Religion and Political Form: Carl Schmitt’s Genealogy of Politics as Critique of Habermas’s Post-secular Discourse

Jürgen Habermas's post-secular account is rapidly attracting attention in many fields as a theoretical framework through which to reconsider the role of religion in contemporary societies. This work seeks to go beyond Habermas's conceptualisation by placing the post-secular discourse within a broader genealogy of the relationships between space, religion, and politics. Drawing on the work of Carl Schmitt, the aim of this article is to contrast the artificial separation between private and public, religious and secular, state and church, and the logic of inclusion/exclusion on which modernity was established. Revisiting this genealogy is also crucial to illustrating, in light of Schmitt's political theory, the problems underlying Habermas's proposal, emphasising its hidden homogenising and universalist logic in an attempt to offer an alternative reflection on the contribution of religious and cultural pluralism within Western democracies

Fatal attraction: a critique of Carl Schmitt's international political and legal theory

The ongoing Schmitt revival has extended Carl Schmitt's reach over the fields of international legal and political theory. Neo-Schmittians suggest that his international thought provides a new reading of the history of international law and order, which validates the explanatory power of his theoretical premises – the concept of the political, political decisionism, and concrete-order-thinking. Against this background, this article mounts a systematic reappraisal of Schmitt's international thought in a historical perspective. The argument is that his work requires re-contextualization as the intellectual product of an ultra-intense moment in Schmitt's friend/enemy distinction. It inscribed Hitler's ‘spatial revolution’ into a full-scale reinterpretation of Europe's geopolitical history, grounded in land appropriations, which legitimized Nazi Germany's wars of conquest. Consequently, Schmitt's elevation of the early modern nomos as the model for civilized warfare – the ‘golden age’ of international law – against which American legal universalism can be portrayed as degenerated, is conceptually and empirically flawed. Schmitt devised a politically motivated set of theoretical premises to provide a historical counter-narrative against liberal normativism, which generated defective history. The reconstruction of this history reveals the explanatory limits of his theoretical vocabulary – friend/enemy binary, sovereignty-as-exception, nomos/universalism – for past and present analytical purposes. Schmitt's defective analytics and problematic history compromise the standing of his work for purposes of international theory

Labor redundancy, retraining, and outplacement during privatization : the experience of Brazil's Federal Railway

One of the most complex challenges of infrastructure privatization is its impact on employment. Often (but not always) private operators'main approach to cost-cutting is labor reduction. Private operators cannot afford the low levels of labor productivity typical in public companies if they are to be competitive and to deliver on their contractual obligations to provide cheaper, more reliable infrastructure services. But labor issues are so sensitive that government's early, direct involvement is seen as a way to address what potential investors see as a risk of privatization as well as to address the social concerns of the population, including the workers. When Brazil's Federal Railway was privatized, the team in charge of privatization made a significant effort to complement the incentive for voluntary reduction with an elaborate menu of training options. The authors describe this experience in dealing with labor redundancy problems. They discuss the design of the program, highlight the connections between its components, and assess the program's achievements. All things considered, they conclude, this staff reduction program was reasonably successful. The aimed-for improvements in productivity were achieved without major problems through a government-stimulated and -sponsored combination of early retirement and voluntary retrenchment. The concessionaire was willing to make quick decisions about the number of involuntary retrenchments it wanted to make, which helped sustain the momentum created by the government's prompt implementation of its own decisions and the fair treatment of workers. The main problems came from the underestimate of time needed to agree on the strategy for implementing the training and outplacement programs. Informal evidence suggests that most workers found new jobs before many of the training programs were available. And the strategy adopted gave workers a good incentive (one month's pay) to sign up for the courses but provided little incentive for workers to show up, since they were paid up front.Labor Policies,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Labor Management and Relations,Labor Standards,Public Health Promotion,Labor Management and Relations,Health Monitoring&Evaluation,Labor Standards,Banks&Banking Reform,Municipal Financial Management

Angular Momentum Mixing in Single Flavor Color Superconductivity with Transverse Pairing

Because of the equal strength of the pairing potential mediated by one-gluon exchange for all partial waves to the leading order QCD running coupling constant and the nonlinearity of the gap equation, the non-spherical pairing in single flavor color superconductivity(CSC) can not be restricted in a single non-s-wave channel and the mixing among different angular momenta will occur. In this paper, we examine the angular momentum mixing in single flavor CSC with transverse pairing, in which the pairing quarks have opposite helicity. We find that the free energy of all non-spherical pairing states are lowered by angular momentum mixing compared with that contain p-wave only. But the amount of the free energy drop is numerically small. Consequently the most stable pairing state that respect the time reversal invariance remains the spherical CSL.Comment: 16 pages, 2 figures, 1 table in Revte

Jet directions in Seyfert galaxies: B and I imaging data

We present the results of broad-band B and I imaging observations for a sample of 88 Seyfert galaxies (29 Seyfert 1's and 59 Seyfert 2's), selected from a mostly isotropic property, the flux at 60$\mu$m. We also present the B and I imaging results for an additional sample of 20 Seyfert galaxies (7 Seyfert 1's and 13 Seyfert 2's), selected from the literature and known to have extended radio emission. The I band images are fitted with ellipses to determine the position angle and ellipticity of the host galaxy major axis. This information will be used in a future paper, combined with information from radio observations, to study the orientation of radio jets relative to the plane of their host galaxies (Kinney et al. 2000). Here we present surface brightness profiles and magnitudes in the B and I bands, as well as mean ellipticities and major axis position angles.Comment: To appear in The Astrophysical Journal Supplement Series, June 2000. 48 pages, 7 tables, 19 gif and 11 postscript figures. Better quality figures can be obtained with the autho

Patient-Oriented Eczema Measure (POEM), a core instrument to measure symptoms in clinical trials: a Harmonising Outcome Measures for Eczema (HOME) statement

Background: The Harmonising Outcome Measures for Eczema (HOME) initiative has defined four core outcome domains for a core outcome set (COS) to be measured in all atopic eczema (AE) trials to ensure cross-trial comparison: clinical signs, symptoms, quality of life and longterm control. Objectives: The aim of this paper is to report on the consensus process that was used to select the core instrument to consistently assess symptoms in all future AE trials. Methods: Following the HOME roadmap, two systematic reviews were performed which identified three instruments that had sufficient evidence of validity, reliability, and feasibility to be considered for the final COS. Results: At the 4th international HOME meeting there was broad consensus among all stakeholders that the Patient-Oriented Eczema Measure (POEM) should be used as the core instrument (87.5% agreed, 9.4% unsure, 3.1% disagreed). Conclusions: All relevant stakeholders are encouraged to use POEM as the chosen instrument to measure the core domain of symptoms in all future AE clinical trials. Other instruments of interest can be used in addition to POEM

Data sharing on P2P mobile networks

This thesis is submitted in partial fullfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Science in Computational and Software Techniques in Engineerin

Estimating the Ages of Bars: Implications for the Bar-AGN-Star Formation Connection

In an effort to elevate to higher grounds our understanding on the impact of the formation and evolution of bars in the formation and evolution of galaxies, we have developed a diagnostic tool to distinguish between recently formed and evolved bars. Our method was applied in the study of a sample of 14 galaxies and revealed that, apparently, AGN activity tends to appear in galaxies which have young bars rather than evolved bars. This suggests that the time scale for the fueling of AGN by bars is short, and may help to explain, for instance, why there is not a clear correlation between the presence of bars and AGN in galaxies.Comment: 4 pages including 2 figures and 1 table; contributed talk to appear in the proceedings of the IAU Symp. 222, The Interplay among Black Holes, Stars and ISM in Galactic Nuclei, Th. Storchi Bergmann, L.C. Ho, H.R. Schmitt, eds., held in Gramado, March 200