British Muslims and the anti-war movement

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All I'm asking, is for a little respect: assessing the performance of Britain's most successful radical left party

This article offers an overview of the genesis, development and decline of the Respect Party, a rare example of a radical left party which has achieved some degree of success in the UK. It analyses the party's electoral fortunes and the reasons for its inability to expand on its early breakthroughs in East London and Birmingham. Respect received much of its support from Muslim voters, although the mere presence of Muslims in a given area was not enough for Respect candidates to get elected. Indeed, despite criticism of the party for courting only Muslims, it did not aim to draw its support from these voters alone. Moreover, its reliance on young people and investment in local campaigning on specific political issues were often in opposition to the traditional ethnic politics which have characterised the electoral process in some areas

Aesthetics relation between art, culture, politics: social turn

Рукопись поступила в редакцию 1 июня 2016 г.This article deals with the problem of important social turn in the relationship between politics and art in the contemporary situation. In the postmodern sense, the relation between politics and art is assumed as performance or, in other words, as the representation of art and politics in the realm of cultural discourses and figures. The relations between art and politics in the contemporary sense may be assumed in terms of this triple definition, as: the transfer of politics into art, as the spectacularization of politics through art, and as a potential field of intervening critical, subversive practices in the global-transitional social processes of performing forms of life in the realm of expansive neoliberal capitalism and its global crisis

Sports mega-events – three sites of contemporary political contestation

This article discusses the contemporary politics of sports mega-events, involving the Olympic Games and Fédération Internationale de Football Association (FIFA) Men’s Football World Cup Finals as well as other lower ‘order’ sports megas, taking two main forms: the promotional and the protest. There is a politics in, and a politics of, sports mega-events. The former focuses on the internal politics of the organizing bodies, such as the International Olympic Committee and FIFA. This form of politics has been written about elsewhere, and hence, there is no detailed discussion in this article about it. Instead this article offers a brief discussion of the range and number of sports mega-events since 2000, an assessment of the contemporary politics of sports mega-events, a focus on three main sites of political contestation – rights, legacy and labour, and finally, it offers conclusions about research into the politics of sports mega-events

What Do We Mean When We Talk about the 'Political Class'?

This is the peer reviewed version of the following article: Allen, Peter, and Paul Cairney. "What Do We Mean When We Talk about the ‘Political Class’?." Political Studies Review (2015), which has been published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/1478-9302.12092. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving

Coalition and Minority Government in Scotland : Lessons for the United Kingdom

Peer reviewedPostprin

Dissemination of management into politics: Michael Porter and the political uses of management consulting

The article contributes to the literature on management dissemination by looking at how management fashions are diffused into and circulated in politics. The ideas of management have been increasingly disseminated into the realm of politics during recent decades. To illustrate how this takes place, this article examines the spread of Michael Porter’s ideas on national politics. Porter’s work is considered a management fashion that has been skilfully packaged; a new form of the 20th-century tradition of state-led social engineering which takes the form of management fashion-style packaging. For this he is seen as a global guru in national politics, and this development is regarded as a new form of consultocracy in the realm of democracies. In consultocracy, the ideas of management consulting are often adopted into politics as a common justifying rationality of power for the political elites. Thus we call for further research on the underlying dynamics of the power involved as management fashions are disseminated into the realm of politics

The past is evil/evil is past: on retrospective politics, 'philosophy of history, and temporal manichaeism

One of the most remarkable phenomena in current international politics is the increasing attention paid to historical injustice. Opinions on this phenomenon strongly differ. For some it stands for a new and noble type of politics based on raised moral standards and helping the cause of peace and democracy. Others are more critical and claim that retrospective politics comes at the cost of present- or future-oriented politics and tends to be anti-utopian. The warnings about the perils of a retrospective politics outweighing politics directed at contemporary injustices, or strivings for a more just future, should be taken seriously. Yet the alternative of a politics disregarding all historical injustice is not desirable either. We should refuse to choose between restitution for historical injustices and struggle for justice in the present or the future. Rather, we should look for types of retrospective politics that do not oppose but complement or reinforce the emancipatory and utopian elements in present- and future-directed politics. I argue that retrospective politics can indeed have negative effects. Most notably it can lead to a temporal Manichaeism that not only posits that the past is evil, but also tends to treat evil as anachronistic or as belonging to the past. Yet I claim that ethical Manichaeism and anti-utopianism and are not inherent features of all retrospective politics but rather result from an underlying philosophy of history that treats the relation between past, present, and future in antinomic terms and prevents us from understanding transtemporal injustices and responsibilities. In order to pinpoint the problem of certain types of retrospective politics and point toward some alternatives, I start out from a criticism formulated by the German philosopher Odo Marquard and originally directed primarily at progressivist philosophies of history

Medicine as Friendship with God: Anointing the Sick as a Theological Hermeneutic

A theological bioethics needs, first, a theological politics. The thesis of this essay rests on the claim that the contours of a theological politics are found in the nature of sacramental practices. More specifically, a theological politics of medicine is found in the sacramental practice of anointing of the sick. Anointing provides a radically theological hermeneutic—a theologically robust vision for interpreting medicine that, if enacted, can powerfully make real God\u27s work in the world. Such a vision is embodied in one particular twentieth-century exemplar—the organization called Partners In Health (PIH) and its cofounder, Paul Farmer. Farmer and PIH, I argue, live the théologie and theological politics of medicine embodied in the practice of anointing. What is more, they show—against those who would accuse such an approach of being naively idealistic—that such a theological politics is possible, powerful, and can even change the world