Suchergebnisse

En la primera parte de este trabajo se reflexiona sobre la manera en que relaciones de poder acotan, en regímenes democráticos, libertades de sujetos no privilegiados que se encuentran subordinados a dinámicas de dominación y opresión. Con el reconocimiento de que ello representa un déficit democrático, puesto que exhibe formas de exclusión, se plantea la necesidad de radicalizar la democracia a través de la deliberación de todos los actores sociales a fin de retar dichas prácticas de segregación. En la segunda parte, se lleva a cabo una discusión sobre el concepto de justicia social para determinar la urgencia de la ampliación del espectro democrático hacia una política social más incluyente. Para este análisis se toma el caso del Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional (ezln), en particular los Acuerdos de San Andrés, debido a la consistencia y coherencia de sus esfuerzos de radicalización de la democracia en México, a través de una estrategia diseñada a partir de la importancia del diálogo con todos los actores sociales. Dicho diseño emula los procedimientos de las tradicionales asambleas comunales indígenas que se manifiestan como formas de democracia deliberativa avant la lettre. Al final se concluye que si se considera la democracia como un esfuerzo continuo y constante de acometida de relaciones de poder desbalanceadas, a partir de la posibilidad de participación de todos los miembros de una comunidad, entonces la deliberación resulta ser una herramienta de organización social y política que aspira a que las capacidades y posibilidades de los sujetos tengan un foro de discusión sobre su condición, y que ello le permita potenciar su actuación en la búsqueda de mayores libertades.

The analysis of games played on graph-like structures is of increasing importance due to the prevalence of social networks, both virtual and physical, in our daily life. As well as being relevant in computer science, mathematical analysis and computer simulations of such distributed games are vital methodologies in economics, politics and epidemiology, amongst other fields. Our contribution is to give compositional semantics of a family of such games as a well-behaved mapping, a strict monoidal functor, from a category of open graphs (syntax) to a category of open games (semantics). As well as introducing the theoretical framework, we identify some applications of compositionality.

This paper characterizes the successful civil lawsuits brought by sub-national units of government in the US against multinational pharmaceutical companies to recover the costs of public expenditures (goods and services) incurred as they attempt to manage the 'opioid crisis,' as a scapegoating strategy whose function is to deflect attention from the governance failures that allow corporate colonization of the public sphere and rescue the moribund privileges of whiteness enjoyed by the 'blue collar aristocracy' until neoliberal globalization rendered them obsolete. Recent drops in white life expectancy, which are associated with chronic diseases and non-medical opioid use, map onto high unemployment and under-employment rates in formerly prosperous communities, now fodder for populist political campaigns. Criminalizing the pharmaceutical companies and executives for peddling prescription medicines to inadequately trained (in the treatment of pain) physicians — some of whom prescribed opioids inappropriately to (majority white) patients/consumers, some of whom developed addictions, and/or poisoning following non-medical use or consumption with alcohol or illicit substances —medicalizes the white opioid crisis and identifies consumers as victims. This distinguishes them from the Americans of color whose 'drug use' has been criminalized, who have been disproportionately arrested, and sentenced to long periods of incarceration that entail the loss of civil and political rights, including the right to vote. White elites staked out the 'color line' before the Founding, perpetuating it through various scapegoating and 'shapeshifting' strategies to the present day. The lawsuits are only the most recent iteration of a morally bankrupt carceral state.

The following critical appraisal presents eight interlinked works that apply and extend Michael Barkun's (2003) concept of 'improvisational millennialism'. This body of work demonstrates that, as Barkun suggests, the concept is widely applicable to the online communities in which stigmatized knowledge is widely accepted. Moreover, it extends the definition to consider how improvisational millennialism provides ill-defined or dispossessed communities a means of articulating a collective relationship to historical time as well as a crude means of shoring up basic assumptions of group membership. Mythical pasts and millennial expectation provide the opportunity for shared eschatological orientation whilst the dualism of conspiracy theories demarcates between the communities and their outsiders. This critical review demonstrates how the journal articles and book chapters collected in the appendices provide specific examples of the application and extension of improvisational millennialism. The examples chosen are varied but a persistent theme drawn out through analysis is the role that national cultures – official and official – are articulated through improvisational millennialism. The examples include consideration of how the depiction of millennial beliefs in the mass media contribute to national cultural constructs but more typically focus on the use of improvisational millennialism in online communities. Of the latter, the greater number of examples are concerned with improvisational millennialism within the neo-fascist milieu. Mobilised by conspiracy theories with apocalyptic subtexts, the far right reliance on improvisational millennialism demonstrates the implicit danger of the increased incursion of stigmatized knowledge into the cultural mainstream. This critical review serves to show that despite being typified by a syncretic bricolage of unconnected ideas and traditions, improvisational millennialism is reflective of both social and political realities. ; N/A

This article addresses a puzzle in the history of academic disciplines: Why is Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America, once considered a sociological classic, nowadays mostly praised as a classic in political philosophy? Existing approaches emphasize either aspects internal to the text or to the figure of the author, or external factors such as historical contexts and disciplinary dynamics. Our explanation questions the assumption that texts are stable and explores the pragmatic interplay between text-artifact-metaphor. The result is a pragmatic genealogy of the successive material incarnations of Democracy since 1945. This allows us to account for the various meanings that have been associated with Democracy (and Tocqueville) at key historical moments in terms of the cultural work of collectives of agents around the text and its material form so as to make it the icon of certain political and disciplinary projects. ; info:eu-repo/semantics/acceptedVersion

The recent characterization of German economic hegemony in the Eurozone is oversimplified without a historical and economic analysis of the ascendancy of German economic hegemony in the European Economic and Monetary Union (EMU). The thesis finds that Germany in the EMU negotiations was an economic hegemon, albeit not in a traditional realist sense. Germany neither explicitly stated that it wanted to create the EMU for its economic hegemony nor initiated any attempt for European monetary integration. Ironically, these two traditional hegemonic motives were represented by France. Instead, Germany only assumed the role as the reluctant economic hegemon in the EMU negotiations upon invitation and consent by other countries. The thesis further examines the extent that Germany was able to use its hegemonic bargaining power to embed its economic hegemony in the institutional framework of the EMU. Using a Post-Keynesian economic lens, the paper finds that the hegemonic vacuum opened by the flawed institutional structure of the Euro for the dominant economic country to fulfill in a financial crisis did not automatically coincide with Germany. For that reason, German economic hegemony was the inadvertent outcome of the collective economic ignorance underpinning the EMU.