Political Science Commons^™

Taking Liberalism And Religious Liberty Seriously: Shifting Our Notion Of Toleration From Locke To Mill, James R. Beattie, Jr.

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

American Populism Shouldn’T Have To Embrace Ignorance, Daniel R. Denicola

Philosophy Faculty Publications

Public ignorance is an inherent threat to democracy. It breeds superstition, prejudice, and error; and it prevents both a clear-eyed understanding of the world and the formulation of wise policies to adapt to that world.

Plato believed it was more than a threat: He thought it characterized democracies, and would lead them inevitably into anarchy and ultimately tyranny. But the liberal democracies of the modern era, grudgingly extending suffrage, have extended public education in parallel, in the hope of cultivating an informed citizenry. Yet today, given the persistence and severity of public ignorance, the ideal of an enlightened electorate seems …

Elections In The Shadow Of Ebola: Sierra Leone’S African Socialist Movement And The Struggle For Democracy, Joshua Mcdermott

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

The West African eEbola outbreak of 2014-15 claimed the lives of nearly 12,000 people, most of them from the Mano River region, comprising Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Guinea-Conakry, three of the world’s poorest nations. In the wake of the outbreak, Sierra Leone’s ruling party, the All People’s Congress (APC), postponed the country’s 2017 elections for one year, under the pretext that the crisis had undermined the agenda of the president, Ernest Bai Koroma.

Authoritarianism is not new to Sierra Leone: The APC ruled the small coastal nation under a one-party state from the 1960s until a brutal civil war that …

Faith-Based Resistance, Human Rights, And Emancipatory Practices, Curtis Kline

Biennial Conference: The Social Practice of Human Rights

Progressive political theologies can expand and deepen both the strength and the conceptualization of human rights advocacy. However, not all political theologies are an effort to defend human dignity; neither are all understandings and practices of human rights. The validation of progressive political theologies as well as the validation of human rights conceptualizations comes from their capacity to concretely change the lived reality of poor and oppressed peoples of the world.

As with political theologies, there is a constant struggle over the control of how to conceptualize what constitutes a human rights issue. While many communities of faith find liberating …

The Glocal Hiv/Aids Epidemic And The Need For An Extended Theory Of Power In International Relations, Annika Hughes

International Dialogue

This paper argues for an extended theory of power in International Relations (IR), using the example of the glocal HIV/AIDS epidemic. It will argue that world power relations depend not only on military, economic, social and cultural power, but also on the power of the human body itself. This argument builds on the author’s own theory of glocalised world power, which combines a Foucaultian with a structurationist approach to argue for the existence of four-faced power relationships across the following twelve interdependent sites of power: 1) time; 2) space; 3) knowledge and aesthetics; 4) morality and emotion; 5) identities; 6) …

Table Of Contents, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Table of Contents for Volume 7

Agamben’S Comic Messianism: Giorgio Agamben: Beyond The Threshold Of Deconstruction; Agamben And Politics: A Critical Introduction, Anthony Curtis Adler

International Dialogue

The publication of Giorgio Agamben’s The Use of Bodies in 2014, followed the next year by Adam Kotsko’s English translation, marked a momentous event in the history of more recent continental thought, bringing to a close one of the most far reaching and ambitious scholarly and philosophical labors of the twentieth century. Initiated in 1995 with Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, Agamben’s project, named after the first volume, would come to comprise nine separate books, published at fairly regular intervals over the course of twenty years. While neither Kevin Attell’s Giorgio Agamben: Beyond the Threshold of Deconstruction (BTD) …

Notes From The Editor, Rory J. Conces

International Dialogue

Notes from International Dialogue's Editor-in-Chief, Rory J. Conces for Volume 7.

Bosnia’S Paralyzed Peace, Oliver P. Richmond

International Dialogue

This study offers a powerful blow by blow analysis of the attempts to create peace in BiH since the Dayton Agreement. According to Christopher Bennett, Dayton provided a “balance of terror,” was full of unrealistic deadlines, and aimed at providing internationals with an exit strategy (81) and international involvement constantly suffered from an “enforcement gap” (110) derived from the contradiction between trusteeship and democracy as well as limited resources (114). It has even reinforced existing power structures (the ethnos rather than the demos (116, 182), connected to para-states, and undermined democracy. A “new ethno-national reality now exists” even extending to …

War And Individual Rights: The Foundation Of Just War Theory, Nathan Wood

International Dialogue

Rights are a cornerstone of much contemporary moral and political philosophy. They tell us what we are owed by others, what protections we enjoy against both private citizens and against the state, and they inform us of the restrictions on our freedom that morality and law demand.

Adam Smith: His Life, Thought And Legacy, Sarah Otten

International Dialogue

Since the publication of the Glasgow Edition of the Works and Correspondence of Adam Smith by Oxford University Press in the 1970s and 80s, there has been increasing interest in the philosophical aspects of Smith’s writings. While in the public mind, he is associated with economics through his second book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, (Wealth of Nations) Adam Smith was a professional philosopher, holding the chair of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University for eleven years. It was a period he regarded as “the most useful, and, therefore, as by far the happiest” …

The Legacy Of Iraq: From The 2003 War To The “Islamic State”, Kieran Mcconaghy

International Dialogue

Benjamin Isakhan’s The Legacy of Iraq attempts to take a holistic look at the totality of political developments and relationships in Iraq since the U.S.-led invasion in 2003. The book has contributions from more than a dozen experts in aspects of Iraq’s history and politics.

Ethics Of Mobility, Globalization, Political Economy, And Culture: Refugees, Terror And Other Troubles With The Neighbors: Against The Double Blackmail, Edward Sandowski, Betty J. Harris

International Dialogue

Slavoj Žižek’s Refugees, Terror and Other Troubles with the Neighbors-Against the Double Blackmail is yet another book demonstrating Žižek’s ability to seize on major contemporary social phenomena and to bring to bear on a topic, with provocative results, his unusual combination of traits. He is very much a European educated by study and travel into an especially vivid awareness of the connections of Western Europe (and the UK), with Central and Eastern Europe (including his native Slovenia), and much of North America. He has an expansive sense of being European that includes a sense of special kinship with historical and …

Human Rights And Cultural Diversity. Core Issues And Cases, Stener Ekern

International Dialogue

As clearly explained on the very first page, this book is about “the troubled relationship between the promotion of human rights and the promotion of cultural diversity.” Its purpose is to discuss (and overcome, I presume) some of the “core areas of anxiety” that this trouble speaks of. Anyone working with human rights, academically or in more applied ways, will be familiar with the anxieties that arise from trying to reconcile individual and collective rights in a consistent and convincing manner. A book holding the promise of taking you one step further towards simultaneously handling the issues of individual moral …

The Empty Place: Democracy And Public Space, Asma Mehan

International Dialogue

The relationship of public space to democracy is dominated by two competing, yet intertwined, theoretical bases: political philosophy and spatial theory. But how does the architect make political space? Can architectural practice create political space through design? In this book, Teresa Hoskyns theorizes that the converging point between theoretical foundations and democratic practices is “participation” within “social production of space.” Therefore, “participation” from joint perspectives of architecture and political philosophy has been studied in two different frameworks: the theoretical and the practical. Unlike most previous works on the relationship between architecture and democracy, Hoskyn’s book transcends the spatial and political …

Hitler’S American Model: The United States And The Making Of Nazi Race Law, Michael J. Kelly

International Dialogue

Yale’s James Whitman jumps straight into academic controversy with his new book outlining how the lawyers of the Third Reich modeled their anti-Jewish race laws on older Jim Crow era laws in the United States. Prior American and German scholars had previously tackled this hypothesis with mixed results—some dismissing the idea or playing it down, others acknowledging some limited influence. After plumbing primary sources from the Nazi government, however, Whitman goes much further and plants his flag squarely in the influence camp. The sources, read soberly, paint a different picture. Awful it may be to contemplate, but the reality is …

The Making Of Salafism: Islamic Reform In The Twentieth Century, Matthew Vondrasek

International Dialogue

Henri Lauzière takes the reader on a multi-dimensional counterintuitive journey with The Making of Salafism: Islamic Reform in the Twentieth Century. The book might be more aptly titled The Conceptual Construction of Salafism as its most illuminating and insightful features focus more on linguistics and heuristic devices rather than history or political developments. Through detailed analysis of language, religion, history, and politics, Lauzière shows how Salafism, as it is understood today, represents a misunderstood construction that is often portrayed back into history onto primary sources. Perhaps the most important parts of the text help the reader “unlearn.”

The Good Crisis: How Population Stabilization Can Foster A Healthy U.S. Economy, Owen G. Mordaunt

International Dialogue

Even though there is a notion of a birth dearth, this text aims at debunking the common belief that a population that is not growing due to declining fertility spells disaster for our world. The population has declined over time, but in reality the world continues to add 83 million people each year. Some birth dearthers, citing low fertility in affluent nations, express concern about “moral decay” (vi). For example, “smaller and unconventional families” will harm the United States because there will be fewer children and there will not be enough people to care for the elderly (vii). The authors …

Political Rhetoric: The Modern Parrhesia, Jessica Townsend

The Catalyst

The concept of parrhesia, or free speech, was explored by the philosopher Michel Foucault to describe the discourse between a person of high political power and a subordinate, wherein the subordinate is risking his own well-being or freedom in order to convey an unwelcome truth. In Foucault’s Discourse and Truth lectures, he briefly entertains a link between political rhetoric and parrhesia before dismissing the concepts as completely incompatible. According to Foucault, parrhesia requires a dialectic format and a real threat to the speaker, and rhetorical speeches lack both. However, the scholar of Greek philosophy, Laurent Pernot, hosted a lecture …

Against The Stream, How Karl Barth Reframed Church-State Relations (Chapter 3 Of Keine Gewalt! No Violence!), Roger J. Newell

Faculty Publications - George Fox School of Theology

Excerpt: "Defenders of the Barmen Declaration's apolitical tone remind us that it was never intended to establish a program of political protest, that Karl Barth and the others were pastors not politicians; that the goal was to reassert the integrity of the gospel in the face of the attempted subversion by the German Christians. On the one hand, the soundness of this interpretation is self-evident. And yet it should surprise no one that an apolitical strategy would have little political impact on the German state. It is also true that Barth's views on church and state relations changed after Barmen; …

To Build The Fire Of Revolution, Stephen Roddewig

James Madison Undergraduate Research Journal (JMURJ)

Scholarly examinations of naturalism in Jack London’s 1908 short story “To Build a Fire” often overlook the influence of the socialist political movement. After surveying the American Socialist Party movement and London’s activism in “How I Became a Socialist,” this essay uses the frame of Marxist rhetorical criticism to inspect sociopolitical themes in London’s famous story. London’s critiques of Individualism in “How I Became a Socialist” parallel one of his concerns in “To Build a Fire” as his unnamed protagonist progresses through the Yukon with the larger ideals of American society and the capitalist economy guiding his actions. Although masculinity, …

Withdrawal: Reassessing America's Final Years In Vietnam, Gregory A. Daddis

History Faculty Books and Book Chapters

Withdrawal is a groundbreaking reassessment that tells a far different story of the Vietnam War. Daddis convincingly argues that the entire US effort in South Vietnam was incapable of reversing the downward trends of a complicated Vietnamese conflict that by 1968 had turned into a political-military stalemate. Despite a new articulation of strategy, Abrams's approach could not materially alter a war no longer vital to US national security or global dominance. Once the Nixon White House made the political decision to withdraw from Southeast Asia, Abrams's military strategy was unable to change either the course or outcome of a decades' …

Hermeneutic Philosophies Of Social Science: Introduction, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

No abstract provided.

Hermeneutics And Its Discontents In Philosophy Of Science: On Bruno Latour, The “Science Wars”, Mockery, And Immortal Models, Babette Babich

Articles and Chapters in Academic Book Collections

Themes discussed include a hermeneutic of hermeneutic philosophy of science, along with the hegemony of analytic style in university philosophy in the US and Europe as well as the rhetoric of power, highlighting the politics of mockery using the example of Alan Sokal’s hoax as this sought to exclude other voices in the academy, especially philosophy of science. In addition to reviewing Sokal’s attack on Bruno Latour, Latour’s own “biography” of an investigation is read as articulating a doubled hermeneutic reflection on modernity including both field ethnography and lab-ethnography. The further question of the viability of a hermeneutics of science …

Speaking Of Genocide: Double Binds And Political Discourse, Benjamin Meiches

Genocide Studies and Prevention: An International Journal

Genocide scholars have always argued over the best definition of genocide. However, recent genocide studies have begun to emphasize both the ‘contestable’ nature of genocide and, paradoxically, call for clear or rigid definitions of the term. This article evaluates this tension by examining the act of defining genocide as a type of epistemological practice. Placing the act of definition in the context of a complex socio-linguistic system, the article shows how genocide discourse is subject to a variety of demands and pressures. These pressures, internal to genocide discourse, inadvertently promote restrictive and paradoxical formulations of the concept. To illustrate this …

Undergraduate Research Needs: Faculty-Librarian Collaboration To Improve Information Literacy In Policy Papers, Michelle C. Pautz, Heidi Gauder

Political Science Faculty Publications

To improve the quality of semester-long policy projects of upper-division political science students, a faculty member and research librarian collaborated to reframe the assignment in hopes of improving students’ research skills and information literacy, revising the traditional one-way model of faculty sending students to the library to get information. The outcomes over the course of two semesters have been promising. Citations in two sets of student papers showed a remarkable increase in the number and quality of sources used. This suggests that when faculty work with librarians throughout the semester, such collaboration can improve students’ information literacy and thus their …

Kennan And The Neglected Variable In Post-Socialist Societies: The Loss Of Honest Dialogue And The Need For Empathy, Joan Davison

Faculty Publications

This paper analyzes the symbolism of George Kennan’s famous “X” article relative to the challenges of contemporary post transitions. It unpacks recent political discourse, discussing the critical application of practices such as thinking with your heart, parrhesis of the significance of uncertainty and reflection for question is: What would Kennan write in an X Article to states in transition paper employs both the definition suggested by Michel Foucault who understood it as “fearless speech” and Eric Voegelin who closely follows Plato’s meaning linking it with “heart” (dis)order of representatives of a society.

Scriptural Justification For The American Revolution, Samuel Ewing

Senior Honors Theses

This thesis will seek to examine the intention of the Founding Fathers regarding their decision to break from England in what became the American Revolution. On July 4^th, 1776, fifty-five men gathered to sign the defining document of their cause – the Declaration of Independence. As the document presents the climactic argument against the English crown, this thesis will seek to analyze its writers’ intentions, presuppositions, and rationalizations. Ultimately, this thesis will demonstrate that the Founders not only sought biblical justification for their actions and opinions, but followed the letter of biblical and common law in order to …

Ideological Independence In The American Political Experiment, John S. Connor, C.M.

The Catholic Lawyer

No abstract provided.

Research Offers Tough Love To Improve Human Rights Practices, Joel Pruce

Political Science Faculty Publications

We know what it means to practice a skill such as juggling or dancing, but what does it mean to "practice" human rights?

Contributions to OpenGlobalRights (OGR), since its inception, have gravitated around critique of human rights practices by focusing on advocacy and activism, cultivating debates that address the contemporary dilemmas facing human rights movements worldwide. The launch of OGR four years ago is a symptom of what I’ve referred to elsewhere as a “practice turn” in the scholarly field of human rights—one that takes human rights practice as its subject, forges space for scholar-practitioner collaboration and communication, and focuses …