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As police with tear gas and water cannons fuel unrest across Turkey, it seems that many eyes are wearily cast over Europe’s favourite neighbour, soon to join the list of potentially unstable Middle-East nations. Yet even as Erdogan’s messy power play brings Turkey’s democratic survivability into question, the nation’s solar energy industry is breaking new ground and massive nuclear power capacity is quietly being prepared to relieve the nation’s energy import dependency. In Brazil, riots breaking out over a transport price hike reflect the pressures of inflation and widespread corruption: an outburst fuelled by a long history of mismanagement and ineffective policy at state and federal levels. Nevertheless, big plans are underway for the expanding of Brazil’s power grid, set to underwrite national economic growth into 2030 and beyond. Behind these gruelling scenes of democratic upheaval, lie two distinct cases of energy policy in the making, in spite of overt political turmoil. This post highlights two instances of critical energy policy, unfolding behind the scenes.
Within the emerging field of cultural neuroscience (CN) one branch of research focuses on the neural underpinnings of “individualistic/Western” vs. “collectivistic/Eastern” self-views. These studies uncritically adopt essentialist assumptions from classic cross-cultural research, mainly following the tradition of Markus and Kitayama (1991), into the domain of functional neuroimaging. In this perspective article we analyze recent publications and conference proceedings of the 18th Annual Meeting of the Organization for Human Brain Mapping (2012) and problematize the essentialist and simplistic understanding of “culture” in these studies. Further, we argue against the binary structure of the drawn “cultural” comparisons and their underlying Eurocentrism. Finally we scrutinize whether valuations within the constructed binarities bear the risk of constructing and reproducing a postcolonial, orientalist argumentation pattern.
Ethical issues of justice and human rights are central to countries emerging from conflict. Yet involving women in transitional justice processes rarely is articulated in ethical terms. To make a case for an ethical commitment to improving women’s participation in these processes, the paper begins by exploring why transitional justice strategies should bother with gender. Women and men often experience conflict and injustices differently which may require different responses to redress harms suffered. Timor-Leste is used as a case study. The paper explores whether hybrid traditional and formal justice systems can address women’s justice claims in principle and specifically, when applied to Timor-Leste. The paper maintains that customary justice practices can be combined with conventional ones, but only when both practices adhere to international human rights conventions, which rarely happens where patriarchal practices are entrenched. The conclusion addresses what might be done to create gender-responsive justice systems given that they are crucial in building environments that are conducive to sustainable peace and security.
Our most recent podcast: We were able to talk to the Japanese culturalanthropologist Mihara Ryôtarô while he visited Frankfurt in July for a talkon the Coool Japan Initiative [link]. As we have written on K-Pop in the past,we were very interested to talk about this kind of export promotion ofcultural goods as a foreign policy strategy: Do export subsidies of J-Popartifacts really promote Japanese soft power in the region? What are thedangers of promoting certain images of Japanese-ness? And is fried sushireally cool?
The G20 summit starting today will be overshadowed by the Syrian crisis. Wolfgang Seibel assesses that,while Germany and Russia share a common history that has shaped their relationship as well as close and crucial economiclinkages, their worldviews are incompatible – international problem-solvingvs. prioritizing geopolitical interests. The question is, in light of the crisis in Syria, are German foreign policymakers in a position to influence Russian key-players?
According to his own understanding, Jürgen Habermas’ Theory of Communicative Action offers a new account of the normative foundations of critical theory. 1 Habermas’ motivating insight is that neither a transcendental or metaphysical solution to the problem of normativity, nor a merely hermeneutic reconstruction of historically given norms, is sufficient to clarify the normative foundations of critical theory. In response to this insight, Habermas develops a novel account of normativity which locates the normative demands upon which critical theory draws within the socially instituted practice of communicative understanding. Although Habermas has claimed otherwise, this new foundation for critical theory constitutes a novel and innovative form of “immanent critique”. To argue for and to clarify this claim, I offer, in section 1, a formal account of immanent critique and distinguish between two different ways of carrying out such a critique. In section 2, I examine Habermas’ rejection of the first, hermeneutic option. Against this background, I then show, in section 3, that the Theory of Communicative Action attempts to formulate an immanent critique of contemporary societies according to a second, “practice-based” model. However, because Habermas, as I will argue in section 4, commits himself to an implausibly narrow view in regard to one central element of such a model – in regard to the social ontology of immanent normativity – his normative critique cannot develop its full potential (section 5).