Many prominent writers on political ethics suggest that refusing to employ violence and force when required is a mark of political irresponsibility given the specific demands and obligations of holding high political office. Such judgements fuel the theory of dirty hands, which famously holds that admirable politicians will sometimes have to commit or commission grave moral wrongdoing. Drawing on Bernard Williams's discussion of the audience of political philosophy, I suggest that the normative, action-guiding claims that the theory of dirty hands is standardly said to deliver are, ironically, likely to encourage dangerous forms of political irresponsibility. On the one hand, if the theory is intended to guide the action of high-ranking politicians, it is highly unclear that the responsible politician would accede to the suggestion that they must often act in ways that violate ordinary moral requirements which prohibit violent acts. On the other hand, if the theory is intended to improve the political judgements that citizens make about high-ranking politicians, it conflicts with a series of underlying political attitudes that responsible citizens will display.
The article examines lawful behavior as a key factor ensuring the stability, security, and integrity of the state. The author argues that lawful behavior is not only a result of legal norms but also a complex socio-economic phenomenon shaping an atmosphere of legality, order, and public trust. The theoretical section outlines major approaches to defining lawful behavior in legal scholarship, analyzes its functions, and highlights the role of legal, social, and institutional mechanisms that promote compliance with the law. Special attention is given to the importance of lawful behavior for strengthening the rule of law and enhancing citizens’ trust in state institutions. Empirical findings demonstrate a strong correlation between the level of lawful behavior within society and the effectiveness of the national security system, which includes law-enforcement bodies, the judiciary, and state institutions responsible for implementing security policy. The study explores different types of offenses resulting from violations of lawful behavior and discusses mechanisms for their prevention through legislative improvements, the development of legal education, and the strengthening of civil society institutions. The practical section emphasizes the role of education, media, and public communication in fostering legal awareness. The author stresses the need for an integrated approach combining effective legal regulation with social incentives that promote law-abiding behavior. Examples from international practice illustrate the success of such measures in enhancing state resilience and security. The conclusions emphasize that lawful behavior should be viewed not only as compliance with legal norms but also as an essential social phenomenon that contributes to democratic development, increases public trust, and reinforces national security. It represents a crucial component of social capital, ensuring the effectiveness and stability of state institutions.
Education (General), Theory and practice of education
In recent years, the name Alfred Russel Wallace, the 19th-century British naturalist who co-conceptualized the theory of natural selection and authored the book documenting species diversity throughout Indonesia, titled The Malay Archipelago (1859), has regained significance in the place where he did his research: Ternate, North Maluku (the Moluccas), Eastern Indonesia. His legacy and icon are being reclaimed by local communities, inserting themselves as authors of the region’s future, one that is centered on multispecies stewardship. Based on visual anthropology ethnographic fieldwork spanning over 15 months since the beginning of 2021, the materials presented in this article explore the perspectives of local cultural activists/practitioners in making visible their concerns, advocating for the rich multispecies existence on their island acknowledged globally since Wallace. Working with a team of university students, photography clubs, journalists, and heritage and environmental activists based in Ternate, I engage with everyday socio-cultural and visual media practices that treat images as modes of address/redress mobilizing affective engagement and political effects (Spyer & Steedly, 2013), contesting possible tropical futurities. Discussing three sites of image-making—a mural, wildlife photography, and drone-afforded reportage—I argue that these practices play a crucial role in intervening in and shaping how this tropical region is imagined at various scales, globally and nationally. Oscillating between utopian and dystopian scenarios, the images produced make a demand for a more just and livable future across species.
The purpose of this article is to explore the theoretical foundations and methodological approaches of leading academic schools in the field of international relations to gain a deeper understanding of Ukrainian-Polish relations in the context of the European Union's enlargement policy. Special emphasis is placed on the relevance of realist and liberal theories in analyzing the dynamics of this bilateral interaction. The main objectives of the study include a systematic analysis of key theoretical concepts used to examine Ukrainian-Polish cooperation within the framework of European integration, identification of the role of the EU as a driver of stability, democratization, and the diffusion of European values in Ukraine, and assessment of the instruments through which Poland and the European Union support democratic transformations in Ukraine, particularly within the framework of the “Eastern Dimension” initiative. The study applies methods of theoretical analysis, comparative research, interpretation, and systems thinking to investigate the evolution and current state of Ukrainian-Polish relations against the backdrop of EU enlargement. An integrative approach is also employed to synthesize various international relations theories for a more comprehensive understanding of the issue. Particular attention is paid to the realist school, which emphasizes national interest and state security, as well as to neorealism, which frames the international system as a structural constraint or enabler of state behavior. Liberal theories, such as liberal intergovernmentalism and the theory of democratic peace, are also considered essential tools for interpreting the process of European integration.
Within these theoretical frameworks, the article explores how Poland and Ukraine interact with international organizations, especially the EU, and investigates the mechanisms that shape their bilateral relations in the context of integration. The analysis also covers key aspects of EU enlargement, highlighting its dual function: first, as a mechanism for promoting stability through reforms in neighboring states; second, as a means of projecting European norms and values onto new geopolitical areas. Scholars increasingly emphasize the EU’s role as a normative power that influences partner countries through a strategy of conditionality, often referred to as the “carrot and stick” approach. The article provides a detailed characterization of the “Eastern Dimension” initiative, originally advanced by Poland, and examines its strategic significance for fostering democratic change in Eastern Europe. Finally, the research focuses on the EU's democracy promotion instruments – such as political dialogue, financial assistance, and international support – as key tools for ensuring stability and advancing development in countries striving for closer integration with the European community.
History (General) and history of Europe, Political science
The power of individual EU Member States has been changing over the past decades as a result of revisions to the voting systems and the enlargements of the European Union. The present article analyses the development of the voting power of individual Member States in the Council of the European Union before and after the withdrawal of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland from the European Union. We use the calculation of the standardized Banzhaf power index to calculate the legislative power of the Member States. The calculations recorded in the table point to changes in the weights of national votes caused by Brexit. The article pays special attention to the Visegrad Group, which we define within the European Union as an informal group consisting of four Central European states - the Czech Republic, Hungary, Poland, and the Slovak Republic. The results indicate a significant growth of the voting power in Poland and more moderate growth in the other three Visegrad Group countries which contributes to the shift in the voting equilibrium within the ordinary legislative procedure of the European Union.
Despite widespread recognition of an emergent politics of data in our midst, we strikingly lack a political theory of data. We readily acknowledge the presence of data across our political lives, but we often do not know how to conceptualize the politics of all those data points—the forms of power they constitute and the kinds of political subjects they implicate. Recent work in numerous academic disciplines is evidence of the first steps toward a political theory of data. This article maps some limits of this emergent literature with an eye to enriching its theoretical range. The literature on data politics, both within political theory and elsewhere, has thus far focused almost exclusively on the algorithm. This article locates a further dimension of data politics in the work of formatting technology or, more simply, formats. Formats are simultaneously conceptual and technical in the ways they define what can even count as data, and by extension who can count as data and how they can count. A focus on formats is of theoretical value because it provides a bridge between work on the conceptual contours of categories and the technology-centric literature on algorithms that tends to ignore the more conceptual dimensions of data technology. The political insight enabled by format theory is shown in the context of an extended interrogation of the politics of racialized redlining.
تهدف الدراسة إلى تقصي دور التجارة الخارجية في إطار تحفيز النمو الاقتصادي، فقد قام الباحث بعرض تطور مؤشرات الاقتصاد السوري على مستوى النمو الاقتصادي، ومؤشرات التجارة الخارجية خلال فترة الأزمة الممتدة بين 2010 – 2017، وقد خلصت الدراسة إلى مجموعة من النتائج كان أهمها: أن للتجارة الخارجية دوراً محورياً في تحقيق النمو والتوازن الاقتصادي خلال فترة الأزمة، كما أن أنه لا توجد اختلافات بين الواقع الحالي والمطلوب لناحية المسارات التي تم اتخاذها في إطار رسم سياسات التجارة الخارجية وتنفيذها، فمسارات التجارة الخارجية بقيت قاصرة لناحية التوسع في صافي الصادرات، ولاسيما في ظل توسع الهوة لصالح المستوردات مع الجهود في ضغط فاتورة الاستيراد وزيادة نسبة تغطية الصادرات خلال الأعوام 2014 و 2015 و2016.
This research is studying about novel Faraj. The novel contains an overview of the silencing the student movement’s resistance during the capitalist government. This resistance rises due to the cooperation policy between Egypt and the U.S, which impact on intervention of the U.S in Egypt economic and political affairs. The Egyptian students begin, intensively, to discuss these issues, write numerous articles about resistance and criticism of the government, and perform various protests in Cairo. The method of data collecting data in this research consist of two phases, determines the research object and restriction on research problems that focused on an overview of events related to silencing the student movement. The method of data processing consists of determining the relevant theory to answer the problem, searching for references that support the research topic, analyzing the data in accordance with the related theory. The Result of this research indicates the silencing carried out against the anti-capitalist student movement in Egypt. The silencing was conducted through the destruction of the wall magazine, which publish numerous articles about resistance and criticism of the government, arrest, and torture. It happened because of the different interests between the government and the students.
Purpose: Worldwide, there have been consistently high or even rising incidences of diagnosed mental disorders and increasing mental healthcare service utilization over the last decades, causing a growing burden for healthcare systems and societies. While more individuals than ever are being diagnosed and treated as mentally ill, psychiatric knowledge, and practices affect the lives of a rising number of people, gain importance in society as a whole and shape more and more areas of life. This process can be described as the progressing psychiatrization of society.Methods: This article is a conceptual paper, focusing on theoretical considerations and theory development. As a starting point for further research, we suggest a basic model of psychiatrization, taking into account its main sub-processes as well as its major top-down and bottom-up drivers.Results: Psychiatrization is highly complex, diverse, and global. It involves various protagonists and its effects are potentially harmful to individuals, to societies and to public healthcare. To better understand, prevent or manage its negative aspects, there is a need for transdisciplinary research, that empirically assesses causes, mechanisms, and effects of psychiatrization.Conclusion: Although psychiatrization has highly ambivalent effects, its relevance mainly derives from its risks: While individuals with minor disturbances of well-being might be subjected to overdiagnosis and overtreatment, psychiatrization could also result in undermining mental healthcare provision for the most severely ill by promoting the adaption of services to the needs and desires of the rather mild cases. On a societal level, psychiatrization might boost medical interventions which incite individual coping with social problems, instead of encouraging long-term political solutions.
The purpose of this article is to contribute to the relatively scarce scholarly literature regarding the democratisation of the intelligence sector in post-communist Europe, with a focus on the experience and lessons that can be learned from the case of Romania. Essentially, the article addresses the impact of external pressure (derived from international cooperation, both at the national and agency level) on the reforms undertaken by Romania after 1989 and in preparation for its accession to NATO and the EU. I build upon literature in intelligence studies and civil-military relations and I analyse the two waves of legislative and institutional changes reflected in official documents, legislation, and public interviews by prominent members of the intelligence community. I also highlight the importance as well as the limits of international cooperation of Romanian agencies with their Western counterparts (NATO/EU institutions as well as agencies in member states) as a factor of democratization.
China is the first country to have faced an extensive contagion of Covid-19, and the response it has given, in terms of prevention and control measures, has been effective in eradicating the virus, even though not completely. Those measures were based on an extensive and widespread use of technologies. The strategies adopted were not the result of improvisation: the social, cultural and technological structures were already in place well before the epidemic took place. The present contribution draws upon the anecdotal experience of one of the two authors, who lives in China and has been there during the epidemic, in light of the news and the media theory. Though the Chinese approach was indeed successful, we suggest that it is doubtful that such a model can be exported to countries with different history, culture and socio-political background.
Among the latest texts sended to the press by Voltaire, the Histoire de l’établissement du Christianisme (1776) offers the reader the best possible synthesis of his thoughts on religion. Written in a style as clear and fast as it is dense and passionate, this short text traces all the themes that had fueled the reflection of the French philosopher for more than half a century: the humble origins of Christianity, the close ties of Jesus and his first disciples with the Jewish religion, the importance of the role played by Paul of Tarsus in the elaboration of Christian doctrine, the compromises of the early Church with the Roman imperial power, up to the triumph under Constantine. But Voltaire, with his unparalleled talent for controversy, transforms this historical knowledge into a ferocious anticlerical satire; at the same time, he knows how to draw from his erudition a rich repertoire of arguments, historical figures, facts, to plead the cause of that natural religion, called deism, which constituted the negation of every revealed religion and which it seemed to him, still in the late age (he was over eighty), the "most reasonable religion", the only one capable of healing men from the disease of fanaticism and religious intolerance.
In recent years, contemplative practices of meditation have become increasingly mainstream in American culture, part of a phenomenon that scholars call “Buddhist modernism.” Connecting the embodied practice of meditation with the embodied practice of democracy in everyday life, this essay puts the radical democratic theory of Jacques Rancière into conversation with the Zen writings of Shunryu Suzuki and Thomas Merton. I show how meditation can be understood as an aesthetic practice that cultivates modes of experience, perception, thinking, and feeling that further radical democratic projects at the most fundamental level. Reading the landscape of Buddhist modernism to draw out democratic possibilities, we can understand contemplative practices like meditation as a form of political theorizing in a vernacular register. Buddhist modernism works as a practice of everyday life that ordinary users can employ to get through their days with more awareness and attentiveness, to reclaim and reauthorize their experience, and to generate more care and compassion in ways that enable, enact, and extend the project of democracy itself.
This paper investigates the limitations of the ideal of political equality under non-ideal circumstances and focuses specifically on the way in which structurally unjust social contexts endanger individuals’ perception of their own worth. Starting from Rawls’ definition of the social bases of self-respect as a primary good to be fairly distributed, the paper main goal is to provide normative arguments in favor of a power sensitive theory of political agency. A power sensitive theory, in fact, proves to be necessary as it sheds a light over the way in which power relationships affect the very possibility, for some members of the constituency, of fully enjoying the status of political reflexive agents. Against this background, in the paper I defend two main theses. First, I argue that the contemporary debate concerning the implementation of the ideal of equality within liberal democracies has been overlooking the epistemic dimension of the basis of political equality. Second, I claim that specifying the epistemic dimension of political equality has at least two important effects. a. It is important from the perspective of conceptual analysis, as it allows to properly distinguish between the normative job played by moral arguments on the one hand, and the epistemic aspects of political equality on the other hand. b. The specification of the epistemic aspects of political equality has at least on important normative upshot, namely the possibility to show that epistemic forms of injustice are detrimental to the very ideal of political equality as an essential feature of liberal conceptions of democracy.
Store utdanningsreformer kan ha mange uintenderte resultater til tross for at reformenes retorikk synliggjør velgjørende og overbevisende incentiver, samt tilsynelatende god styring og kontroll. I denne artikkelen belyses politikkutforming gjennom implementering av tre store utdanningsreformer: Reform 94, Kompetansereformen og Kunnskapsløftet. Med bakgrunn i teori om sosial konstruksjon, gjennomgang av evalueringsrapporter, aktuelle internasjonale rapporter og relevant forskningslitteratur, identifiseres en rekke gap mellom intensjoner og resultater når det gjelder voksnes læring. Artikkelen diskuterer hvorvidt disse gapene kan forklares ut ifra selve politikkutformingen. Politikkutformingen relatert til de aktuelle reformene er konstruert gjennom en diskursiv praksis der det balanseres mellom ulike hensyn og verdier, som veves sammen med et fragmentert og til dels manglende kunnskapsgrunnlag. Retorikken og de vage formuleringene kamuflerer i tillegg en del kritiske punkter mellom vitenskap og politikk, der vitenskapelige kunnskapsfragmenter konstrueres inn i en evidensbasert politikkutforming.
English abstract
Major political education reforms have many unintended results, despite the fact that the political rhetoric highlights convincing incentives and apparently good governance and control. In this article, policy design is highlighted through the implementation of three major education reforms; Reform 94, The Competence reform and The Knowledge Promotion reform. Based on social construction theory, relevant research, and international and national policy documents, gaps are identified between intentions and outcomes regarding adult learning. The article further discusses whether these gaps can be explained by the actual policy design. The political rhetoric that encircles the three educational reforms includes abstract and vague formulations which contradict some critical points between science and politics, where scientific knowledge fragments are constructed into evidencebased policy design.
Karin Rönnerman, Peter Grootenboer, Christine Edwards-Groves
Abstract The development of Early Childhood Education in Sweden is a central concern for national and local government, and for school districts and preschools. While principals have the responsibility for, and a particular role in, leading education in the preschools, they are somewhat removed from the core work of teachers. In this article, we argue that it is ‘middle leaders’ who are the critical professionals for developing quality in education. The argument is made through examining the leading practices of middle leaders using a practice theory framework. We specifically draw on the theory of practice architectures to explore and understand the arrangements and conditions that enable and constrain the practices of these leaders in their work. The study draws on survey data and recorded professional Learning Dialogues among participants. Responses revealed a number of enabling and constraining conditions relating to particular cultural–discursive, material–economic and social–political conditions that influenced what was possible in their leading practices. Results further show how the practices of middle leaders were crucial in not only developing but sustaining quality in Early Childhood Education as they coordinate between the educational practices within the preschool and across the city district.
This paper analyses economic power, state power and ideological power in the age of Donald Trump with the help of critical theory. It applies the critical theory approaches of thinkers such as Franz Neumann, Theodor W. Adorno and Erich Fromm. It analyses changes of US capitalism that have together with political anxiety and demagoguery brought about the rise of Donald Trump. This article draws attention to the importance of state theory for understanding Trump and the changes of politics that his rule may bring about. It is in this context important to see the complexity of the state, including the dynamic relationship between the state and the economy, the state and citizens, intra-state relations, inter-state relations, semiotic representations of and by the state, and ideology. Trumpism and its potential impacts are theorised along these dimensions. The ideology of Trump (Trumpology) has played an important role not just in his business and brand strategies, but also in his political rise. The (pseudo-)critical mainstream media have helped making Trump and Trumpology by providing platforms for populist spectacles that sell as news and attract audiences. By Trump making news in the media, the media make Trump. An empirical analysis of Trump’s rhetoric and the elimination discourses in his NBC show The Apprentice underpins the analysis of Trumpology. The combination of Trump’s actual power and Trump as spectacle, showman and brand makes his government’s concrete policies fairly unpredictable. An important question that arises is what social scientists’ role should be in the conjuncture that the world is experiencing.
See also the related blog post "How The Frankfurt School Helps Us To Understand Donald Trump’s Twitter Populism"
http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/christian-fuchs1/how-the-frankfurt-school-_b_14156190.html?utm_hp_ref=uk-donald-trump
The German translation of this shorter piece was published in Der Falter 5/2017: 21-23.
Communication. Mass media, Communities. Classes. Races
After the 1989-1990 political changes the aim of the Hungarian University Sports Federation was to follow its traditions of nine decades in foreign policy as well, therefore the organization of international competitions in Hungary was promoted. Up to now the study of the management of these international events was neglected in the Hungarian scholarly literature, although all university sporting events held in Hungary were successful and they were highly appreciated internationally. Taking the example of three university world championships hosted by Hungarian towns, the objective of this paper is to analyze how the management succeeded to solve the major tasks of the organizational work and how some management theories were implemented in its activity. In order to collect data the following methods were used: analysis of documents, in-depth interviews and participant observation. The results are presented on the basis of some theses of the event planning theory, the event management theory, and the situational leadership theory. More specifically, the issues of motives-decisionactions, consistency- coherency- harmony and these of the quantity indicators of event organization in connection of the three underscored world championships organized in Hungary are discussed. In conclusion it is stated that in the management the situation theory had to be taken into consideration the most in the leading process. It was proven that despite preparations lasting often for several years and expanding to every detail of requirements, the flexibility of the management was crucial to search and to find response to every critical situation.