Moderation through exclusion? The journey of the Tunisian Ennahda from fundamentalist to conservative party

The success of processes of democratic change is often predicated on the moderation of anti-systemic and extremist parties. The literature on such parties argues that such moderation, namely the acceptance of democratic procedures, human rights, and a market economy, comes about through inclusion. This seems to be borne out when one analyses a number of Islamist parties having contributed to the progressive democratization of their respective countries. The Tunisian case, however, offers a different perspective on moderation. This article argues that it has been exclusion through repression and social marginalization that has led the Islamist party Ennahda to move from its extreme anti-systemic position of the 1970s to become the mainstream conservative party it is today

The US-led liberal order: imperialism by another name?

This article argues that the biggest challenges facing the post-1945 liberal international order are to genuinely embrace ethno-racial diversity and strategies to reduce class-based inequalities. However, this is problematic because the LIO’s core foundational principles, and principal underpinning “theory” (liberal internationalism), are Eurocentric, elitist, and resistant to change. Those core principles are subliminally racialized, elitist, and imperial, and embedded in post-1945 international institutions, elite mindsets, and in American foreign policy establishment institutions seeking to incorporate emerging powers’ elites, willingly, into the US-led order. As illustration, this article considers examples that bookend the US-led system: wartime elite planning for global leadership, and the role of the UN in Korea, 1945-53, which served as the primary instrument for the creation and incorporation of (South) Korea into the US-led order; and the role of several US-state-linked initiatives in China over the past several decades, including the Ford Foundation. The article compares the contemporary and historical evidence to liberal internationalists’ claims, and those implied by the work on “ultra-imperialism” by Karl Kautsky and Antonio Gramsci’s ideas of hegemony. The article concludes that elite incorporation – by a combination of coercion, attraction, and socialisation – is the principal goal of the US-led order, not embracing diversity and moving towards genuine change felt at a mass level. Hence, we should expect domestic and international political crises to deepen

The contested politics of climate change and the crisis of neo-liberalism

Climate change must be placed in relation to broader contestation of unequal social and environmental relations and specifically in relation to the crisis of neoliberalism. I contest those accounts of climate change which isolate carbon emissions from the unequal social and environmental relations upon which neoliberal globalization depends. I locate the mobilizations during the COP15 round of climate negotiations in relation to political trajectories that have shaped antagonistic ways of constructing climate change politics. These forms of contentious action challenge the dominant terms of climate change politics in a number of important ways, and at the same time the repressive policing of demonstrations and actions open up the space for protests and for productive debates around the environmental politics of climate change

Constructing an open model of transition: the case of North Africa

This article puts forth an open model of transition to democracy challenging the conventional wisdom of the literature on processes of democratisation, which focuses almost exclusively on domestic factors. International variables are thus at the centre of explanations for regime change. The article argues that transitions do not occur in a vacuum and presents a theoretical model that can be useful to analyse external-internal linkages. The model is then applied to three North African countries, whose efforts to democratise have failed: Tunisia, Morocco and Algeria. The article concludes that it is no longer methodologically sound to exclude international factors from the analysis of transitions and that there is considerable evidence pointing in the direction of the central role they have

"Freedom" through Repression: Epistemic Closure in Agricultural Trade Negotiations

A central concern of critical theory is that of how the forces of Modern reason cause certain logics to become reified in the name of rational progress. Two such logics – the ongoing spread of liberal capitalism, and territorial particularism – are simultaneously embodied within social institutions such as the World Trade Organization (WTO) that regulate the global economy, a phenomenon that occurs on the premise of maximising global welfare. Building upon a critical reading of Jürgen Habermas' theory of communicative action, this article undertakes an empirical immanent critique of the extent to which such logics repress the possibility of normative imperatives being considered within agricultural trade negotiations. Specifically, it argues that the dialectic of functionalist and communicative rationality, operating as a theoretical heuristic, reveals that the DDA is susceptible to an ethical indictment that arises from its inability to countenance the alternatives to the dual logics of neo-liberalism and state-interest that could otherwise emerge from a free and rational discussion. The nature of the WTO as a site of social action is revealed to be that of a closed epistemic community in which important normative claims are repressed, and as such, one in which the underlying rational bases for communication are fundamentally distorted

Legal socialization effects on democratization

As is the case with all our joint publications, this article represents a genuine research collaboration between the authors, with equal contributions. Therefore, neither is first or second author. This article uses data from a collaborative project that grew out of the Law and Society Associations Working Group on Orientations toward Law and Normative Ordering‘. Ellen S. Cohn, lames L. Gibson, Susan O. White, Joseph Sanders, Joan McCord, and Felice Levine were responsible for the development and implementation of the research design. Funding for the project was provided by the (US) National Science Foundation (SE 13237 and SIR 11403). Our European collaborators include Chantal Kourilsky-Augeven (France), Grazyna Skapska, Iwona Jakubowska-Branicka, and Maria Barucka-Arctowa (Poland), Andras Sajo (Hungary), Rosemary Barberet (Spain), and Stefka Naoumova (Bulgaria). Pam Moore, Kris Guffey, Marika Litras, Julie Nadeau, John Kraft, and Kimberly Smirles provided valuable research assistance

Stigmatized Words: A Defense of Political Correctness

The debate over political correctness and the repression of speech has experienced a resurgence in the 2016 election season. “Political correctness is killing people,” Senator Ted Cruz remarked in December 2015. This thesis explores the liberal justification for the repressing politically incorrect speech and challenges the association of expressive freedom with truth, a position linked to John Stuart Mill’s philosophy of liberty and George Orwell’s denunciation of political speech. Reflecting contemporary postmodern views on language and liberation, I ultimately defend political correctness as a way to reflect social stigmatization, render stigmatized words more visible, and enhance linguistic agency

On the Financial Repression in Japan During the High Growth Period (1953-73)

Japanese financial policies during the so called High Growth Period (HGP-roughly 1953-1973) stand at sharp contrast with the presumptions of the financial liberalization literature. Against the Japanese example, McKinnon (1991) and Horiuchi (1984) have argued, based on relatively high interest rates in Japan during this period compared to developed economies, that the Japanese financial market was not repressed. In this paper, Japanese financial policies during the HGP are examined to show the heavy and distortionary but purposeful government intervention in the financial markets. Moreover evidence is provided against those of McKinnon and Horiuchi to show that major interest rates have been repressed during the HGP. Finally, the reasons that forced the Japanese government to implement financial liberalization after 1973 are discussed. These reasons do not include considerations related to growth and the growth performance have declined after 1973.Japanese financial policies