A growing body of literature studies how expert practices constitute issues such as climate change, migration, or public health as international objects of expertise. The article contributes to this research agenda by highlighting the role of digital visual technologies and infrastructures in the constitution and governance of these international objects. It develops the concept of visual objects and uses it to trace and explain the emergence of a new technological initiative conducted by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the EU: the vision of a ‘digital twin Earth’ (DTE). The idea behind the DTE is to combine various technologies, including satellite Earth observation, advanced computer models, and AI, to build a digital replica of our planet and thereby govern risks emanating from environmental changes and other global challenges. The article provides a first analysis of the international politics of the DTE. It shows how the visual object of the DTE functions as an attractor of heterogeneous actors and practices involved in the European space policy field thereby temporarily stabilizing this complex assemblage. Finally, it traces how the DTE and its machinic ways of seeing enact the Earth not only as an object of knowledge but also as one of experimentation and intervention.
{"title":"When the World Is an Object: On the Governmental Promise of a Digital Twin Earth","authors":"Delf Rothe","doi":"10.1093/ips/olae022","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae022","url":null,"abstract":"A growing body of literature studies how expert practices constitute issues such as climate change, migration, or public health as international objects of expertise. The article contributes to this research agenda by highlighting the role of digital visual technologies and infrastructures in the constitution and governance of these international objects. It develops the concept of visual objects and uses it to trace and explain the emergence of a new technological initiative conducted by the European Space Agency (ESA) and the EU: the vision of a ‘digital twin Earth’ (DTE). The idea behind the DTE is to combine various technologies, including satellite Earth observation, advanced computer models, and AI, to build a digital replica of our planet and thereby govern risks emanating from environmental changes and other global challenges. The article provides a first analysis of the international politics of the DTE. It shows how the visual object of the DTE functions as an attractor of heterogeneous actors and practices involved in the European space policy field thereby temporarily stabilizing this complex assemblage. Finally, it traces how the DTE and its machinic ways of seeing enact the Earth not only as an object of knowledge but also as one of experimentation and intervention.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-06-27","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141462182","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
What can we learn about diplomacy by studying its practice through the body of an apprentice? Drawing on the works of Loïc Wacquant, this article argues that to understand the making of background dispositions, tacit rules, and situated know-how in international politics’ diverse fields of practice, researchers ought to consider apprenticeship as a concept and a methodological device. This argument is based on ethnographic observations from the author’s internship at the Delegation of Denmark to the OECD. As a concept, apprenticeship cultivates a sensitivity to the embodied dynamics at play in acquiring habitus. An apprenticeship is structured as a participatory and corporeal process of socialization through which an aspirant acquires or fails to acquire a prospective identity within a given field of practice. Methodologically, studying practices of initiation through the body of an apprentice enables scholars to access tacit knowledge transmissions while recognizing that such knowledge operates beneath discursive representation and logical reasoning. In advancing this argument, the article foregrounds the figure of the apprentice and the experience of apprenticeship as conduits for gaining insights into social learning in diplomacy, other fields of practice, and the broader domain of socialization in International Relations.
{"title":"Apprenticeship in Diplomacy, or How I Became Another Replaceable Intern at the OECD","authors":"Frederik Carl Windfeld","doi":"10.1093/ips/olae018","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae018","url":null,"abstract":"What can we learn about diplomacy by studying its practice through the body of an apprentice? Drawing on the works of Loïc Wacquant, this article argues that to understand the making of background dispositions, tacit rules, and situated know-how in international politics’ diverse fields of practice, researchers ought to consider apprenticeship as a concept and a methodological device. This argument is based on ethnographic observations from the author’s internship at the Delegation of Denmark to the OECD. As a concept, apprenticeship cultivates a sensitivity to the embodied dynamics at play in acquiring habitus. An apprenticeship is structured as a participatory and corporeal process of socialization through which an aspirant acquires or fails to acquire a prospective identity within a given field of practice. Methodologically, studying practices of initiation through the body of an apprentice enables scholars to access tacit knowledge transmissions while recognizing that such knowledge operates beneath discursive representation and logical reasoning. In advancing this argument, the article foregrounds the figure of the apprentice and the experience of apprenticeship as conduits for gaining insights into social learning in diplomacy, other fields of practice, and the broader domain of socialization in International Relations.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141448673","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This paper analyses the extent to which zero-carbon energy transitions are a securitized phenomenon in selected countries and what that means for sustainability transitions more broadly. Without taking a normative stance on securitization, we focus on the ways in which security is constructed through in-depth interviews with experts in the energy, security, and defense sectors in Estonia, Finland, and Norway. We use a securitization framework to study how securitization as a process is discussed by identifying “securitization moves.” The analysis is also connected to the literature on sustainability transitions: the zero-carbon energy transition can be depicted as a large-scale socio-technical transition related to environmental sustainability. Our findings suggest that energy transitions are securitized to an extent because we were able to detect all “securitization moves” in the interview data. The interviews showed different ways in which security is interpreted and what is achieved by its construction in specific contexts. For example, the identified threats were connected to preserving sovereignty in Estonia, the inability to openly discuss threats related to energy transitions created new concerns in Finland, and the connections between the two sectors were urgently and inescapably addressed in Norway only after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.
{"title":"Securitization of Energy Transitions in Estonia, Finland and Norway","authors":"Marja Helena Sivonen, Paula Kivimaa","doi":"10.1093/ips/olae017","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae017","url":null,"abstract":"This paper analyses the extent to which zero-carbon energy transitions are a securitized phenomenon in selected countries and what that means for sustainability transitions more broadly. Without taking a normative stance on securitization, we focus on the ways in which security is constructed through in-depth interviews with experts in the energy, security, and defense sectors in Estonia, Finland, and Norway. We use a securitization framework to study how securitization as a process is discussed by identifying “securitization moves.” The analysis is also connected to the literature on sustainability transitions: the zero-carbon energy transition can be depicted as a large-scale socio-technical transition related to environmental sustainability. Our findings suggest that energy transitions are securitized to an extent because we were able to detect all “securitization moves” in the interview data. The interviews showed different ways in which security is interpreted and what is achieved by its construction in specific contexts. For example, the identified threats were connected to preserving sovereignty in Estonia, the inability to openly discuss threats related to energy transitions created new concerns in Finland, and the connections between the two sectors were urgently and inescapably addressed in Norway only after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141448562","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
In an apparent departure from responses to the so-called 2015 “migration” crisis, Ukrainians displaced by the war have been welcomed relatively unbureaucratically by European states. Yet, despite this, they are positioned as a problem to be solved, a disruption to the normal order and state system. This article asks what this problematization of “migrants” reveals about the dominant system of thought that assigns people to place and how it might it be possible to think beyond its limits. It starts by demonstrating that the “security-space” imaginary both excludes and relies upon highly problematic, concealed assumptions about time and race. It shows how questions of time and race continually haunt and disrupt the seemingly coherent and indomitable “security-space” way of thinking. Following a strategy of deconstruction, the article arrives at the counter-intuitive conclusion that this dominant problematization of migration is temporal and structured by a relation to the future. Building on existing critical literature produced by scholars of Geopolitics, International Relations, and International Political Sociology, it offers an alternative imaginary, “time-race,” which opens up new ground for reimagining borders and migration to overcome reproducing the never-ending cycle of “migration crises,” to which there is apparently no alternative.
{"title":"From Security-Space to Time-Race: Reimagining Borders and Migration in Global Politics","authors":"Maja Zehfuss, Nick Vaughan-Williams","doi":"10.1093/ips/olae019","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae019","url":null,"abstract":"In an apparent departure from responses to the so-called 2015 “migration” crisis, Ukrainians displaced by the war have been welcomed relatively unbureaucratically by European states. Yet, despite this, they are positioned as a problem to be solved, a disruption to the normal order and state system. This article asks what this problematization of “migrants” reveals about the dominant system of thought that assigns people to place and how it might it be possible to think beyond its limits. It starts by demonstrating that the “security-space” imaginary both excludes and relies upon highly problematic, concealed assumptions about time and race. It shows how questions of time and race continually haunt and disrupt the seemingly coherent and indomitable “security-space” way of thinking. Following a strategy of deconstruction, the article arrives at the counter-intuitive conclusion that this dominant problematization of migration is temporal and structured by a relation to the future. Building on existing critical literature produced by scholars of Geopolitics, International Relations, and International Political Sociology, it offers an alternative imaginary, “time-race,” which opens up new ground for reimagining borders and migration to overcome reproducing the never-ending cycle of “migration crises,” to which there is apparently no alternative.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-06-22","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141448575","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This article makes a critical contribution to the study of digital reactionary movements by tracing the resonant circulation of “the cuck” memes across various levels of racialized and gendered subjectivity. It argues that the cuck meme resonates through composing an affective narrative of deferred and stolen enjoyment at the intersection of personal, social, and international politics. It follows the meme’s digital movements across pornographic anxieties around the sexual prowess of the Black other (the personal), the Gamergate events of 2014 and its politics of geek masculine injury (the social), and the perceived threat of immigration to the enjoyment-space designated as the nation (the international). Throughout, the paper makes three contributions. First, it theorizes the structuring role played by enjoyment as a political factor in historically shaping political subjectivity. Second, it shows how this political factor animates the transnational politics of contemporary reactionary movements and how they affectively and discursively perceive their various political resentments through narratives of enjoyment. Third, it demonstrates how memes as specific technical-aesthetic products allow the common resonance and articulation of these various resentments to shape a site of rectification for an enjoyment that is felt to be lost.
{"title":"Cucktales: Race, Sex, and Enjoyment in the Reactionary Memescape","authors":"Uygar Baspehlivan","doi":"10.1093/ips/olae026","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae026","url":null,"abstract":"This article makes a critical contribution to the study of digital reactionary movements by tracing the resonant circulation of “the cuck” memes across various levels of racialized and gendered subjectivity. It argues that the cuck meme resonates through composing an affective narrative of deferred and stolen enjoyment at the intersection of personal, social, and international politics. It follows the meme’s digital movements across pornographic anxieties around the sexual prowess of the Black other (the personal), the Gamergate events of 2014 and its politics of geek masculine injury (the social), and the perceived threat of immigration to the enjoyment-space designated as the nation (the international). Throughout, the paper makes three contributions. First, it theorizes the structuring role played by enjoyment as a political factor in historically shaping political subjectivity. Second, it shows how this political factor animates the transnational politics of contemporary reactionary movements and how they affectively and discursively perceive their various political resentments through narratives of enjoyment. Third, it demonstrates how memes as specific technical-aesthetic products allow the common resonance and articulation of these various resentments to shape a site of rectification for an enjoyment that is felt to be lost.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141448553","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience (2003–2020) was an artistic performance of hypervisibility. Initiated in response to being misidentified as a terrorist, preemptively arrested, and interrogated by the FBI, the artist created a comprehensive life log documenting his everyday life for all to see. Despite transformations to the surveillance environment, the performance raised a question that remains relevant today: How can ubiquitous surveillance be resisted when the technologies of capture and control are pervasive, but being visible is normalized? I argue that through his performance of countervisual aesthetics, Elahi claimed the right to existence and reassessed the need for the collective refusal of surveillance. I make two contributions to the theorization of aesthetic resistance. First, against the tendency to romanticize resistance, I reaffirm the impossibility of evasion. Surveillance is ubiquitous in the current datafied society, and being under surveillance generates vulnerability. Yet it is from this located, contingent position that we need to theorize resistance. Second, by theorizing how aesthetic performance mobilizes its public, I demonstrate that resistance to surveillance needs to move beyond the individualism of privacy. Through rereading Tracking Transience, I show how visibility enables collective resistance to the normalization of surveillance control and hierarchies.
Hasan Elahi 的《Tracking Transience》（2003-2020 年）是一场超可见性的艺术表演。由于被误认为是恐怖分子，遭到先发制人的逮捕和联邦调查局的审讯，这位艺术家创建了一个全面的生活日志，记录他的日常生活，让所有人都能看到。尽管监控环境发生了变化，但这场表演提出了一个至今仍具有现实意义的问题：当捕捉和控制的技术无处不在，而被看见却被正常化时，如何抵制无处不在的监控？我认为，通过他的反视觉美学表演，埃拉希主张了存在的权利，并重新评估了集体拒绝监控的必要性。我对美学抵抗的理论化做出了两点贡献。首先，针对将抵抗浪漫化的倾向，我重申了逃避的不可能性。在当前数据化的社会中，监控无处不在，被监控会产生脆弱性。然而，我们正是需要从这种定位的、偶然的立场出发，将抵抗理论化。其次，通过对美学表演如何动员公众的理论研究，我证明了抵制监控需要超越隐私的个人主义。通过重读《追踪短暂》（Tracking Transience），我展示了可见性是如何使集体抵抗监控和等级制度正常化的。
{"title":"Individual Vulnerability and Collective Resistance Under Surveillance: Claiming the Right to Existence against Discriminatory Suspicion","authors":"Simon Hogue","doi":"10.1093/ips/olae023","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae023","url":null,"abstract":"Hasan Elahi’s Tracking Transience (2003–2020) was an artistic performance of hypervisibility. Initiated in response to being misidentified as a terrorist, preemptively arrested, and interrogated by the FBI, the artist created a comprehensive life log documenting his everyday life for all to see. Despite transformations to the surveillance environment, the performance raised a question that remains relevant today: How can ubiquitous surveillance be resisted when the technologies of capture and control are pervasive, but being visible is normalized? I argue that through his performance of countervisual aesthetics, Elahi claimed the right to existence and reassessed the need for the collective refusal of surveillance. I make two contributions to the theorization of aesthetic resistance. First, against the tendency to romanticize resistance, I reaffirm the impossibility of evasion. Surveillance is ubiquitous in the current datafied society, and being under surveillance generates vulnerability. Yet it is from this located, contingent position that we need to theorize resistance. Second, by theorizing how aesthetic performance mobilizes its public, I demonstrate that resistance to surveillance needs to move beyond the individualism of privacy. Through rereading Tracking Transience, I show how visibility enables collective resistance to the normalization of surveillance control and hierarchies.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-06-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141448558","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
This study questions to what extent state agents invest efforts in building interpersonal relations with their counterparts. It is based on data collected during two years of ethnographic fieldwork at the Israeli president’s residence, where we observed credential ceremonies involving ambassadors from twenty-three states and interviewed the president’s advisors. We consider the credential ceremony an extreme case study regulated by highly formalized protocol, including the strictest guidelines existing in the world of diplomacy. We assume that if relation-building between statespersons takes place in the most unexpected spaces of international politics, we can detect it in all sites of diplomacy. Adopting a relational practice approach, we identified two methods of positive signaling for relationship building: preplanned by the organizers “from above,” directed at the individual-as-state-representative, and conveyed by participants “from below,” targeting the individual-as-guest/host. We conclude by discussing the implications of the prevalence of interpersonal relation-building in international politics, the role of diplomatic protocols as a communicative resource that affects the diplomatic environment, and how the concept of affordances provides a fresh look at one of the most fundamental debates in the field of IR: the relationship between agency and structure.
{"title":"Communicating through Protocols: The Case of Diplomatic Credential Ceremonies","authors":"Roni Berkowitz, Gadi Heimann, Zohar Kampf","doi":"10.1093/ips/olae013","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae013","url":null,"abstract":"This study questions to what extent state agents invest efforts in building interpersonal relations with their counterparts. It is based on data collected during two years of ethnographic fieldwork at the Israeli president’s residence, where we observed credential ceremonies involving ambassadors from twenty-three states and interviewed the president’s advisors. We consider the credential ceremony an extreme case study regulated by highly formalized protocol, including the strictest guidelines existing in the world of diplomacy. We assume that if relation-building between statespersons takes place in the most unexpected spaces of international politics, we can detect it in all sites of diplomacy. Adopting a relational practice approach, we identified two methods of positive signaling for relationship building: preplanned by the organizers “from above,” directed at the individual-as-state-representative, and conveyed by participants “from below,” targeting the individual-as-guest/host. We conclude by discussing the implications of the prevalence of interpersonal relation-building in international politics, the role of diplomatic protocols as a communicative resource that affects the diplomatic environment, and how the concept of affordances provides a fresh look at one of the most fundamental debates in the field of IR: the relationship between agency and structure.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-06-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141333767","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
The concept of agency has long been a focal point of research in the social sciences. While traditional discussions primarily centered on human agency, recent scholarship has increasingly turned its attention to agency beyond the human realm. This paper introduces a framework for comprehending the agency of spiritual beings within complex pluriversal sociopolitical systems. It contends that exploring the agency of spiritual beings challenges established binary distinctions and acknowledges their inherent complexities. Drawing from a relational understanding of animacy, this framework reveals that the agency of spiritual beings cannot be simply equated with gods or fixed other-than-human agencies. Instead, it enriches our understanding of agency by highlighting how diverse agencies shape and influence social interactions. The paper compares Jane Bennett’s “thing power” and social assemblages to the Andean concepts of camaq (creating animating force) and Ajayu (spirit). By doing so, it uncovers both tensions and connections between these approaches, underscoring the need for pluriversal methodologies in analyzing pluriversal societies. In conclusion, the paper reflects on the implications of re-enchantment through animacy and its potential to provide fresh insights into understanding international phenomena.
{"title":"Animacy and the Agency of Spiritual Beings in Pluriversal Societies","authors":"Amaya Querejazu","doi":"10.1093/ips/olae012","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae012","url":null,"abstract":"The concept of agency has long been a focal point of research in the social sciences. While traditional discussions primarily centered on human agency, recent scholarship has increasingly turned its attention to agency beyond the human realm. This paper introduces a framework for comprehending the agency of spiritual beings within complex pluriversal sociopolitical systems. It contends that exploring the agency of spiritual beings challenges established binary distinctions and acknowledges their inherent complexities. Drawing from a relational understanding of animacy, this framework reveals that the agency of spiritual beings cannot be simply equated with gods or fixed other-than-human agencies. Instead, it enriches our understanding of agency by highlighting how diverse agencies shape and influence social interactions. The paper compares Jane Bennett’s “thing power” and social assemblages to the Andean concepts of camaq (creating animating force) and Ajayu (spirit). By doing so, it uncovers both tensions and connections between these approaches, underscoring the need for pluriversal methodologies in analyzing pluriversal societies. In conclusion, the paper reflects on the implications of re-enchantment through animacy and its potential to provide fresh insights into understanding international phenomena.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141185221","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Robert Topinka, Cassian Osborne-Carey, Alan Finlayson
Research into online forms of far-right, alt-right, populist, and supremacist politics has raised questions about the extent to which social media enables or constitutes extremist affects and ideologies. Building on this research and through a case study of how a pro-Trump community on Reddit made sense of news events and sought to contest their representation, this paper explores the relationship between games and politics, arguing that digital platforms encourage people to apprehend, interpret, and contest political ideas and information as if engaged in a kind of videogame. We show how the group sought to manipulate platform affordances, waging a kind of Info War rooted in an understanding of politics as a pure space of conflict. We show how social media orients people to politics, phenomenologically, through the logics, structures and narratives of online games and argue that this affects not only online behaviors but more general apprehensions of politics.
{"title":"Playing with the News on Reddit: The Politics Game on r/The_Donald","authors":"Robert Topinka, Cassian Osborne-Carey, Alan Finlayson","doi":"10.1093/ips/olae015","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae015","url":null,"abstract":"Research into online forms of far-right, alt-right, populist, and supremacist politics has raised questions about the extent to which social media enables or constitutes extremist affects and ideologies. Building on this research and through a case study of how a pro-Trump community on Reddit made sense of news events and sought to contest their representation, this paper explores the relationship between games and politics, arguing that digital platforms encourage people to apprehend, interpret, and contest political ideas and information as if engaged in a kind of videogame. We show how the group sought to manipulate platform affordances, waging a kind of Info War rooted in an understanding of politics as a pure space of conflict. We show how social media orients people to politics, phenomenologically, through the logics, structures and narratives of online games and argue that this affects not only online behaviors but more general apprehensions of politics.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141182328","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Despite growing interest in studying counter-revolution in Egypt, scholars have neglected the ways in which the regulation of normativity governs conduct and discourages resistance. This article argues that discourses of normativity in Egypt have produced counter-revolutionary subjectivities, without whom the counter-revolution could not have succeeded. These subjectivities are constructed through the mobilization of normal/deviant binary logics, which are encapsulated in the normative figure of the honorable citizen. I suggest that the honorable citizen—which informs how best to be Egyptian—is a contradictory figure that is made possible by the ongoing interaction between (post)colonial and neoliberal governing rationalities. By employing Foucault’s work on governmentality, and Cynthia Weber’s queer analysis of figuration, I conceptualize normal/deviant logics through what I call counter-revolutionary governmentality (CRG). CRG reduces the originality of Egyptian resistance by associating it with the desire to be Westernized and constructs revolutionary aspirations as a threat to sovereignty. I argue that figurations of normative “Egyptianness” fortify Egypt’s “backwardness” in contemporary international orderings of progressive versus backward states and maintain international hierarchies that privilege Western modes of socio-economic and political organization. Such maintenance is not only the work of the global North but is also reproduced in the South.
{"title":"How Best to Be Egyptian? The “Honorable Citizen” and the Making of the Counter-revolutionary Subject","authors":"Amira Abdelhamid","doi":"10.1093/ips/olae014","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1093/ips/olae014","url":null,"abstract":"Despite growing interest in studying counter-revolution in Egypt, scholars have neglected the ways in which the regulation of normativity governs conduct and discourages resistance. This article argues that discourses of normativity in Egypt have produced counter-revolutionary subjectivities, without whom the counter-revolution could not have succeeded. These subjectivities are constructed through the mobilization of normal/deviant binary logics, which are encapsulated in the normative figure of the honorable citizen. I suggest that the honorable citizen—which informs how best to be Egyptian—is a contradictory figure that is made possible by the ongoing interaction between (post)colonial and neoliberal governing rationalities. By employing Foucault’s work on governmentality, and Cynthia Weber’s queer analysis of figuration, I conceptualize normal/deviant logics through what I call counter-revolutionary governmentality (CRG). CRG reduces the originality of Egyptian resistance by associating it with the desire to be Westernized and constructs revolutionary aspirations as a threat to sovereignty. I argue that figurations of normative “Egyptianness” fortify Egypt’s “backwardness” in contemporary international orderings of progressive versus backward states and maintain international hierarchies that privilege Western modes of socio-economic and political organization. Such maintenance is not only the work of the global North but is also reproduced in the South.","PeriodicalId":47361,"journal":{"name":"International Political Sociology","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.4,"publicationDate":"2024-05-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141182322","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":2,"RegionCategory":"社会学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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