Suchergebnisse

Finnish Lapland is a historical borderland of Finnish and Sámi cultures. Such a region offers various social-political identifications for people to choose: people may see it possible to identify as Finnish, Laplanders, Lappish or Sámi, for instance. However, the choices have social and political limits, and some identifications are more contested than others. The book examines the processes of identifications in the middle parts of Lapland, just south of the region defined as Sámi homeland in Finland. While the study reveals differences and nuances in people's thinking, it also shows that there is a recognizable sense of shared cultural specifity around the region. Lapland is conceptualized as an extraordinary place with unusual nature and history, characterized by particular livelihoods (such as reindeer herding) and lively cultural interaction. The book concludes that while Lapland is extraordinary as a historical dwelling region of indigenous Sámi, it may be politically significant to recognize it as a unique borderland of cultures with features of its own.

The rise of the populist radical political right is one of the significant phenomena in recent European party politics. In this article, I examine the ideology of the radical right in Finland by analysing the Aloof Election Manifesto, an election platform published by radical wing of the Finns Party for national parliament elections 2011. The analysis shows that the ideology challenges traditional notions of nationalism. It combines cultural nativism, secularism and economic neoliberalism to the fear of Islam and multiculturalism.

In this chapter, we argue that the political and economic activities of the members of the Conservative Laestadianism are often intertwined with the religion and the religious notions of the movement. Many seemingly secular stances and procedures have theological basis, while others rely and utilize the social networks that originate in the church. However, the effects of the religion in the secular life of Laestadians are quite diverse, and one should not oversimplify them. The implications of a person's religious background can be positive for the members of the movements and society as a whole, but the religious dimension can also have negative consequences in politics and business, especially in the context of strong social relationships, bonds, and reciprocal links. Religious literacy means, at least partly, that one recognizes the variable roles that religion has in different social contexts.

"This volume explores the shifts in how civil disobedience has come to be theorized, defined, understood and practiced in contemporary politics. As social activism takes increasingly global forms, the goals of individuals and groups who view themselves as disobedient activists today can be defined in broader cultural terms than before, and their relationship to law and violence can be ambiguous. Civil disobedience may no longer be entirely nonviolent, its purposes no longer necessarily serve progressive or emancipatory agendas. Its manifestations often blur the lines established in "classic", philosophically justified, and self-regulatory forms as epitomized in mass nonviolent protests of Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Luther King, and theories of Arendt, Rawls and Dworkin. How civil disobedience operates has changed over the years, and this volume unpacks its many contemporary lives. It discusses new theoretical and political dilemmas and paradoxes through empirical cases and practical examples from Europe, the US, and South Asia, which enables a "mirroring" perspective for the challenges and complexities of civil disobedience in different parts of the world. Bringing together innovative and instropective perspectives on people and protests in contemporary political contexts, this volume will be of great interest to scholars and philosophers of political science, international relations theory, political philosophy, peace and conflict studies, sociology, and cultural studies"--

AbstractEurope received an unprecedented number of asylum seekers in 2015. This article examines Iraqi asylum seekers who journeyed through Europe in search of an idealized version of Finland, which they had imagined based on word‐of‐mouth and social media information. Through cognitive migration, the act of pre‐experiencing futures in different locations, Finland was seen to offer both subjective hope of personal growth and advancement and objective hope of safety and physical security. This hope motivated them to embark on a journey of 6,000 kilometers to the European North. Based on interview data and relevant studies, the article concludes that hope of a better, imagined future abroad acts as a powerful magnet for persons with poor prospects in their countries of origin. Hope is a kind of critical emotion strongly shaped by beliefs and real‐time opportunities; and as such, beliefs are notoriously difficult to change. Imagination, therefore, should not be overlooked when planning and implementing migration policies.

This article analyses the 'European refugee crisis' in the context of Northern Finland, building on the concepts of exceptionality and affect. Conventionally, exceptionality is conceptualised from the perspective of the state that does not enable analysing exceptional situations in their broader social context. A shift in focus is required to understand how people perceive and experience exceptionality and what kinds of affects this involves. Based on participatory engagement and in-depth interviews with asylum-seekers living in reception centres in Northern Finland and local residents in their neighbourhood, our analysis demonstrates that exceptionality gains diverse meanings in different contexts. We propose affective exceptionality as a conceptual tool for analysing affects in transformational situations in which people's sense of the 'normal' becomes disrupted and illustrate how placing emphasis on subjects who experience and embody exceptionality in their everyday lives enables a more nuanced understanding of exceptionality, centralising the people instead of the state.