Political Theory Commons^™

Border Fascism And The Fascistization Of Society, Nicholas P. De Genova

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

The massive destruction and social dislocation wrought by capitalist crisis has culminated, historically, in the brutal cataclysms of fascism and other forms of authoritarian rule. Today, across the globe, we are confronted with the aggressive advance and entrenchment of a variety of such authoritarian political projects. Anxious discourses about ascendant fascism have become perfectly mainstream. These developments command our acute attention and critical analysis. This essay addresses these dire questions and the conceptual vexations surrounding the concept of fascism, particularly as it has been elaborated in various Marxist analyses.  Specifically, much of the debate around fascism as an analytical category …

Boot Camp For The Mind: The Role Of Jpme In Developing National Security Strategists, Joseph Gagliano, Nick Gvosdev, Derek Reveron, Rebecca Russo, Dana Struckman

Joint Force Quarterly

Joint professional military education (JPME) plays a deliberate and pivotal role in an officer’s operational and strategic growth. JPME provides a structured environment for officers to develop the intellectual agility, critical thinking, and collaborative skills necessary to lead complex decisionmaking at headquarters away from the battlefield. Translating broad strategic guidance into employable strategies and executable plans requires (1) assessing the international security environment and (2) analyzing domestic policymaking system constraints. This approach stresses that a comprehensive education in national security affairs must acknowledge that a well-crafted security strategy is meaningless if not informed by the domestic policymaking system that develops …

Panopticism And Pan-Oticism: Sound-Power From Foucault To Deleuze, Eric Dillenberger

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

From Muzak to long range acoustic devices (LRADs), the contemporary proliferation of sonic technologies for governing moods, behaviors, and potentialities complicates the virtual absence of sound within Michel Foucault's primarily visual modality of disciplinary power in Discipline and Punish, exemplified by his central conceptual model of the panopticon. This thesis develops the corollary concept of pan-oticism to theorize the transformation of sound-power and its political function within administered sonic ecologies from Foucault's disciplinary societies to Gilles Deleuze's societies of control. Within the enclosed spaces constitutive of disciplinary societies, sound-power remains subordinated to Foucault's visual logic of panopticism, extending …

Winnie's Feminism: A Tribute To Mama Dr. Winnie Madikizela-Mandela As A Radical Feminist From 1986-2018, Anna Lefatshe Moagi

Wagadu: A Journal of Transnational Women's & Gender Studies

Growing up in South Africa and having read several “tell-all” biographies by influential women have made this researcher aware of the struggles of women to be recognised and valued within their social environments. The many names that come to mind, when speaking of women’s voices that challenged their position in our society, belong to those of struggle veterans such as Adelaide Tambo, Ruth First, Lilian Ngoyi, Albertina Sisulu, Thandi Modise, Baleka Mbethe, Leymah Gbowee, Ruth Mompati, Charlotte Maxeke, Joice Majuru, Thuli Madontsela and Winnie Madikizela-Mandela. Their as women leaders roles remain undervalued (Shekhawat 2015). These phenomenal influential women and many …

Las Voces Olvidadas Del Territorio: Infancias Mayas Ante El Conflicto Socioambiental En Ixil, Cielo María Ávila López, Myriam Montserrat Baca Canché, José Israel Herrera

Journal of Maya Heritage

Resumen: En la península de Yucatán, en el sureste de México, la comunidad maya de Ixil resiste ante los diversos intentos de implementación de megaproyectos en su territorio. En el marco de estas disputas territoriales, las voces de las infancias adquieren un matiz clave en el análisis de las dinámicas de desterritorialización y las respuestas de resistencia que devienen del contexto del conflicto socioambiental. Es así como, a partir de la ecología política y metodologías que favorecen el acercamiento a las voces de las infancias, emergieron los significados construidos en torno a dichos sucesos, lo que reveló que más allá …

Jison Jiei: Offensive Realism And Imperial Japan's Spiral Toward Regional Hegemony, John William Dodd

War, Diplomacy, and Society (MA) Theses

This thesis examines Imperial Japan’s march from the Mukden Incident of 1931 to the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 through the lens of offensive realism. It asks to what extent Japan’s prewar grand strategy can be understood as a bid for regional hegemony, and what that interpretation reveals about the relationship between power politics, international law, and future great-power crises. Rather than treating Japanese expansion as irrational madness or reducing it only to ideology or militarism, this thesis argues that Japanese leaders acted according to a recognizable strategic logic.

Proceeding from theory to historical analysis, this project first situates …

Religious Practice And Attitudes Toward Immigration And Racial Justice In America, Amya Douglas

Graduate Theses and Dissertations (2019 - present)

This study aims to understand how Christians’ knowledge of Scripture and involvement in the church have an impact on their social-political views, specifically, racial justice and immigration. By using the survey responses from the 6th wave of the Baylor Religion Survey, more frequent church attendance and reading Scripture were correlated with a greater recognition of racism in terms of being against white supremacy and white nationalism, supporting racial justice when asked about racial gaps, and possessing greater support for immigrants. This study highlights the distinction between religious affiliation and religious practice, and it suggests that certain policy sentiments can be …

A World Without Literature? Tagore’S Words For His Times And Ours, Salmoli Choudhuri

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

In 1907, Rabindranath Tagore delivered a lecture on world literature to an audience in Calcutta, the then capital of British India. Amid powerful and intersecting forces—colonialism and nationalism, industrial modernity and mass poverty—Tagore’s position on literature was neither disengaged nor defensive, insofar as he related it to the human condition and the capacity for world-making. Far from staking a representational claim to world literature on behalf of Indian or Bengali literature, I argue in this article, Tagore reconceptualized the idea from its earlier canonical formulation by Goethe. He departed from dominant nineteenth-century philosophies that conceived the world as a spatial—and …

Reconsidering Karl Marx’S Concept Of World Literature, Kenneth Cheng

CLCWeb: Comparative Literature and Culture

It is widely assumed that Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels regarded world literature as an epiphenomenal product of the capitalist world market, and therefore as a symptom of rather than potential cure to the crisis of modern society. However, this conflicts with the fact that they designated the Communist Manifesto itself as a world-literary production—the joint work of communists of various nationalities—and opposed it to the national limitations of German socialist literature. This article challenges existing interpretations by outlining how Marx and Engels incorporated the humanistic idealism of the Goethean Weltliteratur tradition into the theoretical framework of historical materialism. It …

They, The People, Ammel Sharon

Socio-Legal Review

This essay engages with Rohit De and Ornit Shani’s Assembling India’s Constitution by situating it within a broader conceptual history of “the people.” While the book offers a compelling account of participatory constitution-making, the essay suggests that it opens up further questions about the conceptual and historical conditions shaping the people as a political subject. Drawing on contemporary political theory on populism, the essay explores how politics invokes the people through affective and performative practices alongside constitutional forms.

The Sustainable Autonomy Framework: Explaining Autonomy In Aceh And Southern Yemen, Abdulsalam Saad, Arie Kusuma Paksi

Jurnal Politik

This article examines why post-conflict autonomy consolidates into durable self-governance in some cases while remaining fragile and externally dependent in others. While Aceh has maintained stable self-governance since the 2005 Helsinki Agreement, Yemen’s Southern Transitional Council remains a fragmented authority sustained by external patronage. To explain this divergence, the article develops the Sustainable Autonomy Framework (SAF) and asks: under what conditions does post-conflict autonomy become viable and sustainable? The SAF argues that durability depends on the alignment of three mutually reinforcing pillars: elite legitimacy, resource sovereignty, and mediation credibility. Using a most-similar systems comparison of Aceh’s Free Aceh Movement and …

Gramsci’S ‘Democratic Philosopher’ And The Concept’S Foundations In Marxian Social Ontology, Eli Recht-Appel

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

This thesis deals with the term ‘democratic philosopher’ from Antonio Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks. In order to lay the groundwork for my distinct interpretation of the ‘democratic philosopher,’ I begin by providing an overview of Gramsci’s theory of the role of intellectuals in civil and political society. I then argue that the ‘democratic philosopher’ emerges from Gramsci’s typology of intellectuals but is a category which is both temporally and ontologically distinct from his more well-known concept of ‘organic intellectuals.’ ‘Organic intellectuals,’ intellectuals who co-develop alongside their fundamental social group or class, occupy a variety of cultural and political roles in …

Rethinking The Canon: A Conceptual History Of The Layered Foundations Of Western Politics, Dembael Seidi, Muhammad Andi Firmansyah

Jurnal Wacana Politik

Many accounts of Western political history suggest a direct, straight line from Ancient Greece to modern democracy. This article argues that this “Great Books” narrative is a myth that ignores how political ideas actually change over time. Using Reinhart Koselleck’s Begriffsgeschichte (conceptual history) framework, we demonstrate that key terms such as “law” and “citizenship” were not merely preserved but fundamentally transformed as they moved through Greco-Roman, Islamic, and Judeo-Christian civilizations. We call this transformation “conceptual alchemy”: a series of semantic translations through which Greek rationalism was retheorized via Islamic metaphysics and later synthesized by medieval scholasticism. Consequently, rather than a …

Critical Geopolitics And The Reconstruction Of Meaning: A Discourse Analysis Of The 'Terrorism' Label Applied To Hamas By Western Hegemony, Cahaya Mulyani Sakti, M.Hamdan Basyar

Journal of Terrorism Studies

The emergence of Hamas in 1987 cannot be separated from the configuration of modern colonialism and the continuity of occupation that shaped the political reality. Hamas’s early phase was rooted in socio-religious activities through education and community empowerment programs, before evolving into armed resistance against the occupation. The labeling of Hamas as a “terrorist” organization began in the mid-1990s in U.S. legal documents, which subsequently generated debate and gave rise to counter-narratives. This study employs the frameworks of critical geopolitics (Ó Tuathail & Agnew) and the Discourse-Historical Approach (Wodak) to analyze the labeling of Hamas as “terrorist” by Western hegemony. …

Mothers On The Ballot: Gender And Partisan Dynamics In The Evaluation Of Maternal Political Candidates, Jimena Sanchez

DU Undergraduate Research Journal Archive

While scholarly research on the interaction between gender and political candidacy has grown, there is limited research on the way mothers are perceived in politics when they choose to run for office. The goal of the paper is to answer the following research question: how do partisanship and gender influences public perceptions of mothers running for political office, and to what extent does social desirability shape these attitudes? Through a list experiment, I surveyed individuals in the United States to capture the beliefs of the public toward mothers running for political office. Specifically, I analyze the opinions of survey participants …

The Autonomy Plan In Morocco: Legal Foundations, Political Dimensions And Prospects For Resolving The Sahara Conflict, Limam Boussif, Jalila Ait Soudane

Journal of Maya Heritage

Summary: The territorial conflict over the Sahara is one of the most enduring territorial disputes in international relations, involving issues of sovereignty, self-determination, and regional stability. In this context, Morocco’s 2007 Autonomy Plan is presented as a negotiated framework of self-government under Moroccan sovereignty.

This article analyzes the evolution and consolidation of the Autonomy Plan using a conceptual approach based on self-determination, territorial governance, and conflict resolution theories. It shows that the initiative has progressively evolved from a national proposal into an internationally recognized framework, particularly through growing diplomatic support and developments within the United Nations Security Council, including Resolution …

Les Grands Chantiers De La Transition Énergétique Au Maroc: Le Cas De Dakhla-Oued Eddahab Entre Réalisations, Facteurs De Réussite Et Perspectives, Limam Boussif, Jalila Ait Soudane

Journal of Maya Heritage

Résumé: Cet article examine la dynamique de la transition énergétique au Maroc à travers une analyse descriptive et analytique du cas de Dakhla-Oued Eddahab. Dans un contexte marqué par l’accélération des politiques de décarbonation à l’échelle mondiale, le Maroc s’impose comme un acteur stratégique en matière de développement des énergies renouvelables et de l’hydrogène vert. L’étude met en lumière les principaux chantiers structurants engagés dans la région de Dakhla, notamment le développement des énergies éolienne et solaire, les projets de production d’hydrogène vert, le dessalement de l’eau de mer, ainsi que la réalisation du port Dakhla Atlantique. L’analyse montre que …

How Religion, Morality, And Worldview Impact Public Policy, Adam Opp

Journal of Statesmanship & Public Policy: Briefs and Commentaries

It is important to examine the intersection between religion, morality, and worldview when analyzing the creation of public policy. Faith and spiritual beliefs play a key role in how an individual behaves as a policymaker and how they view the role of government. Religion considers the critical role of authority, which the government must analyze if the people have given it the authority to take a course of action. Morality asserts that the purpose of government is to maintain a system of justice that protects individual rights. Worldview highlights the framework individuals take in approaching the role of government and …

Inherited By “Merit”: What Caste Carries Across The Indian American Diaspora, Aarushi V. Jaiswal

English Undergraduate Distinction Projects

This project traces the rhetorical formation termed “meritocratic nationalism,” a political vocabulary that makes national belonging conditional on moralized merit, converting structural advantage into the language of individual character. Meritocratic nationalism is traced across three political figures whose rhetoric represents successive moments in a single ideological trajectory. Reading Narendra Modi’s 2014 and 2018 Independence Day addresses and his 2014 Madison Square Garden speech to the Indian American diaspora as the formation’s originating texts, this project argues that Modi’s recurring moral tetrad of conduct, values, traditions, and ability translated the structurally concentrated advantages of India’s upper-caste professional class into a universalist …

Hammurabi’S Laws: Ancient Traditions Of Violence, Aaron Secrist

The Confluence

The tradition of enforcing private property through violence is truly ancient, and goes back thousands of years to the first civilizations. There exists a prevailing attitude that contemporary culture is more “civilized” than the first organized societies – and while it’s true in some ways, our laws are still remarkably similar to those practiced in antiquity. In the following essay, I analyze the Law Code of Hammurabi and examine its parallels to the way laws function today. First, I will provide context for the technological advances that made the first city-states possible, then give a cultural and economic overview of …

Toward A Corporeal Materialism. Response To Reviewers, Banu Bargu

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

No abstract provided.

Embodying The Masses. Review Of Banu Bargu's Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics Of Radical Refusal (Oxford University Press, 2024), James Martel

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

No abstract provided.

Worldmaking Against Disposability: Review Of Banu Bargu’S Disembodiment: Corporeal Politics Of Radical Refusal (Oxford University Press, 2024), Daniel Loick

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

No abstract provided.

Toward A Non- Or Post-Historical Materialism. Review Of Banu Bargu'sdisembodiment: Corporeal Politics Of Radical Refusal (Oxford University Press, 2024), Amy Allen

Emancipations: A Journal of Critical Social Analysis

No abstract provided.

An Alternative To Armageddon: O.P. Weyland And The Development Of Tactical Air Power, Paul Wells

LSU New Orleans Theses and Dissertations

Theorists and advocates of air power argued that aircraft, not ground forces, would become the dominant platform for victory in war. They promoted the concept of strategic bombing, using aircraft to bypass ground forces and directly attack a nation's industrial capacity to wage war, hoping to ensure quick victory and avoid a repeat of the prolonged slaughter in the trenches of WWI. In 1947, led by advocates of strategic bombing, the United States Air Force (USAF) became an independent and equal branch of the U.S. military. The USAF developed the Strategic Air Command (SAC) to meet the requirements of the …

Initial Type Craft, Micah Angelus

Theses and Dissertations

What kinds of objects can still think when the self-contained aesthetic object can no longer be taken for granted? The historical ruptures that have placed painting under crisis have also brought into view the fallacy of artistic autonomy, raising questions about how value, contemplation, and meaning persist under conditions of deconstruction.

Do Clothes Make The Man? Ftm Crossdressing In The 18th-19th C. Anglo-American World, Aidrian Graber

Theses and Dissertations

This paper seeks to analyze the legacy of "Female Husbands" and other female-to-male crossdressers in the 18/19th c. Anglo-American world and how such people can illuminate the field of transgender history.

Communist Yugoslavia: Non-Alignment, Solidarity, And Webs Of Diplomacy, Morgan Dillon

Honors Projects

The Non-Alignment Movement has been covered extensively in Cold War scholarship, yet the relationship between Yugoslavia and Indonesia is often underexplored, especially in the realm of IR theory. This project examines Yugoslavia and Indonesia between 1945 and 1966 to propose an imagined community, as conceptualized by Benedict Anderson, that serves as a microcosm for a wider Non-Aligned community in the Third World. This is achieved by using Social Constructivism to synthesize the histories, foreign policies, and national/political identities of these two nations, and then placing the theoretical community against Yugoslavia’s relationships with the U.S and the USSR for contrast. Through …

"Principle Before Party": Samuel "Golden Rule" Jones And The 1899 Ohio Gubernatorial Election, Connor Hand

Honors Projects

As partisan loyalty declined and resentment grew against American social, political, and economic conditions at the end of the nineteenth century, political reformers saw an opportunity to spread their ideals for a better society. Most reformers opted against running for office, and those who did often used standard or newly formed political parties. Mayor of Toledo and progressive businessman Samuel Jones differed from the standard reformer by seeking office while embracing a non-partisan ideology. By analyzing Jones’ writings, the partisan response to his movement, and contextualizing him amongst reformers, this essay explores how Jones stood out from the standard political …

Luja Volume 6: Issue 1 (Full Volume)

Laurier Undergraduate Journal of the Arts

No abstract provided.