MORALITY AND THE SUSTENANCE OF SOCIAL ORDER IN AN AFRICA

Author(s): Philip Ogo Ujomu,Felix O. Olatunji / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

A key basis of the recent problems in many social orders may appear to be a prevalence of ethical and or moral decadence at all levels of social life; political, social and economic, etc. We need to answer the question what is morality and why do we need it in the society? This is important given the need to understand the fundamental roles of intolerance, prejudice, unfair actions towards other and a lack of empathy and sympathy towards others as features of almost every kind of human political or social behaviour that results in discrimination, conflicts, hate, terrorism, and corruption. As such this paper discusses the relationship between morality and social order. It examines how morality underwrites social order and it locates the key moral values through which social order can be established and sustained.

Urząd pełnomocnika ds. równego traktowania jako element walki politycznej w Polsce

Author(s): Natalia Klejdysz / Language(s): Polish Issue: 4/2016

The Office of the Plenipotentiary for Equal Treatment was established to strengthen the practice of egalitarian. While in Poland, the office has more than 30-year old, its position and influence on legislation and social life are unsatisfactory. This is a consequence of the politicization of the office and giving the ideological context to its functioning. This is evidenced by the changing names and personal details. Until the Prime Minister decides who performs this function, the Office of the Plenipotentiary will remain as a part of the political game. This article is an attempt to approximate this problem by analyzing the changes that have occurred over three decades in the functioning of the Office.

X ve Y Kuşaklarının Politik Davranış Algılarının Karşılaştırılması

Author(s): Ayse Elvan Pehlivan,Latife Kılıçsal,Duygu Kizildag / Language(s): Turkish Issue: 1/2019

Employees within the organization, which is also a political structure, conduct various behaviors in order to gain power or to stand up for their self. These behaviors, which are defined as political behavior, can create obstacles or negativities for other employees while they benefit from some of the employees and evaluate them positively. The political perception of behaviors and their positive or negative evaluations depends on the people, situation or time. Also, different generations can evaluate political behaviors from the varied perspective. In this context, the study aims to investigate the effect of generational differences on organizational political behavior perception. For this purpose, interviews with assumption questions based on three different scenarios were conducted with eight participants, who are the academic staff of Afyon Kocatepe University Faculty of Economics and Administrative Sciences. After one-to-one interviews conducted as a pilot study, it was determined that generational differences have not a significant effect on the perception of political behavior.

РЕФЛЕКСИИ ЛАТВИИ НА РОССИЙСКУЮ ГИБРИДНУЮ АГРЕССИЮ В УКРАИНЕ: КЕЙС ПОЛИТИКИ ПАМЯТИ

Author(s): Sergej Pahomenko / Language(s): Russian Issue: 1/2020

The article investigates the influence of Russian hybrid aggression upon Ukraine over politics of memory securitization in Latvia. It shows that research paradigm of Latvian reflections of Ukrainian events in the field of politics of memory supposes interrelationship between politics of memory, historical memory, and security, based on understanding of their constructivist nature and fundamental importance for national identity maintenance. The article clarifies that Russian aggression upon Ukraine using historical memory as public awareness weapons has determined re-actualization of historical experience and collective trauma of Latvians associated with the Soviet occupation and has accelerated the national narrative securitization. This securitization has been carried out in the following directions: fixing of historical memory as national security element in official documents; harsher criminal liability for communist regime glorification, justification, and denial; expansion of prohibition on communist symbols use; inclusion of national narrative with communist regime condemnation in the policy of memory at the EU level.

De-demokratizáció Magyarországon a demokráciaindexek fényében

Author(s): István Benedek / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 2/2019

The optimism of the third wave of democratization has declined in the late 90s and a grey zone between liberal democracies and autocracies has developed. The evaluation and classification of these intermediate regimes is complicated because the various models, terms and indices of democracy significantly differ from each other in many aspects, such as the preconditions, the criteria, and the presumed aim, meaning or functioning of democracy (and politics in general). This study examines the most relevant democracy indices to facilitate the location of the contemporary Hungarian regime in this murky zone, focussing on the most ’injured’ areas of the quality of democracy. The indices used are those of Freedom House, IDEA International Global State of Democracy, Varieties of Democracy, Economist Intelligence Unit and Bertelsmann Stiftung.

Demokratikus vezetés mint „bálványfogalom”?

Author(s): Rudolf Tamás Metz / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2020

The tension between democracy and political leadership is one of the great paradoxes in the fi eld of political theory and political leadership studies. The contradiction emerges in the expectations towards leaders that require leaders to solve community problems and to enforce the public will at any cost, but at the same time to respect the rules of democracy, to allow and not to jeopardize the self-government of the people or civic participation. The literature has pointed out that the question is not whether leadership is necessary for the functioning of democracy, but how these concepts and practices can be linked to each other. Accordingly, this study is based on the presupposition that democracy and leadership are not only conceptually related, but they also depend on each other in practice. The article is written with the modest ambition to illustrate the necessity of this conceptual relationship from the perspective of leadership. Drawing on political and generic leadership literature, the paper unravels the stable denotation, the strict boundaries and the normative connotations of leadership that make democratic leadership not an oxymoron, but even an “idol concept”.

Speaking in Formulae Fitting the Traditional Culture into The Current Chinese Political Discourse

Author(s): Mugur Zlotea / Language(s): English Issue: 2 (32)/2020

Starting from the report the Secretary General Xi Jinping delivered at the 19th Party Congress, the paper analyzes the relation between traditional culture and socialism with Chinese characteristics for a new era. Since socialism with Chinese characteristics has always been discursively related to the Chinese tradition and political speeches abound in references to tradition, we intend to find out what role tradition plays in the “new era” and what makes it important. The paper discusses the relation between the guiding Marxist ideology and tradition and looks at how the importance of tradition is explained to the masses by employing ritualistic formulae. The analysis is based on the elite political discourse and subsequent academic discourse acting as commentaries to the political discourse.

Felix Dodds (2019) Stakeholder Democracy: Represented Democracy in a Time of Fear. New York: Routledge. 262 pages.

Author(s): Alíz Nagy / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2020

The End of War

Author(s): Dayton International Peace Museum / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Kraj rata

Author(s): Dayton International Peace Museum / Language(s): Bosnian,Croatian,Serbian Issue: 1/2021

Pragmatics of Eponyms in Political Discourse (On the Material of the Speeches of Politicians)

Author(s): Zharas Taubayev / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

Eponyms are complicated, unique constructs named after people and places used in special-professional areas of science. One of those specific areas is politics/political discourse. The main purpose of this article is to investigate the political discourse of politicians (Barack Obama, Vladimir Putin) in the period from 2012 to 2017 to reveal the pragmatic potential and skillful use of eponyms used by the latter when they ran for presidency as a means of influence. Results show that eponyms are becoming powerful language tools of political discourse. At each stage of work, various methods were used to complete the analysis. Such methods include the diachronic method, definition analysis (descriptive method), and discourse analysis. Using different methods, especially discourse analysis, considerably facilitated the research process, enabling the identification of the pragmatic effects of eponyms. The main reasons that eponyms frequently appear in political discourse are the existence of new political eras, modern political events, and controversial political issues.

Britain and Europe at a Crossroads. The Politics of Anxiety and Transformation, by Andrew Ryder

Author(s): Péter Futó / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2021

This is an interesting and coherent book which offers a specific interpretation of Brexit by following the political discourse and investigating its linguistic and rhetoric context.

A politikai vezetés narratív konstrukciója. A magyarországi politikai vezetéskutatási munkák konstruktivista olvasata

Author(s): Botond Gergely Árpási / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 2/2021

This article seeks to review the Hungarian literature on political leadership from a social constructivist point of view. The text is based on the premise that there is an ‘elective affinity’ between the constructivist mode of inquiry focusing on intersubjectivity and the approach emphasising the formative role of political leadership. This concept not only allows the structuring of the Hungarian literature, but it may nonetheless prove useful in grasping the unique features of the significant directions of this fi eld on a theoretical level. Namely, the particularity of this discourse is its leader-centric focus on the one hand, while showing recurring constructivist premises on the other. All this, in a constructivist reading, means that political leaders play a formative role in the linguistic and discursive construction of our social and political reality, thus the meaningful social reality is greatly created via leadership narratives.

Supporting the President in a #NotMyPresident Context: Experiences of College-Aged Trump Supporters at a Southern University

Author(s): Madison Adams / Language(s): English Issue: 4/2021

In light of sexual misconduct allegations involving the former president of the United States, this study analyzes the reasons some university students provide for their continued support of Donald Trump. Relying on ten semi-structured qualitative interviews with college students who align with the president, this paper identifies three interrelated stages making up a model of support. First, students identify their conservative worldviews as helping to explain their initial support of Trump. Second, given the numerous accusations leveled against the president in the media, students readily use neutralization tactics to counter these narratives and rationalize their continued support. Finally, they feel vilified at their university and elsewhere for supporting Trump, and they find it necessary to conceal their opinions. Such experiences do not contribute to them questioning their beliefs. On the contrary, they lead to more entrenched and rigid support of the president. By identifying this three-stage process and applying neutralization theory to better understand it, this paper contributes to the existing sociological literature on the persistence of conservatism in the United States today.

Integráció a polarizáció árnyékában

Author(s): Dániel Oross / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 3/2021

(Kovách Imre [szerk.]: Integrációs mechanizmusok a magyar társadalomban. Társadalomtudományi Kutatóközpont–Argumentum Kiadó, Budapest, 2020, 444 oldal)

Út a Fideszhez. Politikai szocializációs utak a pártválasztáshoz a magyar egyetemisták körében

Author(s): Zoltán Kmetty,Andrea Szabó / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 4/2021

Several publications have been published on the party election of Hungarian students in the last decade. These analyses suggest that the paths of young people to parties may be related to the composition of the family of origin, the socio-cultural environment, the peer group’s design, and the socialisation mechanisms of the school system. However, few studies have examined the dimensions of socialization dynamically and analyzed how a young person is associated with a particular party through political socialization pathways. Our research uses complex SEM (Structural Equation Modelling) models to draw the typical paths that lead to Fidesz with high statistical probability. We assume that sufficient time has passed since the regime change to develop a typical pathway to the dominant party based on party identification. Our results show that religiosity is a crucial factor in the attachment to Fidesz among university students. At the same time, conservatism defi ned along values do not play a role, but positioning on the left-right axis is an essential discriminatory factor.

A Covid–19-világjárvány biztonságiasítása metaforikus politikai diskurzussal

Author(s): Anna Molnár,Lili Takács,Éva Jakusné Harnos / Language(s): Hungarian Issue: 1/2022

Politicians’ response to the COVID–19 pandemic worldwide relied on war scenarios having a tradition in disease management. The study contrasts how the political measures introduced during the state of emergency were presented by the Prime Minister of Hungary in his social media posts and his speeches and announcements broadcast by public media. A computer assisted content analysis was conducted to extract data on war and military metaphors, followed by a qualitative analysis of the metaphor scenarios used for explaining the situation and justifying action. The role of the PM indicated by the social media posts and by his transcribed speeches was compared with the suggestion of the visual illustrations. Our findings were that verbal communication shifted between war-related metaphoric and military-related realistic. The third conceptual domain identified was fear. Messages were mostly about national cohesion, however, visually, the PM was the protagonist of the events. The communication proved efficient according to opinion polls. Our research revealed how the securitization of the pandemic took place via the political discourse constructed both for internet users and traditional media consumers. Metaphors of fear, war and military action created the justification of the declaration of a state of emergency. The PM as a capable and responsible leader was placed in focus of the events. Although verbal messages by the PM were centred on a sense of community and joint action, the personalization of political action was remarkable by indirect means, such as visual messages. The personalization of politics throughout the period researched served the purpose of securitization of the pandemic with the PM as a charismatic leader attracting attention and giving credit to the severity of the threat along with the introduction of extraordinary measures.

‘All that custom has divided’

Author(s): Bertalan Bordás / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Ryder, A. (2020). Britain and Europe at a Crossroads: The Politics of Anxiety and Transformation. Bristol University Press

Power and Narcists – Ideal Types of States Based on Their Sources of National Power, Extraction Capability and Foreign Policy Behaviour

Author(s): Mateusz Filary-Szczepanik / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2022

This paper aims at problematizing this distinction between status quo and revisionist/imperialist states by creating a typology of four kind of states: imperialist, status quo, young and old narcist state. The text will proceed in three sections that: 1) problematises the contemporary realist theorising; 2) reconstructs Morgenthau’s notions of sources of national and political power, ideal types of foreign policy and the character of political community and its interest; 3) presents the four ideal types of states. This typology, based on analyticist metatheory and deeply inspired by Hans Morgenthau’s thought, aims at solving problems with neorealist, and neoclassical realist theorising. Based on such non-positivist metatheory, and thus closer to the classical realist roots, it omits the offensive/defensive neorealist assumption about states motivation. By explicitly combining the three historically bound qualities of states –their sources of national power, extraction capability and foreign policy behaviour it transcends the problems with weak causal linkages between state level variables present in neoclassical realism. Hence, it exemplifies the approach to general theory-building that is practically viable for explicitly exerting normative judgement, also from the perspective non great power state actors – the consistent weakness of mainstream, contemporary realist theorising.

Dueling Personalities and Leadership Styles: Gül, Erdoğan, and the Parliament in Turkey’s Policymaking during the 2003 Iraq War

Author(s): Barış Kesgin / Language(s): English Issue: 6/2022

Recent research in International Relations pays more attention to the role of individuals in world politics. The subfield of Foreign Policy Analysis, in contrast, has a long-standing record in advancing its explanation of individuals in foreign policy. Specifically, at-a-distance approaches to studying individuals have grown noticeably. New theoretical connections (for example, to role theory), an expansion of its subjects and linguistic capabilities beyond English promise a growing literature in years to come. To continue to exploit the exploratory promise and illustrate these approaches’ability to account for individuals’impact on decision-making, this paper investigates Turkish foreign policymaking into the 2003 Iraq War under the leadership of two prime ministers. It utilizes Leadership Trait Analysis to profile Gul and Erdoğan, reports from multiple elite interviews, and connects the two leaders’profiles with associated behavioral expectations in their engagement with the parliament. Based on its findings in leaders’profiles and case study discussion, the paper argues an individual focused analysis offers much insight to understanding foreign policymaking processes and outcomes.