Suchergebnisse

Over the past decade, Slovakia has witnessed the dismantling of public human rights institutions and gender equality policies and incessant efforts to limit sexual and reproductive rights. While these processes have been mostly discussed in relation to the transnational anti-gender movement, this article conceptualizes them as part of an illiberal turn. We argue that recent rhetorical, institutional, and policy processes in Slovakia have been enabled by a discursive shift positing a new subject: conservative people and their rightful demands. Our argument is bolstered through two analyses. Quantitative content analysis of media articles published between 2002 and 2020, firstly, traces the increased emphasis on the signifiers "conservative" and "liberal." This examination demonstrates that the anti-gender discourse in the 2010s accelerated and normalized this specific discursive frame. Furthermore, it underscores how the carriers of the conservative label shifted away from institutions towards individual politicians and, more importantly, toward a collective subject—people. Qualitative discourse analysis, secondly, focuses on the anti-gender discourse, understood here as a Laclauian populist practice. It posits three types of demands entangled in an equivalential chain—demands dealing with cultural recognition, material redistribution, and political representation. This analytical approach enables us to show how the construction of the conservative/liberal divide goes beyond the struggles for so-called traditional values, but is embedded in broader socioeconomic processes, and how it led to calls for political representation of the "conservative people" and for a "conservative" (in fact illiberal) transformation of political institutions.

In recent years, science has become a battlefield where the lines of the gendered world order are being negotiated. This negotiation cannot be understood without examining the epistemic communities of gender studies – their members, practices, conditions, and the power relations within which they operate. This study aims to enrich the research on gender and feminist scholarship from the perspective of a country with a weak degree of institutionalisation of gender studies. It focuses on the experiences of PhD candidates and early career scholars of social sciences in Slovakia, as narrated in two focus group discussions. We argue that the combination of fragmentation in gender-oriented epistemic communities and the competitiveness of neoliberalised academia pushes junior gender studies scholars to experience isolation, a self-imposed or forced symbolic exile within their institutions and academic communities. However, while the symbolic exile is a space of exclusion, it also is a space of care – for oneself, for others, for one's institution. The study conceptualises these practices of care as 'diversity work' and examines them as both initiatives of individual scholars and invisible everyday labour that maintains the presence of gender-oriented scholarship in an academic environment marked by limited institutionalisation of gender studies.

The aim of this paper is to fill the geographical gap in the literature about the militarization of COVID-19 through a comparative exploration of how the pandemic was handled in militarized ways in Hungary, Poland, and Slovakia. Drawing from official government and military statements, media articles, and expert interviews with defense intellectuals, we examine two interconnected areas – that of discourse and that of military domestic assistance. By viewing the developments through the lens of militarization and military-society relations scholarship, we argue that rather than serving as a 'portal' for civilian resilience, the pandemic constituted an unprecedented 'return of the troops' to Visegrad states and societies in terms of its size, scope, and duration, thus strengthening the pressure for re-militarization in the region that has been recorded in the last decade. The paper presents a number of analytical findings: first, it identifies the emerging gap between right-wing populist rhetoric that relied on warspeak and the human-centered communication of the armed forces; second, it reveals that military domestic assistance functioned as a military 'band aid' on systemic vulnerabilities, as well as incidentally converged with illiberal patterns of governance; third, it shows how the pandemic aided re-militarizing pressures, resulting in a significant boost to the defense sector, a positive public opinion about the armed forces, and military-society relations.

This contribution reviews and comments on recent scholarship on thepolitics of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on how vulnerability wasconstructed and studied. We reflect on the various meanings ofvulnerability and suggest political science should go beyond individualizedand identity-based approaches and see the pandemic conditions as sharedand embedded within the already existing social, political, and economicstructures. We also examine how our previously identified discursive framesof science and security work in the context of the later pandemic stagesand the vaccination rollout and note how these frames continue to rendercertain lives ungrievable. Our contribution is intended to add to thegrowing interest in using the concepts of vulnerability, precariousness, andprecarity in studies of politics and international relations, as well as incritical studies of public health and the coronavirus pandemic.

This contribution reviews and comments on recent scholarship on the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic, focusing on how vulnerability was constructed and studied. We reflect on the various meanings of vulnerability and suggest political science should go beyond individualized and identity-based approaches and see the pandemic conditions as shared and embedded within the already existing social, political, and economic structures. We also examine how our previously identified discursive frames of science and security work in the context of the later pandemic stages and the vaccination rollout and note how these frames continue to render certain lives ungrievable. Our contribution is intended to add to the growing interest in using the concepts of vulnerability, precariousness, and precarity in studies of politics and international relations, as well as in critical studies of public health and the coronavirus pandemic.

This article examines Judith Butler's concepts of vulnerability andgrievability in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and biopowerpractices introduced in the name of the protection of the people. Ananalysis of the elite political discourse in Czechia, Germany, Great Britain,and Slovakia in the first three months of the pandemic explores howvulnerability was constructed and distributed among the respectivepopulations. We identified two prevailing discursive frames – science andsecurity. Within the first, vulnerability was constructed in terms of biologicalcharacteristics, rendering elderly, disabled, and chronically ill bodies asalready lost and ungrievable. Within the security frame, Roma or migrantpopulations' vulnerability to the virus has been discursively shifted intobeing seen as a threat, while vulnerability itself was recognized more as afeature of institutions or society. Thus, despite the claims that 'we are all inthis together', the pandemic has exposed how our vulnerability andinterdependency are embedded within existing social structures.