Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

On Hannah Arendt's Study Of Constitutionalism In The Aftermath Of Totalitarianism: A Philosophical Search For The Principle To Secure The Foundations Of Modern Politics, Joseph De Leon Flores

Open Access Theses & Dissertations

Hannah Arendt faces the grotesque appearance of totalitarianism, and with bravery goes on the offensive, herself armed with contemporary philosophical tools of analysis, to do battle in the field of existential-phenomenology against this modern monster. Totalitarianism, birthed from the seeds of lawless action, claims to be the most lawful mode of human existence. The monstrous existence of totalitarianism demonstrates a crisis in the very foundations of modern manâ??s political mode of being. In order to find a solution to this modern political crisis Arendt closely studies the experience of constitution writing at the moment the men of action are about …

Introduction To The Special Issue On Secrecy And Technologies, Clare Stevens, Sam Forsythe

Secrecy and Society

Many scholars have treated the inscrutability of technologies, secrecy, and other unknowns as moral and ethical challenges that can be resolved through transparency and openness. This paper, and the special issue it introduces, instead wants to explore how we can understand the productive, strategic but also emancipatory potential of secrecy and ignorance in the development of security and technologies. This paper argues that rather than just being mediums or passive substrates, technologies are making a difference to how secrecy, disclosure, and transparency work. This special issue will show how technologies and time mediate secrecy and disclosure, and vice versa. This …

Why Agriculture Productivity Falls: The Political Economy Of Agrarian Transition In Developing Countries, Rashed Al Mahmud Titumir

Purdue University Press Books

Why Agriculture Productivity Falls: The Political Economy of Agrarian Transition in Developing Countries offers a new explanation for the decline in agricultural productivity in developing countries. Transcending the conventional approaches to understanding productivity using agricultural inputs and factors of production, this work brings in the role of formal and informal institutions that govern transactions, property rights, and accumulation. This more robust methodology leads to a comprehensive, well-balanced lens to perceive agrarian transition in developing countries. It argues that the existing process of accumulation has resulted in nonsustainable agriculture because of market failures—the result of asymmetries of power, diseconomies of scale, …

Reimagining The Theory Of Necropolitics In A Modern Lens: Hate Crimes And Violence, Salma Ahmed Abdulmagied Gheita

Future Journal of Social Science

This research paper is testing the validity of the Necropolitics theory and how we can reintroduce its definitions in a modern lens. Though the theory of Necropolitics is extreme and historically was a terminology and paradigm that was used towards more catastrophic and traumatizing events. The main argument that this paper is discussing is how did the idea of Necropolitics evolved into a more institutional, systematic, and legalized manors of exclusion. This is made through critical discourse analysis of the text presented on the term Necropolitics to highlight on the history of this term and what it stood for in …

Political Theory, Activism, And Visual Media: The Ideology Of Protest Symbols, Jilly E. Crane-Mauzy Mx.

Whittier Scholars Program

Art changes culture while policy codifies it. Radical revolutionary movements are often accompanied by equally radical shifts in art and design. I cataloged, compared, and contrasted the semiotic power of three specific symbols and their most significant historical moments in the United States. Through the examination of; Stonewall, The Equality March March Against Death, The Day The World Said No To War, The 1968 Summer Olympics, and The 2020 Black Lives Matter, the shifting of each ideologies symbol from inflammation in the media to recognition showcases the clarifying function along with creating unity and pride in community that is integral …

Relative Political Capacity: A Dataset To Evaluate The Performance Of Nations, 1960–2018, Ali Fisunoglu, Kyungkook Kang, Tad Kugler, Marina Arbetman-Rabinowitz

Arts & Sciences Faculty Publications

Measuring the ability of governments to implement policy remains one of the most significant questions of political science. This paper presents the latest iteration of the Relative Political Capacity (RPC) dataset and introduces the Absolute Political Capacity measure. It then investigates the trends in political performance measures across time and space, and different political and economic characteristics. Covering 168 countries from 1960 to 2018, the RPC offers a comprehensive measure of state capacity that allows direct comparisons to be made across countries from all levels of development and will help researchers explore different dimensions of capacity and power.

Facing Famine: Justice And The Case Of Unilateral Intervention, Tanner R. Brooks

Honors Theses

Through the course of this year, 900 thousand people will have to struggle through conditions of famine, and a total of 345.2 million will experience food insecurity of some kind. These concerning figures represent an over twofold increase since 2020.1 This presents a serious problem, as access to food is so plainly vital to every aspect of an individual’s existence. It should therefore be uncontroversial to assert the grave nature of the occurrence of famine and other food emergencies faced by so many today. Food emergencies are not merely a result of insufficient food, but rather the institutional policies enacted …

The Supreme Court: A Power Hungry And Political Branch Since Its Conception A Timeline From Marbury V. Madison To Dobbs V. Jackson Women's Health Organization, Alec Diradourian

Political Science Student Work

No abstract provided.

Power And Authority In Karl Marx, Niccoló Machiavelli And Thomas Hobbes, Ekim Kilic

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

The concepts of power and authority have been fundamental to political philosophy and science from the beginning. However, in much recent thinking, power’s central and defining relationship with the state has been called into question. This thesis studies the understanding of power and authority in the works of Niccolò Machiavelli, Thomas Hobbes, and Karl Marx, in the context of the emerging trend around the world today of searching for a new social, economic, and political order. It aims to demonstrate how the works of Marx may open a path to rectify the limitations of the traditional thinking of power and …

Racialization And International Security, Richard W. Maass

Political Science & Geography Faculty Publications

Racialization—the processes that infuse social and political phenomena with racial identities and implications—is an assertion of power, a claim of purportedly inherent differences that has saturated modern diplomacy, order, and violence. Despite the field's consistent interest in power, international security studies in the United States largely omitted racial dynamics from decades of debates about international conflict and cooperation, nuclear proliferation, power transitions, unipolarity, civil wars, terrorism, international order, grand strategy, and other subjects. A new framework lays conceptual bedrock, links relevant literatures to major research agendas in international security, cultivates interdisciplinary dialogues, and charts promising paths to consider how overt …

Liminal Beings Are We, John Kenneth Froozan Ii

Theses and Dissertations

This thesis establishes a foundation for liminality in political theory. Liminality, a concept mostly developed in anthropology, is used by them to describe middle periods in rites of passage. Unlike the anthropologists, I argue that liminality should be theorized phenomenologically. Utilizing the history of political philosophy, liminality is defined as a dialectical phenomenon that acts between and beyond the limits of things, Self, and Other. I describe liminality as an ontological-epistemological or existential condition that acts as a connecting tissue to both define what is and the space between things. This requires that notions of power, politics, and their ends …

Civil War And Power: A Theoretical Inquiry, Can Guven

Electronic Thesis and Dissertation Repository

This dissertation is a theoretical project that explores the conceptual nexus between civil war and power. It maps out a lineage of thought which posits civil war as a framework for explicating politics, not as a pre-political stage of savagery or a deteriorated condition of the socio-political order. Starting with Michel Foucault’s radical yet short-lived civil war thesis, which situates civil war as the matrix of relations of power, this investigation traverses the work of several theorists and philosophers who have drawn on, or departed from, this line of thought. It critically evaluates Giorgio Agamben’s use of the concept …

Pandemics And Power: An Applied Analysis Of American Inequality, Megan A. Engle

Pursuit - The Journal of Undergraduate Research at The University of Tennessee

Pandemics represent both social change and continuance. While these public health crises bring about seemingly new issues, they also have a unique ability to reveal pre-existing problems within our society and perpetual social processes. Understanding historical patterns related to public health crises provides greater insight on the ongoing pandemic and American policy needs. Research reveals that, both historically and presently, systemic social injustices and economic inequalities are inflamed by such events. As a result, pandemics disproportionately affect minority groups in several interconnected ways. In examining public health theory, past pandemics, and the present moment, the effects of both power disparities …

Time And Power: The Will To Temporalize In Digital Culture, Talha Issevenler

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

In this dissertation, I analyze the new forms of temporalization of social media in relationship to arrangements of power through nonhuman agency of the algorithm. The new social media industry refers to the entities that make up its circulatory movement, simply as ‘content’. This suggests that scientific or empirical study of social media should deal with content and analyze this as the data of research through sampling (Manovich, 2020, p. 93-94). Yet the forms and the temporality in which the content is presented not only are open to empirical research but should be central to our understanding of the organization …

Archiving Feminist Truth In Trump’S Wake Of Lies, Julie Shayne

Humboldt Journal of Social Relations

This article is about an assignment I do in one of my Gender, Women, and Sexuality Studies social movement classes. I revised the assignment the first time teaching the class after Trump lost the 2020 election. For the assignment, students work in groups to research local feminist and gender justice organizations and deposit all of their original materials – recordings, photos, flyers, etc. – into a digital, open access archive I co-created several years ago with librarians and staff on my campus. In 2021 I had my students do the “post-Trump” edition where they researched local organizations about how their …

The Second-Order Impact Of Relative Power On Outcomes Of Crisis Bargaining: A Theory Of Expected Disutility And Resolve, Tatevik Movsisyan

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

How does structure shape behavior and outcomes in crisis bargaining? Formal bargaining models of war rely on expected utility theory to describe first-order effects, whereby the payoffs of war determine actors’ “resolve” to fight as a function of costs and benefits. Value preferences of risk and future discounting are routinely treated as predefined and subjective individual attributes, outside the strategic context of bargaining or independent from expected utility. However, such treatment fails to account for context-conditional preferences sourcing from actors’ expectations of relative gain or loss. Drawing on a wealth of experimental evidence from behavioral economics, but without departing from …

How Democratic Is Democracy? A History Of Political Corruption In Peru, Kaitlyn Selzler

Graduate Review

With the emergence of revisionist scholarship beginning in the 1960’s and 1970’s, scholars have taken terms which had absolute definitions, such as totalitarianism or democracy, and introduced different perspectives and methods which questioned the absolute authority of historical terminology. As a case study into these new historical methodologies, this essay seeks to answer the question: How democratic is Peru’s democracy? To answer this question, this research explores the deep seeded corruption in Latin America, specifically Peru, beginning in 1985 with the election of Alan Garcia, continuing through the presidency of Alberto Fujimori, and eventually ending with the current state of …

Democracy And Bolivian Sovereignty In The Morales Era, Erin Leick

Graduate Review

In late 2019, Evo Morales was forced out of office as the President of Bolivia and charged with sedition and terrorism. Morales had spent more than two decades as an indigenous and cocalero activist, then served as President for nearly fourteen years. During this time, he and the Bolivian Movement Toward Socialism party, the MAS, oversaw a new constitution with the goals of supporting Bolivian sovereignty and democratic ideals. Morales’s version of democracy,though, is intertwined with sovereignty, and centered on increasing the rights of the indigenous peoples who brought him to notoriety. This paper seeks to determine the extent to …

Smart Power In The Iraq Surge 2007-2008, Russell N. Reiling

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

This dissertation explores U.S. actions in the military “Surge” in Iraq from 2007-2008. Focus is on the entwined utilization of coercive and attractive power or smart power as an enabler of success and change from prior U.S. strategies in Operation IRAQI FREEDOM. The analysis is based upon an extensive set of interviews with operational participants in the Surge from across the Executive Branch. Results show that smart power was an important element of the Surge and its use facilitated success, but that doing smart power was not a simple matter of achieving some mix of ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ power, but …

The Politics Of Medicine: Power, Actors, And Ideas In The Making Of Health, Claire Wulf Winiarek

Graduate Program in International Studies Theses & Dissertations

The practice of medicine has become the prescribing of medicine. Reflecting a construct of health defined by Rationalism, individualism, and biomedical science, medicines (pharmaceuticals) are politically constructed to be the first – and sometimes only prescribed – line of defense against illness and disease. Pharmaceuticals also represent a highly desirable, ‘recession-proof’ component of many Nation-states’ (states’) export strategies, helping advanced economies, in particular, to maintain favorable trade balances and economic growth amidst the headwinds of deindustrialization.

Higher use and the overreliance on pharmaceuticals promote an outsized role for certain actors and ideas in the making of global health, referring to …

Is United States’ Economic Power In Decline? Can China Replace The U.S. As The World’S Next Economic Superpower?, Islam Bakirci

Dissertations

The decline of American economic power has been passionately debated for decades. Starting from the Kennedy administration, there were many cases that declinist scholars interpreted as the beginning of American economic power decline. The financial crisis of 2007-09 is the latest case of the same debate. However, unlike the previous cases, declinist scholars who support the idea of U.S. economic power is in decline after the financial crisis, strongly believe that this time the decline is different. This time the decline is real. In addition, the same scholars also argue that China, as an economic challenger which is different from …

Inauguration Day And The Politics Of A Partial Exorcism, Donald Roth

Faculty Work Comprehensive List

"Our nation is possessed by various spirits, and the parties are far from united on which ones should go and which should stay."

Posting about the 2021 Presidential Inauguration from In All Things - an online journal for critical reflection on faith, culture, art, and every ordinary-yet-graced square inch of God’s creation.

https://inallthings.org/inauguration-day-and-the-politics-of-a-partial-exorcism/

Multispecies Disposability: Taxonomies Of Power In A Global Pandemic, Darren Chang, Lauren Corman

Animal Studies Journal

This paper bridges critical conversations regarding animal exploitation and racialized violence that have been occurring throughout the COVID-19 pandemic. We apply Claire Jean Kim’s analysis of taxonomies of power to help make sense of the interwoven multispecies catastrophes of racialized animalization and animalized racialization, such as the violence experienced by various species of nonhuman animals, as well as East Asians and other People of Colour in the West, whether in public spaces, in media, on farms, or inside industrial animal slaughterhouses or meatpacking plants. We conclude by arguing that Kim’s ethics of mutual avowal provides a productive way for social …

A Student Primer On Intersectionality: Not Just A Buzzword, Elodie Silberstein, Marisa Tramontano, Meghana V. Nayak

Open Educational Resources

This book:

● lays out the objectives of WS 166, Gender, Race, and Class, taught in the Women’s and Gender Studies Department, Pace University, New York City campus;

● provides a structure for any course addressing intersectionality, feminism, and oppression;

● describes the framework of intersectionality, which examines societal issues by analyzing the interlocking systems of oppression that shape people’s lives;

● argues for a transnational application of intersectionality that also centers U.S. Black feminists’ contributions to understanding oppression;

● includes journal articles, TED Talks, and class exercises that are generally accessible for most students or interested readers without previous …

Power For The Powerless: How Donald Trump Used Voters’ Anxieties To Win In 2016, Nathaniel Stekler

Honors Theses

Previous research has attempted to explain the results of the 2016 presidential election, and has concluded that a jaded and anxious electorate propelled Trump to the White House. The current research examines what psychological processes might have been at play. When people feel powerless in their day-to-day lives but are made to feel powerful it leads to behavior that goes against standard moral beliefs (e.g., supporting a presidential candidate who makes offensive comments that one might not explicitly endorse). I hypothesize that a feeling of powerfulness among a subset of the population used to feeling powerless will increase their support …

The Politicization Of The Genocide Label: Genocide Rhetoric In The Un Security Council, Michelle E. Ringrose

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

This article examines the intersection of language, power and national interest by discussing how the UN Security Council permanent five (P5) members navigate the linguistic rhetoric of genocide in debates surrounding the conflict in Bosnia and Herzegovina. A discourse analysis methodology is adopted to ascertain how P5 member-states framed the genocide in Srebrenica through an analysis of linguistic themes and silences in council debates. This article argues that UN P5 members use language as a mechanism to frame a conflict in a particular way that aligns with their own national political interests. The article reaffirms the importance of genocide recognition, …

A Thumb On The Scale: Chinese Investment And Influence In Ecuador And Colombia, Christina Pendergrast

Honors Theses

Over the past two decades, Chinese involvement in the developing world has increased dramatically, raising concerns over the intentions behind the provision of development packages. Critics have accused China of a practice known as debt-trap diplomacy, a method of ensnaring less developed nations by providing more loans than those nations have the ability to feasibly pay back. While China denies that their loan and investment packages are provided with any ulterior motive, the influence held by an investor like China has the potential to impact these partner countries for decades to come. In light of the scope of China’s role …

How Great Power Politics Influences Refugee Policy: Assessing The U.S. Foreign Policy Implications Of Differing Responses To The Venezuelan Migration Crisis In Colombia, Peru, And Brazil, Suhan M. Rosario

Honors Undergraduate Theses

Why are Venezuelan Migrants accepted in neighboring Colombia, but not in other countries in South America? It is true that Colombia and Venezuela are similar in language, culture, and customs, but this is true across the continent. There has been literature published on the size of the crisis, and where they are going. Here, I will assess why the Colombian government is more accepting of Venezuelan migrants, even when this is not popular in Colombia or any other country in South America.

My argument is that US foreign policy has caused Colombia to be more accepting of Venezuelans than neighboring …

Existence Of Media In Implementing The Role Of Watchdog In The Case Of Land Equipment For The Development Of New Yogyakarta International Airport, Gede Moenanto Soekowati, Aceng Abdullah, Evie Ariadne, Oekan Soekotjo Abdullah

Library Philosophy and Practice (e-journal)

Media is the fourth element of power in four pillars of power in democratic countries. Power in a democratic country not only consists of the government or is called an executive, legislative power, judicial power, and press power.

In this connection, the study carried out is a qualitative study concerning which the press is expected to function as oversight and control of power. Qualitative research is carried out by observing, interviewing, and studying documents. 1. How is the existence of journalism supervision in the practice of journalism in land evictions for NYIA airport? 2. Why do residents of Temon Village …

Charles De Gaulle: A Life Of Consequence, Jack Van Der Slik

Pro Rege

No abstract provided.