Search results for "Political Science"
showing 10 items of 7570 documents
Attempts by non-Germans to obtain burgher rights in Riga in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries
2020
The article deals with two unsuccessful attempts by non-German craftsmen to gain burgher rights in Riga, which would have entitled them to trade freely and keep taverns. In the early modern period,...
Politics of belonging in Brussels’ European Quarter
2019
The European Union (EU) has been criticised for a lack of imageries and sites of memory that nation-states have traditionally utilised in their identity-building. The EU, along with other actors, has responded to this iconographic deficit with memory and heritage initiatives and branding campaigns. This article explores how this deficit is dealt with in the European Quarter in Brussels by enlivening it through cultural regeneration and creating narratives that link Europe’s and the EU’s past with the present. The article utilises hermeneutic phenomenological approach combining observation and interpretation of diverse place-making practices, such as monuments, memorials, public artworks, hi…
Europe and refugees : 1938 and 2015-16
2018
Ahonen attempts to provide some historical contextualization for the refugee crisis that has dominated much of European public and political debate since 2015. He draws comparisons between the crisis-ridden present and the decade of the previous century that was particularly laden with anticipation of disaster and doom: the 1930s. More specifically, his article explores parallels in public discussions of refugees by European political leaders and media commentators in 1938, on the one hand, and 2015–16, on the other. The coverage of 1938 focuses on the Evian Conference, organized to discuss the problem of Jewish refugees from Nazi Germany, while the analysis of 2015–16 concerns the period f…
Politics of solidarity in the context of European heritage : The cases of the European Solidarity Centre and Hambach Castle
2019
This article explores the politics of solidarity in the framework of constructing a common cultural heritage of the European Union. The politics of solidarity stems from the notion of solidarity embedded to European heritage. We use critical heritage studies as a theoretical approach that understands heritage as an inherently dissonant social construct, produced by various actors according to political, economic and social interests. The study analyses empirical data from the European Heritage Label (EHL), a flagship heritage action of the EU that communicates shared values and a sense of identification to European citizens. Our empirical data includes ethnographic observation as well as in…
Byzantines, Latins and Turks in the eastern Mediterranean world after 1150
2015
The late-medieval eastern Mediterranean is quite rightly regarded by the publishers as a region typified by its complexity. As stated in the ‘Introduction’ by Catherine Holmes, the publishers’ aim ...
The family, honour and gender in Sicily: models and new research
2004
This article shows how the latest research into Sicily's social and economic history calls into question certain well-established interpretations of the history of the family and its structures, the paradigm of Mediterranean honour, and the theory of familism. This new appraisal also highlights the major significance of the history of women and gender identity.
Politics of tangibility, intangibility, and place in the making of a European cultural heritage in EU heritage policy
2016
The EU has recently launched several initiatives that aim to foster the idea of a common European cultural heritage. The notion of a European cultural heritage in EU policy discourse is extremely abstract, referring to various ideas and values detached from physical locations or places. Nevertheless the EU initiatives put the abstract policy discourse into practice and concretize its notions about a European cultural heritage. A common strategy in this practice is ‘placing heritage’ – affixing the idea of a European cultural heritage to certain places in order to turn them into specific European heritage sites. The materialisation of a European cultural heritage and the production of physic…
On Religious Issues in Contemporary Azerbaijan
2018
The structural tensions that exist in the religious dynamics between Shi‘its and Sunnis in Azerbaijan Republic has led the country’s government to establish a new institution to monitor and supervise the religious issues. This article not only aims to surface the tensions between the “State Committee for Religious Affairs” and the informal religious institutions, but also to show if the secular image of the Azerbaijani State has been affected by this tensions.
Women's history and gender history: The Italian experience
2005
SummarySince the early nineteenth century political opposition became a central concept of political representation in constitutional monarchies. While this concept marked the political language of unified Italy on the national level, in local administration the legitimacy of political opposition remained an issue of dispute, as illustrated in this analysis of the political language in Bologna's city council. Local perceptions of national events, like Garibaldi's unsuccessful Mentana-campaign, assumed a significant symbolic meaning and challenged traditional understandings of local administration by introducing notions of political opposition. In Bologna, the second city of the former Papal…
Biopolitics and Hegemony in Contemporary Russian Cultural Policy
2018
Since 2011, Russian ‘licensing civil society’ 1 has predominated through censorship and the restrictive regulation of arts and cultural societies. The current conservative project has turned artistic space into public space, indicating moral abuse and a threat to the spiritual health of the Russian nation. Consequently, the symbolic borders of human creativity and individual freedom in arts and cultural societies have been reduced to patriotism, nationalism and moral deductive functions of the state-approved program. This paper will explore Russian state cultural policy and argue that biopolitics is its mainstream strategy. It examines how the ensemble of sovereign and disciplinary power de…