Larson describes the glass rod with a pomegranate finial at the Coming Museum of Glass. The rod is core-formed in opaque blue glass, with an applied spiral-wound opaque yellow trail which has been ...dragged into a festoon pattern. The five "leaves" of the finial appear to have been snipped into five sections and pinched outward. The object has been broken, probably in antiquity, into three pieces of roughly equal length and has been reassembled with modern plaster fills. The top of the rod has a small, narrow cavity, opening about 2-3 cm into the interior. This opening was plugged by a solid teardrop-shaped yellow glass stopper.
Legitimacy is a psychological property of an authority, institution, or social arrangement that leads those connected to it to believe that it is appropriate, proper, and just. Because of legitimacy, ...people feel that they ought to defer to decisions and rules, following them voluntarily out of obligation rather than out of fear of punishment or anticipation of reward. Being legitimate is important to the success of authorities, institutions, and institutional arrangements since it is difficult to exert influence over others based solely upon the possession and use of power. Being able to gain voluntary acquiescence from most people, most of the time, due to their sense of obligation increases effectiveness during periods of scarcity, crisis, and conflict. The concept of legitimacy has a long history within social thought and social psychology, and it has emerged as increasingly important within recent research on the dynamics of political, legal, and social systems.
This article explores the role of tradition in the social world and offers a theory of why some traditions ‘stick’. Building on the ontological insight of ‘as if realism’, I argue that traditions are ...constitutive both of an actor’s beliefs and of their institutional context, and so critical to political analysis. The relative resonance of traditions can be understood as contingent upon power relations and ideational maintenance of traditions by groups of upholders – what could be termed ‘socially contingent’. Traditions help us understand why a person believes what they believe and how a person’s strategic calculations are affected by perceptions of what others believe. They exert a powerful pull to political actors as orientation tools in complex social settings and through the symbols and argumentation attached by those who uphold them. While traditions are contingent upon people’s beliefs, it is ‘as if’ they have a life of their own.
The proliferation of diasporas has expanded the intricate web of political relations on a global scale. Transnationality has increasingly replaced methodological nationalism, and relationality ...blurred diaspora's boundaries. This article argues for framing diasporas as socio‐material assemblages to capture the political agency of diasporas in action in a transnational space. This highlights diasporas’ ability to forge their transnational political actorness and to expand their power of attractiveness. By tracing ideas and things behind the essential task of representing the homeland, this research explores the connections of the Kurdish freedom movement in Europe, making three main arguments. First, it outlines the existence of transnational infrastructures of solidarity, which highlight a multi‐ethnic plurality at work. Second, it illuminates the diasporas’ role in the south–north flow of knowledge and political influence. Third, the article examines the desire which stabilizes the assemblage and makes the circulation of ideas possible and smooth.
This essay stages a critical conversation between Stuart Hall and Ernesto Laclau, comparing their different appropriations of Antonio Gramsci’s theory of hegemony. In the 1980s, Hall and Laclau ...engaged with Gramsci and with one another in order to conceptualize what they regarded as a triangular relation between the rise of Thatcherism, the crisis of the Left, and the emergence of new social movements. While many of their readers emphasize the undeniable similarities and mutual influences that exist between Hall and Laclau, this essay focuses on the differences between their theories of hegemony and locates the starkest contrast between them at the level of theoretical practice. While the main lesson that Hall drew from Gramsci was the privileging of conjunctural analysis, Laclau proceeded to locate the concept of hegemony at a higher level of abstraction, developing a political ontology increasingly indifferent to any specific conjuncture. The essay argues that this difference between conjunctural analysis and political ontology has a significant impact on Hall’s and Laclau’s respective understandings of two key political formations: populism and identity politics. Thus by focusing on these two formations, the essay argues that Hall’s work should not be read as a derivative or even undertheorized version of Laclau’s, for this tendency obscures substantial differences between their interventions as well as the fact that Hall’s theory of hegemony, as a theory of the conjuncture, ultimately possesses stronger explanatory power than Laclau’s political ontology.
We challenge Kruck and Weiss' argument about the regulatory security state on two counts. First, we contest the notion that the regulatory state is a viable alternative to the positive security ...state. While regulation and epistemic authority are increasingly important means of security provision, they remain critically dependent power resources and political authority that only the positive state provides. The regulatory security state is premised on the positive state and unviable without it. Second, the rise of the regulatory security state over the past three decades reflects highly specific historical conditions rather than a general trend. These conditions include unusually low geopolitical tensions in Europe and the strong regulatory bias of EU integration. Concepts matter: The wider the notion of security, the more relevant the regulatory security state becomes. It is an important reality but the war in Ukraine reminds us of the enduring centrality of the positive state.
This study explores shifts in political trust during the outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic in Switzerland, examining the role that media consumption and threat perceptions played in individuals’ ...trust in politics. We combine panel surveys taken before and during the first nation-wide lockdown with webtracking data of participants' online behaviour to paint a nuanced picture of media effects during the crisis. Our work has several findings. First, political trust, an attitude known for its stability, increased following lockdown. Second, consumption of mainstream news on COVID-19 directly hindered this increase, with those reading more news having lower over-time trust, while the relatively minor alternative news consumption had no direct effect on political trust. Third, threat perceptions a) to health and b) from the policy response to the pandemic, have strong and opposite effects on political trust, with threats to health increasing trust, and threats from the government policy response decreasing it. Lastly, these threat perceptions condition the effect of COVID-19 news consumption on political trust: perceptions of threat had the power to both exacerbate and mute the effect of media consumption on government trust during the pandemic. Notably, we show that the expected negative effect of alternative news on political trust only exists for those who did not think COVID-19 posed a threat to their health, while public service news consumption reduced the negative effect produced by government threat perceptions. The paper therefore advances our understanding of the nuanced nature of media effects, particularly as relates to alternative media, especially during moments of crisis.
For the fifteen former Soviet states that had been cast out into the international arena following the collapse of the USSR, newly-gained independence brought with it significant economic, political ...and even cultural challenges. Not only were these states forced to contend with economic decline, domestic instability, inter-ethnic conflicts and political power struggles, but there was also the problem of rediscovering a sense of national identity, something which had been actively suppressed by the Soviets during the seventy years of the USSR. For the leaders of many of these states, the solution to these challenges was to create a regional integration project to mitigate any potential extraneous or intrinsic shocks. Over the years since independence there have been multiple attempts at integration, each with varying levels of success. It is widely assumed that the main problem has been the persistently divergent views of the leaders of Eurasian states over what form integration should take and what its objectives should be. These disagreements have led to assumptions that the Eurasian integration project is simply 'doomed to failure'. This thesis expands and modernizes Kalevi Holsti's 1970 work on role theory to analyze the public rhetoric of policy-makers in four Eurasian states (Armenia, Belarus, Kyrgyzstan and Kazakhstan) to examine how they present the country on the international stage in the context of Eurasian integration since 2010. It aims to document whether the existence of divergent views is the reality by constructing a typology of 'role conceptions' for each case and comparing and contrasting their respective views and approaches. It then asks how this has affected integration efforts and concludes that divergent and incompatible role conceptions have constrained the approaches of these states to Eurasian integration. Crucially, until now, there has been a serious lack of empirical applications of role theory as well as a lack of research and widespread misconceptions and misunderstandings of the Eurasian region in the English-speaking literature. However, the importance of the region cannot be overstated given the natural resources of each state and their strategic location. Thus, an empirical study of four key states in the region will go some way to filling a large gap in the literature and improving our understanding of the political and cultural idiosyncrasies of the area.
This thesis analyses controversial relationships between men and women in late Georgian England. It examines a range of different attachments, including adulterous affairs, affinal intimacies, ...cohabiting relationships, and ménages-à-trois. Historiography on heterosexual and marital deviance has tended to focus on the more extreme end of the spectrum, and thus emphasises the high-profile sex scandals and publicity surrounding adultery and divorce litigation that boomed over this period. This thesis addresses gaps in this scholarship by exploring a wider range of emotional and erotic intimacies that were transgressive according to contemporary marital and heterosexual norms. It also takes a more holistic approach compared to other studies by analysing the impact that being controversial had on an individual's domestic, familial, social, and public worlds. The chapters are structured according to these different spheres. This thesis draws upon examples from aristocratic Whig society and several literary networks that existed on the margins of the middle classes between c. 1780-1840. By analysing these small and insular societies this thesis explores the multitude of factors that influenced how people conducted their social and personal relationships. It examines correspondence, diaries, novels, satirical prints, in addition to articles and paragraphs that were printed in contemporary newspapers and journals. Drawing on methodologies from anthropology, literary studies, and the history of emotions, it uses this broad source base to improve our understanding of the exchanges between the complex cultural macrocosm and social interactions. The late Georgian period has been portrayed as an era of change, which included shifts in concepts of political power and social order, as well as in ideas about marriage, love, and intimacy. A number of the relationships I examine involve people who were prominent in public life, with the result that their private lives often developed political significance and were used to criticise and disparage them-both as individuals and as a community. Such pressure increased the strain on these people's social and familial relationships and did so at a time they were facing new challenges caused by a transforming social, political and cultural terrain.
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