Suchergebnisse

"This is a book about the difficulties of thinking and acting politically in ways that refuse the politics of nationalism. It offers a detailed study of how contemporary attempts by theorists of cosmopolitanism, globalism and multiculturalism to go beyond nationalism often reproduce key aspects of a nationalist imaginary. It argues that the challenge of resisting nationalism will require more than a shift in the scale of politics--from the national up to the global, or down to the local--and more than a shift in how we count politics--to an emphasis on diversity and multiculturalism. In order to avoid the grip of 'nationalist thinking', the book argues that we need to reopen the question of what it means to imagine community. It does so by way of various encounters with urban life. Set against the backdrop of the imaginative geographies of the 'War on Terror', the book shows how critical interventions often work in collaboration with nationalist politics. It claims that a nationalist imaginary includes powerful understandings of freedom, subjectivity, sovereignty and political space/time which must also be placed under question if we want to avoid reproducing ideas about 'us' and 'them'. Drawing on insights from feminist, cultural and postcolonial studies as well as critical approaches to International Relations and Geography, this book presents a unique and refreshing approach to the politics of nationalism."--Page 4 of cover.

This article explores the different ideas of community circulating in the aftermath of the 7 July 2005 bombings in London. Specifically, it compares the idea of a community in unity with a more cosmopolitan, urban idea of community. While these two ideas seem to present sharply different responses, the article questions the extent to which the cosmopolitan model offers an alternative to the nationalist idea of community. Drawing on various discussions about how ideas of community are produced through different understandings of time and origins, the article argues that in this specific case both the national and the cosmopolitan accounts of community worked according to a very similar logic, and therefore risked reproducing similar problems and exclusions. Consequently, the article suggests that the task of exploring alternative conceptions of community must involve greater sensitivity to the politics of time and other approaches to the politics of origins. This challenge is pursued through the motif of the city as a site expressing a different temporality and thus a different idea of community from that expressed in traditions of national belonging.

"This inter-disciplinary edited volume critically examines the dynamics of the War on Terror, focusing on the theme of the politics of response. The book explores both how responses to terrorism - by politicians, authorities and the media - legitimise particular forms of sovereign politics, and how terrorism can be understood as a response to global inequalities, colonial and imperial legacies, and the dominant idioms of modern politics. The investigation is made against the backdrop of the 7 July 2005 bombings in London and their aftermath, which have gone largely unexamined in the academic literature to date. The case offers a provocative site for analysing the diverse logics implicated in the broader context of the War on Terror, for examining how terrorist events are framed, and how such framings serve to legitimise particular policies and political practices ."--Publisher's website