Search results for " International Relations"
showing 10 items of 626 documents
Music, Architecture, Proportion and the Renaissance Way of Thinking
2020
During the Renaissance, the language of proportion became a unified theory capable of encompassing the understanding of the world within a coherent theological, philosophical and artistic framework. Music, with its harmonic paradigm, plays a key role in this construction. From the fifteenth century through to the end of the sixteenth century, architects and architectural theorists made reference, both in new treatises and commentaries to Vitruvius, to musical matters, transforming architecture into the summa of knowledge. The affinity to music was grounded on both a common mathematical and rhetoric gnosiology. Formerly conceived of as ideal, numbers became eloquent, reinforcing the quantita…
Joan Robinson and Keynes: finance, relative prices and the monetary circuit.
2003
Joan Robinson's views on credit and money are discussed only rarely. Of late, however, some Post-Keynesians have sought to revive these views, claiming that Robinson was one of the original contributors to the theory of endogenous money, post Keynes. This paper has two objectives. First, it seeks to develop Robinson's views on credit, money and finance and to show that not only did she have a clear understanding of the theory of endogenous money, but that she also held views akin to the theory of the monetary circuit. Second, the paper addresses Robinson's dismissal of the problem of relative prices and the conventional theory of value. Once again, it shows that Robinson's position is conne…
The Discursive Constitution of a World-Spanning Region and the Role of Empty Signifiers: The Case of Francophonia
2007
The cultural turn in political science, history, and political geography has opened new perspectives on the division of the world into geographic entities. Nation-states, regions, districts, etc., are no longer qualified as quasi-natural objects based upon intrinsic qualities but, rather, as contingent results of social or accordingly discursive processes. The Organisation Internationale de la Francophonie (OIF) defines Francophonia as an “geocultural space” (espace geoculturel) and an international community of more than 50 states. In this contribution, the concept of political communities as “imagined communities” and the advancements of discourse theory by Laclau and Mouffe are used in o…
‘Independence is not given, it is taken’: the Ivorian cinquantenaire and competing history/ies of independence
2013
This article explores competing histories of independence in Cote d'Ivoire. The 2010 commemoration of fifty years of independence led to competing histories about how and if the nation achieved independence in 1960. The postelectoral crisis of 2010–2011 that followed soon afterwards has been interpreted by supporters of the outgoing president Laurent Gbagbo as an attempt by France and the international community to re-colonise Cote d'Ivoire. The article asks how different versions of this history are connected to different political projects and how they have changed through time. The article will analyse these processes of meaning-making in a historiology of Ivorian independence, thus cont…
The Limits to Free Speech on Social Media : On Two Recent Decisions of the Supreme Court of Norway
2020
In January 2020, two persons in Norway were condemned by a unanimous Supreme Court of Norway for comments posted on ‘closed’ Facebook groups. With the two decisions, the Supreme Court confirmed for the first time the boundaries of hateful, racist, and discriminatory speech in the context of online utterances in social media. It also established a new sanctioning standard for hate speech. Paid Open Access UNIT agreement
Hedging effectiveness of European wheat futures markets
2014
The instability of commodity prices and the hypothesis that speculative behaviour was one of its causes has brought renewed interest in futures markets. In this paper, the hedging effectiveness of European and US wheat futures markets were studied to test whether they were affected by the high price instability after 2007. Implicitly, this is a test of whether the increasing presence of speculation in futures markets have made them divorced from the physical markets. A multivariate GARCH model was applied to compute optimal hedging ratios. No important evidence was found of a change in the effectiveness of hedging after 2007.
Paths to the recognition of homo-parental adoptive rights in the EU-27: a QCA analysis
2015
ABSTRACTAlthough the recognition of the adoptive rights of LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender) couples is a socially salient topic, cross-national variation regarding this issue has been largely underexplored in social science research. With the aid of configurational analysis, this article fills this gap and shows the conditions that explain the recognition of the adoptive rights of homosexual couples in the countries of the EU-27. It is argued that two different paths led to this outcome. All countries where adoptive rights were recognized had higher degrees of secularization and lower levels of social homophobia. In addition, in Northern European countries, the Protestant back…
Mediterranean regionalism from territory to trains: spatial politics and planning of macro-regions and transport networks in Spain
2015
The contested planning of European macro-regions and Trans-European Transport Network (TEN-T) exemplifies the complexities of spatial politics, territorial and relational. What stratagems – discursive and cartographic – may regional actors employ in the process, and what can we learn from them? In context of European Union integration policies, we explore Spanish regional politics – discursive and cartographic – surrounding planning of cross-border regions and a TEN-T “Mediterranean Corridor” (and its alternatives). The contested remapping of macro-regions and transport networks reveals the role of spatial planning in the vertebracio (structuration in Catalan) of European territory in disti…
Language as an instrument of nationalism in Central Europe
2001
This article presents a brief survey and analysis of the most intimate coupling of culture and national projects that occurred in Central Europe following the success of the Italian and German nation-states established in this manner during the third quarter of the nineteenth century. Language is the very ‘stuff’ of culture as well as the instrument of communicating and reaffirming cultural difference vis-a-vis other cultures. As such, language became central to the processes of nation- and nation-state-building in Central Europe, leading to politicisation of language and also of linguistics and philology, which were expected to fortify the nations and their nation-states than rather to len…
Between Strategic Cooperation and Distrustful Neighbourhood. Polish-German relations in the agendas of Polish governments, 1990–2019
2019
Since 1989 the building of new Polish-German relations has been carried out in the dimensions of both time (historical reconciliation) and space (reintegration eastern and western parts of Europe). This determines their fundamental importance for contemporary Europe. This article presents an analysis of Polish-German relations from the perspective of issue salience. The source base of this paper comprises Addresses by the Ministers of Foreign Affairs (AMFAs), i.e. annual speeches given by foreign ministers presenting the major goals of Poland’s foreign policy. It makes it possible to adopt a long-term perspective (1990-2018). The quantitative analysis was based on the rules of the Comparati…