On the Limits of Liberalism in Participatory Environmental Governance: Conflict and Conservation in Ukraine\u27s Danube Delta

Participatory management techniques are widely promoted in environmental and protected area governance as a means of preventing and mitigating conflict. The World Bank project that created Ukraine’s Danube Biosphere Reserve included such ‘community participation’ components. The Reserve, however, has been involved in conflicts and scandals in which rumour, denunciation and prayer have played a prominent part. The cases described in this article demonstrate that the way conflict is escalated and mitigated differs according to foundational assumptions about what ‘the political’ is and what counts as ‘politics’. The contrasting forms of politics at work in the Danube Delta help to explain why a 2005 World Bank assessment report could only see failure in the Reserve’s implementation of participatory management, and why liberal participatory management approaches may founder when introduced in settings where relationships are based on non-liberal political ontologies. The author argues that environmental management needs to be rethought in ways that take ontological differences seriously rather than assuming the universality of liberal assumptions about the individual, the political and politics

Embattled Vienna 1683/2010:right-wing populism, collective memory and the fictionalisation of politics

The victory of a Christian coalition over Ottoman forces besieging Vienna in 1683 marked the beginning of the end of the Ottoman presence in Central and Eastern Europe and the simultaneous rise of the Habsburg Empire in this region. Memories of these events still circulate in present-day Vienna and provide an emotional reservoir for anti-Turkish sentiments. Current tendencies to fictionalise politics support the dissemination of such anti-Turkish narratives in rather unconventional and hybrid genres such as comic-style booklets. In this article, the authors investigate the interplay of collective memories and this hybrid genre within the social context of the fictionalisation of politics through the test case of the Austrian Freedom Party (FPÖ), one of the most successful European right-wing populist parties. By combining multimodal analysis with the discourse–historical approach in critical discourse analysis, they illustrate the ways in which visuals enable the conveying of contradictory meanings through a discursive strategy of calculated ambivalence by blurring past and present, fiction and reality