Plädoyer für ein kritisch-weltgesellschaftliches Bildungsverständnis. Politische Bildung in Zeiten des (Post-)Neoliberalismus

Um die Möglichkeiten von Citizenship Education auszuloten, wird im vorliegenden Beitrag der neoliberale Umbau der Gesellschaft und damit auch und insbesondere jener der Bildungspolitik als breiterer Kontext herangezogen und hierin vor allem die Diagnose einer "Postdemokratie" oder eines "autoritären Etatismus". Es wird gezeigt, dass es sich bei den neoliberalen Veränderungen nicht um "Sachzwänge" handelt, sondern um strategisch durchgesetzte Entwicklungen, die sowohl von konservativen wie auch von sozialdemokratischen Kräften vorangetrieben wurden. Dies ist auch der Ausgangspunkt der vorliegenden Diskussion um die gegenwärtige "postneoliberale Konstellation". Was bedeutet diese Um­orientierung in einigen Politikfeldern für den demokratischen Prozess im Allgemeinen und für die Bildungspolitik im Besonderen? Inwieweit steigen damit die Chancen einer emanzipatorischen und weltgesellschaftlichen Bildung? (DIPF/Orig.)In order to sound out the possibilities of citizenship education, the present article uses the neoliberal restructuring of society and especially of educational policy as a broader context with a special focus on the diagnosis of a “post-democracy” or an “authoritarian etatism”. It is shown that the neoliberal changes are not “practical constraints” but strategically enforced developments that have been promoted by conservative and socialdemocratic powers alike. This is also the starting point for the present discussion on the current “post-neoliberal constellation”. What does this reorientation in some political fields mean for the democratic process in general and for educational policy in particular? To what extent does this increase the chances of an emancipatory and global social education?(DIPF/Orig.

Spatialising the Imperial Mode of Living - rethinking a concept

In the introduction to this special section, we present the core idea of the concept “imperial mode of living” (IML) which attempts to explain why and how the reproduction of capitalist societal relations continues to be hegemonic despite the widespread recognition of its destructive tendencies. It is argued that the IML itself can be understood as a spatial category: the imperial mode of living creates asymmetric interdependencies between various places and territories in the global North and the global South, it structures the relationship between different parts of the globe in a way that the mechanisms of reproduction in one part affect societies in others. Along four dimensions – valorisation, accumula- tion and reproduction; hegemony and subjectivation; hierarchization; externalization – we present a conceptual and research heuristic on how the working of the imperial mode of living and its socio-spatial implications can be under- stood. Moreover, it is argued that, given deepening crisis tendencies, the paradigm of a “Green Economy” or “Green Deal“ might serve as dominant imaginary that is able to orientate and unite liberal progressive forces to provide for a sufficient degree of economic coherence and to create new terrains of compromising and ways to deal with conflicts that are favourable to the operation of a green-capitalist regime of accumulation. Such an eco-capitalist modernisation of the imperial mode of living in the global North has also severe socio-spatial implications. At the end of the article, we draw a few conclusions, present some criticisms that were made and give a brief outlook of the prospects of a “green capitalism”

Andreev bound states at boundaries of polarized 2D Fermi superfluids with s-wave pairing and spin-orbit coupling

Two-dimensional (2D) Fermi gases subject to s-wave pairing, spin-orbit coupling and large-enough Zeeman spin splitting are expected to form a topological superfluid. While the general argument of bulk-boundary correspondence assures the existence of topologically protected zero-energy quasiparticle excitation at such a system's boundaries, it does not fully determine the physical properties of the low-energy edge states. Here we develop a versatile theoretical method for elucidating microscopic characteristics of interface-localized subgap excitations within the spin-resolved Bogoliubov-deGennes formalism. Our analytical results extend current knowledge about edge excitations existing at the boundary between vacuum and a 2D superfluid that is in its topological or nontopological regime. We also consider the Andreev bound states that emerge at an interface between coexisting time-reversal-symmetry-breaking topological and nontopological superfluids and juxtapose their unusual features with those of vacuum-boundary-induced edge excitations. Our theory provides a more complete understanding of how the spin-orbit-coupled polarized 2D Fermi gas can be tailored as a platform for realizing unconventional Majorana excitations.Comment: 37 pages, 5 figures. Submission to SciPos

Schillernd und technokratisch: Grüner New Deal als magic bullet in der Krise des neoliberal-imperialen Kapitalismus?

A discussion about a Green New Deal (GND) refers to the ongoing and uneven crisis with its financial and economic, environmental and climate related as well as food related dimensions. However, the author criticises the suggestive power of the project and its optimistic assumptions concerning political control, technology and modernisation and its neglect of actual dynamics of capitalist development and crisis as well as the deeply inscribed imperial mode of living. With this, GND is an important project of ecomodernist capitalist forces in the Green and ecologically sensitive social-democratic field. They promote the project in the ongoing "postneoliberal" contestations how to redynamise capitalism. Therefore, it needs to be analysed carefully from a critical-emancipatory perspective. The arrogant tone of some protagonists of the GND debate, i.e. that there is no leftist alternative beyond their project, should be rejected. Emancipatory socio-ecological perspectives must be decisively more critical towards domination, institutions and modernisation

Kapitalistisches Wachstum und soziale Herrschaft Motive, Argumente und Schwächen aktueller Wachstumskritik

Currently, the discussion about degrowth is one of the most important debates in the context of the multiple crises of capitalism. Economic growth as a political orientation and a socio-economic practice has been transformed from a stabilizing factor in society to a de-stabilizer. This article gives a short and necessarily selective overview of the main currents in this debate, and highlights important points of consensus. However, it is argued, degrowth approaches could benefit from a more systematic theorization and consideration of the structures and processes of domination within capitalist societies, and of the manifold forms of domination over nature. Neo-Marxist and feminist perspectives provide good approaches for addressing these shortcomings, and also open the possibility for addressing the as yet not really well developed question of democracy within the degrowth debate in a more sophisticated and realistic manner

Between Protection, Rights and Commercialisation. The Convention on Biological Diversity in the Process of Globalisation and the Opportunities for a Democratic Politics of Biodiversity

1. Introduction 2. The historical context: Globalisation and biodiversity 3. The complex role of the CBD 4. Current problems and conflicts in the CBD process a) Access, benefit sharing and intellectual property rights: Prospects for an international ABS regime b) Conservation of biodiversity and the introduction of genetically modified seed c) Instrumentalisation of indigenous peoples and farming communities d) Implementation weaknesses e) Lack of coherence within the CBD, and in comparison with other conventions f) Forum-shifting g) Maintenance of structural power imbalances 5. Omissions within the CBD Process a) Regulatory difficulties of technological developments b) Biopiracy and the increasing militarisation of the appropriation of nature c) Obscuration of asymmetrical gender relations 6. Significance of the Millennium Ecosystem Assessment 7. Opportunities for a democratic biodiversity policy process a) Democratisation of science and technology development b) Disclosing the practices of biopiracy and the actors involved c) Making the concerns of weaker actors visible d) Demanding not only the participation of weaker actors, but also their legal claims to rights 8. The role of civil society organisations 9. On the way to COP 9 in Germany, 2008 Bibliograph

Sign of tunnel coupling in barrier-separated Bose-Einstein condensates and stability of double-ring systems

We revisit recent claims about the instability of non-rotating tunnel coupled annular Bose-Einstein condensates leading to the emergence of angular-momentum Josephson oscillation [Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 050401 (2007), arXiv:quant-ph/0609133v2]. It was predicted that all stationary states with uniform density become unstable in certain parameter regimes. By careful analysis, we arrive at a different conclusion. We show that there is a stable non-rotating and uniform ground state for any value of the tunnel coupling and repulsive interactions. The instability of an excited state with $\pi$ phase difference between the condensates can be interpreted in terms of the familiar snake instability. We further discuss the sign of the tunnel coupling through a separating barrier, which carries significance for the nature of the stationary states. It is found to always be negative for physical reasons.Comment: 4 pages, comment on Phys. Rev. Lett. 98, 050401 (2007) [arXiv:quant-ph/0609133v2

Eliminating the wave function singularity for ultracold atoms by similarity transformation

A hyperbolic singularity in the wave-function of $s$-wave interacting atoms is the root problem for any accurate numerical simulation. Here we apply the transcorrelated method, whereby the wave-function singularity is explicitly described by a two-body Jastrow factor, and then folded into the Hamiltonian via a similarity transformation. The resulting non-singular eigenfunctions are approximated by stochastic Fock-space diagonalisation with energy errors scaling with $1/M$ in the number $M$ of single-particle basis functions. The performance of the transcorrelated method is demonstrated on the example of strongly correlated fermions with unitary interactions. The current method provides the most accurate ground state energies so far for three and four fermions in a rectangular box with periodic boundary conditions.Comment: 16 pages, 11 figures; revised after referee comment

Regimes in Global Environmental Governance and the Internationalization of the State: The Case of Biodiversity Politics

Scholarly debates on the relative (in-)effectiveness of global environmental governance increasingly focus on problems of cooperation across regime boundaries and on the missing knowledge base for such interlinkages. Global environmental change and related politics are increasingly seen as taking place in a complex field in which several ecological processes are interlinked – e.g. climate change, biodiversity, water, and land-use change – and these processes are deeply interconnected with societal processes, such as food supply and nutrition and the economic and financial crisis. We argue that institutionalist approaches have their merits but they are nevertheless inadequate because they do not seriously address questions concerning the root causes of problems, power, and domination. Furthermore, they do not critically scrutinise how the political institutions of current global environmental governance may in fact support broader socio-economic and political developments. This could effectively undermine the supposed goals of global environmental governance institutions and could seriously threaten other social or ecological processes. Informed by critical research on global environmental governance and adding to this literature insight from critical state theory, we develop an understanding of the internationalized state as well as its role and function in globalized capitalism. We illustrate our argument with recent developments in international biodiversity politics. We show that the predominant forms of politics are not very effective with respect to the ongoing erosion of biodiversity. However, the complicated and conflictive political processes within an apparatus of the internationalised state are mainly in line with hegemonic developments and dominant interest, i.e. the increasing valorization of biodiversity and especially of genetic resources