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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Methodological Nationalism, Migration, And Political Theory, Alexander Sager Aug 2013

Methodological Nationalism, Migration, And Political Theory, Alexander Sager

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

Political theorists of migration have largely operated within a conceptual scheme that treats the nation-state as the natural political unit for analysis at the expense of transnational, regional, and local analyses. Migration is discussed in the contexts of nation-building or in an international framework of autonomous, sovereign states. I show that this paradigm of “methodological nationalism” ignores transnational networks, associations, and organizations and global social and economic structures. This in turn, blinds political theorists to questions of agency and structure and to causal relations that entail moral responsibilities. My aim is to show how debates on migration and distributive justice …


Conventional Wisdom About Yugoslavia And Rwanda: Methodological Perils And Moral Implications, Aleksandar Jokić Jan 2013

Conventional Wisdom About Yugoslavia And Rwanda: Methodological Perils And Moral Implications, Aleksandar Jokić

Philosophy Faculty Publications and Presentations

While ostensibly a response to a critique, the main goal of this Article is to demonstrate how easily conventional wisdom, usually shaped by the media and politics, can corrupt scholarship when it is simply presupposed by those engaged in what should be an academic polemic, yet often also includes ‘activism in scholarship’. The examples of approved narratives in the West on Yugoslavia and Rwanda are used for the sake of this demonstration.