Suchergebnisse

Rebuilding European democracy: resistance and renewal in an illiberal age, by Richard Youngs, London, I.B. Tauris Press, 2022, 256 pp., £21.99 (paperback), ISBN: 9780755639724.

In the aftermath of the 2001 World Trade Center bombings, the application of the label "terrorist" to one of the parties in a given conflict can serve to deny political legitimacy, and can make possible the use of extreme measures to deal with them. This article compares the fortunes of the Liberation Tigers of Tamil Eelam and Hamas. Through the use of an analysis of contemporary discourses relating to terrorism, it is argued that, in the post‐9/11 world, successfully ascribing a nonstate opponent as a terrorist permits the use of overwhelming force. The discourse thus becomes a powerful political technology in the hands of state actors, regardless of the justification for its use.

Abstract
Recently, increased academic attention has been paid to the role played in populist rhetoric by narratives surrounding humiliation and trauma. These studies analytically focus on how populist politicians use such narratives to legitimize their messages, as a response to genuine voter demands or worries. We argue populist messaging may just as easily be constructed through a top–down, elite-driven process, rather than in response to grassroots demands. We examine the use of cultural trauma and humiliation in narratives surrounding Brexit from 2013 to the present day. We argue that these narratives, which typically tended to focus on the UK's loss of international status during the twentieth century (and the role that membership of the EU played in this), were largely constructed by pro-Brexit members of the British political establishment and the Conservative Party. We find that these articulations served two main purposes. First, they allowed prominent Brexiteers to build a defensive wall around themselves against criticism from domestic and foreign political rivals. Secondly, they significantly raised the political significance of the process of Brexit. This allowed Brexit to be portrayed as a grand project of national rejuvenation, and its supporters as the defenders of this project. Thus, Brexit, and narratives evoking humiliation and trauma, remained central even after the country formally left the EU. Indeed, Brexit itself has become a traumatic event invoking further grand narratives that continue to draw on and create a sense of humiliation and cultural trauma, both for those who voted to leave and to remain.

A significant body of literature testifies to the effectiveness of role-play gaming and simulations as pedagogical methods in political science. Many of these studies involve students with a Western background. In contrast, little research exists on the teaching of political science in China and none on the effectiveness of simulations for teaching Chinese students. This study seeks to investigate the efficacy of role-play simulations as a method for teaching comparative politics to Chinese students. The study examined the levels of long-term knowledge retention, enthusiasm towards political science, and self-reported learning outcomes in two groups of students. A test group, students who had completed at least one political science course, participated in a politics-based role-playing simulation; the control group, students who had completed the same political science course, did not participate in a comparable game. The test group displayed significantly better self-reported learning outcomes and significantly better knowledge retention than the control group (albeit at the 90 percent level).