Search results for "ta517"
showing 10 items of 59 documents
Widening the scope of comparative political theory
2014
Māwardī and Machiavelli : Reflections on Power in their Mirrors for Princes
2018
Abstract Despite their apparently contradictory views on religion’s role in statecraft, and despite being separated by both history and geography, Al-Mawardi and Machiavelli approach the question of political power in an unapologetically direct fashion. This paper interrogates their philosophies and the way in which their highly unstable social settings and their rather more stable religious traditions intersect in two of their key texts, The Ordinances of Government and The Prince, respectively. These texts demonstrate that even early Muslim tradition had a theory of impersonal governance, whereas 500 years later Europeans had by no means given up on narratives of personified power.
Evil lords, benign historians: strongman politics in medieval India and Renaissance Florence
2019
Recent developments in Europe and the United States (US) attest to an increasing fascination with and nostalgia for the strong leaders of the past – especially those that emerged in the aftermath o...
“Another Munich We Just Cannot Afford”: Historical Metonymy In Politics
2016
The appeasement of Hitler and the Munich Agreement is a rhetorical comparison used commonly in international relations to defend politico-military action. On the basis of conceptual history and rhetorics, we examine cases of political speech in this paradigm. Firstly, we discuss time and conceptualize experience into first and second order experiences. Secondly, the roles of metaphor, metonymy and analogy in relation to thought and action are examined. We then contextualise Munich 1938, and present three cases demonstrating the political usage of this metonymy since WWII. These range from the Suez Crises to the Gulf War and on-going War on Terror. These cases show that “Munich” can be used …
Containment and intensification in political war : Carl Schmitt and the Clausewitzian heritage
2016
This article provides the first comprehensive and chronological analysis of Carl Schmitt’s reception of Carl von Clausewitz. While earlier scholarship has mostly stressed Schmitt’s shift from Clausewitzian ‘instrumentality’ to an ‘existential’ view of war, I note some inherent difficulties in this dichotomy and instead promote the parallel distinction between two argument types: those of containment and intensification. Schmitt theorized both limited political war and the intensification of war out of traditional bounds, and focusing on one should not eclipse the other. Further, both elements are identifiable already in Clausewitz. I analyse Schmitt’s oscillation between containment and int…
Union Citizenship Representing Conceptual (Dis)continuities in EU Documents on Citizenship and Culture
2014
The question in this article is how citizenship is reinvented and recontextualized in a newly founded European Union after the launching of Union Citizenship. What kind of conceptions of citizenship are produced in this new and evolving organization? The research material consists of documents presented by EU organs from 1994 to 2007 concerning eight EU programs on citizenship and culture. I will analyze conceptual similarities (continuities) and differences (discontinuities) between these documents and previous conceptualizations in various contexts, including citizenship discussions in the history of integration since the 1970s as well as theories of democracy and nation-states. Based on …
Reading Weber and the Claims of the Weberians
2016
The Politification and Politicisation of the EU
2016
Publication date: March 1, 2016 In this article, we suggest a novel conceptual framework for understanding and analysing EU politicisation. Recent studies on EU politicisation argue that the post-Maastricht era led to the politicisation of EU integration via an increasing citizens' dissatisfaction. Contrary to this account, we argue that European integration has been from the beginning linked to politicisation, but in an unusual way. To capture its uniqueness we introduce the concepts of politisation as a precondition of politicisation and of politification as a depoliticised modality of politicisation. Politicisation is then not something new to EU integration but rather it is constitutive…
The concept of the Royal Prerogative in parliamentary debates on the deployment of military in the British House of Commons, 1982–2003
2014
The article will discuss how one political key concept, the Royal Prerogative, was discussed in the British House of Commons in relation to the right to deploy and use armed troops abroad during the period 1982-2003, a time when the role of the British Parliament in decisions to deploy and commit troops to an armed conflict abroad was under extensive discussion in Parliament. This discussion began increasingly to address the state of the constitutional arrangements, more specifically the redefinition of the Royal Prerogative rights, the residual powers of the executive, as outdated in the understanding of modern representative democracy. The use of the concept was studied to reveal the atti…