Search results for "POLITICS"
showing 10 items of 2266 documents
Explaining the Electoral Failure of Extreme-Right Parties in Estonia and Latvia
2009
Extreme-right political parties have achieved significant electoral success in Europe in recent years. This paper considers why this electoral success has not been replicated in contemporary Estonia and Latvia. The paper begins with a discussion of the necessary background conditions for the success of extreme-right movements, finding that they do largely exist in Estonia and Latvia. The paper then moves on to map the rising levels of extreme-right mobilisation among both titular and Russian-speaking parts of the population. We examine two hypotheses to explain the electoral failure of extreme-right parties: (1) The institutional hypothesis argues that the party and electoral laws check ext…
Phytotoponymy and Synphytotoponymy in Western Granada Province (Andalusia, Spain)
2009
En el marco de la investigación etnobotánica desarrollada en el poniente granadino, se ha realizado un estudio sobre la toponimia de la comarca con atención a los apelativos de origen vegetal (fitotopónimos y sinfitotopónimos). La información —obtenida de la Gerencia Territorial del Catastro de Granada, de la Junta de Andalucía y de nuestro trabajo de campo— se ha incluido en una base de datos con el programa Microsoft Excell®. Un total de 98 especies vegetales se encuentran representadas en la toponimia local, dando nombre a 593 lugares del territorio. Se aportan comentarios sobre el significado ecológico, paleofitogeográfico y etnobotánico de las especies reflejadas en la toponimia.
Enduring the Autoimmune Aporia of Democratic Sovereignty
2021
The aim of this article is to read Rogues, in order to show that Derrida is neither a philosopher of democracy nor a critic of sovereignty , but rather a thinker of democratic sovereignty. Taking my cue from his Aporias, I argue that democratic sovereignty is aporetically in excess over itself, for it is based on articulating the path through the im-possible passage from the unconditional injunction of the ‘promise’ to the exigency of sovereignty. That is why it can neither be absorbed into the conditions of any existing democracy nor abstracted into any pure identity of sovereignty. Political trends today fail in enduring the aprioricity of aporia, as neoliberals valorize the posited condi…
Presidential speeches and the online politics of belonging : Affective-discursive positions toward refugees in Finland and Estonia
2019
The so-called ‘refugee crisis’ has added urgency to the social dynamics of inclusion and exclusion in European societies. This study explores how emotions figure in this politics of belonging by studying their discursive mobilization in Finnish and Estonian public debates on asylum seekers. Focusing on presidential speeches addressing the refugee issue, on the one hand, and their reception by online commenters on popular tabloid news sites, on the other, the comparative analysis highlights both similarities and differences in how emotional expressions are employed in these two countries with very different experiences of taking refugees. Despite employing common discursive elements in thei…
Learning to laugh: satire and political thought in the Latvian ‘National Age’
2018
ABSTRACTSatiric publications are often recognized as an important part of the political communication of the nineteenth century. Their role, however, in the national ‘awakenings’ in central eastern...
Pie laika … Now is the time. The singing revolution on Latvian radio and television
2020
AbstractIn the Soviet Union, song competitions had an important role in presenting new artists and songs. The Mikrofona aptauja contest of Latvian radio (1968–1994) was the main forum for new Latvian pop music. It had a reputation for expressing nationalist feelings within the limits of Soviet censorship. In 1988, with the rise of new political movements in the Soviet Union, the competition became a venue for the Latvian independence movement. The winning song of 1988 was a demand for ‘freedom to the fatherland’. The competition also played a part in the rehabilitation of pre-war popular music which had been forbidden in Soviet Latvia. The paper discusses the role of journalists, politician…
Women's Body Consciousness and Political Ideologies in Finnish Exercise Culture
2012
For over one hundred years, women’s gymnastics has been one of the most popular sports in the Nordic countries. Since the beginning of the 20 century, hundreds of gymnastics festivals have attracted thousands of gymnasts in Finland alone. Gymnastics has been taught weekly, monthly, and from year to year, in gymnastic clubs and at schools around the country. When teaching gymnastics according to the standards of the day, the gymnasts and their teachers considered the norms of gymnastics self-evident; in other words, as if the movements exercised and the body consciousness born out of the movements were neutral and value-free. Women’s gymnastics cannot, however, be examined separately from th…
Challenges for Creating Visibility of European Cultural Heritage
2019

 
 
 The European Heritage Label (EHL) is a recent flagship heritage action of the European Union and focuses on the European dimension of Europe’s histo- ry and heritage as part of the Union’s cultural policy. One of the central con- cerns of the EU’s cultural policy is to generate a sense of belonging and iden- tity among European citizens. While efficient promotion of the visibility of the EHL among European audiences could be expected corresponding to the political objectives, the EHL continues to struggle with broader public recog- nition. Based on fieldwork findings, the article discusses the visibility of the EHL action as a network of heritage sites that challenges n…
Designing Deliberation Systems
2010
In a liberal democracy, the evolution of political agendas and formation of policy involves deliberation: serious consideration of political issues. Modern day political participation is dependent on widespread deliberation supported by information and communication technologies, which also offer the potential to revitalize and transform citizen engagement in democracy. Although the majority of web 2.0 systems enable these discourses to some extent, government institutions commission and manage specialized deliberation systems (information systems designed to support participative discourse) intended to promote citizen engagement. The most common examples of these are political discussio…
Death and Transfiguration : The Late Kim Jong-il Aesthetic in North Korean Cultural Production
2016
This article assesses the official music scene in Pyongyang over a span of five dramatic years, surveying how changes in the field of music from 2009 to 2014 mirrored and in some cases presaged North Korean dynastic succession and political consolidation. The article draws upon a new abundance of performance data on North Korean musical groups, data which we argue is important but has largely been ignored or mischaracterized heretofore. The central crisis dealt with in the article is the decline and demise of Kim Jong-il, the architect of North Korea’s musical culture. In his final years, Kim Jong-il assented to the creation of a new leading musical group known as the Unhasu Orchestra, prom…