthusiastically embracing what they believe to be the latter, only to conflate it unwittingly with its more empirical cousin. In short, there is a difference between these two concepts. And how one understands each has consequences for how we approach the turbulence of politics and geopolitics in the early twenty-first century.How to bridge the two conceptually becomes the innovative challenge for both emergent disciplines.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a utopia is not a dystopia, but that the pursuit of the first can lead to the realisation of the other. While a utopia is little more than an everywhere-but-nowhere dream, dystopias have been all too manifest in our history on this planet. As one old year elides into a new, the skies over 2024 risk growing even darker than during those recent months when geopolitics witnessed the growing triangulation of three global crises—Ukraine, Israel–Gaza, and Taiwan—exploited as proxies and direct theatres of engagement between competing ideologies. Increasingly, democrats claim their democracies to be under attack from a concerted authoritarianism pursued from both inside and outside their countries. Yet their pleas for support, argued in the language of an existential struggle, have frequently fallen on deaf ears.

Ambiguity sits at the heart of politics whether we like it or not. In a sense, it goes further still. Ambiguity finds itself innate in human nature. We appear to seek clarity and specificity in trying to understand what we see. Yet we are equally happy to blur the edges of that understanding as we yearn for something greater than is offered us. You might call this aspect wishful thinking. Perhaps it is even woven into the very fabric of belief systems and religions too. In politics the promise of the political manifesto in its appeal to the largest audience must inevitably intimate and tease beyond the point where precision might otherwise undermine the politician's appeal. Such cognitive dissonance—holding two conflicting ideas in our minds simultaneously—only becomes an actual dilemma if we choose to see the world divided into dichotomous readings or black-and-white opposites rather than shades of grey. Ambiguity is a rich concept. It invites curiosity and engagement where ambivalence meets only with a shrug of the shoulders. It resonates in conversation with uncertainty, metaphor, simile, allegory, perspective, and other ways of seeing that undermine certitude. Simile suggests only likeness, similarity; metaphor offers a one-for-one substitution, a surprising way of translating something complex into an unexpected way of presenting a new simplicity. Yet over time the surprise wears off and yesterday's live metaphors become tomorrow's dead metaphors. Some might go further to say that all language inherently lacks certainty of meaning, however clear the intent.

Drawing on post-structural political theory, this book explores two concepts used to make sense of our disturbed reality: the state and the network. It argues that, in order to better understand today's world, we must pull apart the familiar lines of our maps to find new insights and opportunities for a better future.

Drawing on post-structural political theory, this book explores two concepts used to make sense of our disturbed reality: the state and the network. It argues that, in order to better understand today's world, we must pull apart the familiar lines of our maps to find new insights and opportunities for a better future.