|
Showing 1 - 4 of
4 matches in All Departments
The symposium "Sleepers, Moles, and Martyrs: Secret
Identifications, Societal Integration, and the Differing Meanings
of Freedom" held in Reinhausen, 2002, formed the basis of this
publication. Occasioned by the social, political and mass media
discourses after the bombings of New York's World Trade Center on
September 11, 2001, an interdisciplinary group of scholars came
together to explore the connotations and implications of the term
"sleeper". The biographies of terrorist perpetrators are but one of
many permutations of sleeper-like phenomena in late modern
polities. Clandestine operatives of the state are sleepers, and
both willing and unwilling victims of terrorism are discursively
transformed from sleepers into martyrs. Starting with analyses of
the discourses about sleepers in Part I-their historical
antecedents, narrative employment, and semantic
differentiation-Part II turns to the hidden or unspoken of aspects
of the state, the challenge of fundamentalist terrorism to the
modern political project and the tensions between neighbourly
discourse, public display and the state. Part III juxtaposes
changing depictions of Shiite martyrdom with the violence done to
the term "martyr" within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Part
IV, cultural secrets encoded in memorials and public silences in
academic discourse are addressed. The different cases assembled
offer comparative materials and perspectives from the USA, France,
the Netherlands, Pakistan, Spain, Iran, Israel, Istria and Sweden.
The symposium 'Sleepers, Moles, and Martyrs: Secret
Identifications, Societal Integration, and the Differing Meanings
of Freedom' held in Reinhausen, 2002, formed the basis of this
issue of Ethnologia Europaea. Occasioned by the social, political
and mass media discourses after the bombings of New York's World
Trade Center on September 11, 2001, an interdisciplinary group of
scholars came together to explore the connotations and implications
of the term 'sleeper'. The biographies of terrorist perpetrators
are but one of many permutations of sleeper-like phenomena in late
modern polities. Clandestine operatives of the state are sleepers,
and both willing and unwilling victims of terrorism are
discursively transformed from sleepers into martyrs. Starting with
analyses of the discourses about sleepers in Part I-their
historical antecedents, narrative emplotment, and semantic
differentiation-Part II turns to the hidden or unspoken of aspects
of the state, the challenge of fundamentalist terrorism to the
modern political project and the tensions between neighbourly
discourse, public display and the state. Part III juxtaposes
changing depictions of Shiite martyrdom with the violence done to
the term 'martyr' within the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. In Part
IV, cultural secrets encoded in memorials and public silences in
academic discourse are addressed. The different cases assembled
offer comparative materials and perspectives from the USA, France,
the Netherlands, Pakistan, Spain, Iran, Israel, Istria and Sweden.
"I envisioned her on her mission of escape as flying a plane to an
unknown destination (happiness), realizing she was not going to get
there (plan crumbling), but not having enough fuel to go back (past
the point of no return), and just keep flying (into oblivion), and
all the while denying there was anything wrong with the course she
was on."
Is the performance of western democracies in decline? Which
countries show the best performance? Do institutions matter for
political performance? This book offers a comprehensive analysis of
twenty-one OECD countries by systematically examining all major
domestic policy areas - domestic security policy, economic policy,
social policy, and environmental policy - and using outcome
indicators. The quality of democracy is assessed both at the level
of the four policy areas and at a general level encompassing all
policy areas. The question of trade-offs between policy areas is
studied in an unprecedented way and, for the first time, national
types of policy patterns are identified. The findings of this book
confront widely-held assumptions about the performance of
democracies. Western democracies as a whole did not converge at a
lower level of performance, and trade-offs between different policy
areas did not increase. The question 'do institutions matter?' can
only partially be answered in the affirmative. Political
institutions do matter, but formal and informal institutions cause
different effects and both matter only sometimes and to a limited
degree. The Performance of Democracies is a book with significant
theoretical implications. It stresses that the effect of
institutions is more complicated than most of the
neo-institutionalist approaches assume. No clear predictions can be
made on the basis of institutional factors. Consequently, it does
not support the established assertion that fundamental political
problems can simply be resolved through institutional reforms of
liberal democracies. Comparative Politics os a series for students
and teachers of political science that deals with contemporary
government and politics. The General Editors are Max Kaase,
Professor of Political Science, Vice President and Dean, School of
Humanities and Social Science, International University Bremen,
Germany; and Kenneth Newton, Professor of Comparitive Politics,
University of Southampton. The series is produced in association
with the European Consortium for Political Research.
|
|