Department of Political Science

Permanent URI for this community

https://hdl.handle.net/10919/24253

Browse

Now showing 1 - 20 of 100

The 2020 Indian Farm Laws in the Global Financial-Agritech Accumulation Regime
Gill, Bikrum Singh (2021-10-31)
Much of the popular analysis of the 2020 farmers protests in India identifies an “authoritarian” BJP government as the primary antagonistic force threatening the livelihoods of farmers in major grain producing states such as Punjab. This paper is motivated by concern that such a “methodologically nationalist” and “presentist” account risks obscuring more than it reveals regarding what is at stake in the contestations over the 2020 farm laws. It addresses these limitations by asking instead how the contestation over the farm laws renews the confrontation over the appropriation of the surplus value of the “agrarian South” that was set in motion by the rise of the neoliberal form of global capital accumulation in the late twentieth century. Locating the contemporary moment within the long history and broader geography of neoliberal capitalist imperialism brings to light the accumulation imperatives of global financial-agribusiness capital as key motive forces underpinning the farm laws. Attention is thus drawn in this paper to how the deepening of the privatization, liberalization, and financialization of agriculture in the Global South remains a key strategy for addressing global capital’s structural crises of over-production and over-accumulation. The paper argues that the intensification of neoliberal agrarian restructuring in India via the 2020 farm laws has opened further space for both a familiar mode of global agribusiness accumulation that aims to capture the surplus value of the real agricultural economy and for an emergent agritech mode of accumulation that is centered more on harvesting data in order to generate profits through financial speculation in the derivative agricultural economy. The paper concludes by emphasizing that the farmers movement is correct in contesting the farm laws, as the deepening of Indian agriculture’s integration into global capitalism threatens to render farmers into a category of permanently surplus labor.
The “Accidental Candidate” Versus Europe’s Longest Dictator: Belarus’s Unfinished Revolution for Women
Jalalzai, Farida; Jurek, Steve (Cogitatio, 2023-02)
Women in Central and Eastern Europe have made gains as presidents and prime ministers. A notable exception to this is Belarus, where President Alyaksandr Lukashenka, the longest dictator in Europe, has tightly clung to power since 1994. Sviatlana Tsikhanouskaya surprised many when she threw her hat in the ring for the 2020 presidential election. This article asks how Tsikhanouskaya arose as the 2020 opposition candidate and how gender shaped the campaign. Gender played a central role in her being able to stand in the election. Her husband had been a leading presidential candidate but was imprisoned by the regime. Like women who rose to executive leadership positions, Tsikhanouskaya ran in her husband’s place. Lukashenka permitted her candidacy because he did not see her as a political threat. Lukashenka regularly diminished her candidacy using sexist rhetoric. Tsikhanouskaya’s own campaign highlighted more traditionally feminine traits such as being a nurturer, unifier, and non-power seeking, and only being in politics by chance. Referring to herself as an “accidental candidate,” she made it clear that she sought to unify the Belarussian people against the dictatorship and would step aside after this was accomplished. As de facto opposition leader, she continues to highlight these more feminine qualities and craft a less threatening image.
Ambiguous citizenship policies: Examining implementation gaps across levels of legislation in Jordan
Frost, Lillian (2024-04-10)
Despite the prevalence of ambiguous citizenship policies that say one thing in law and another in implementing regulations, few studies have focused on systematically studying this type of implementation gap, particularly in contexts beyond North America and Europe. This largely has remained the case despite research on discursive policy gaps, which occur between a policy’s stated objectives and its laws, efficacy gaps, which describe when a policy’s outcomes fail to meet its goals, and compliance gaps, which reflect disparities between a state’s commitments to international law and its corresponding domestic policies. How can we advance conceptualizations of law-regulation implementation gaps? This paper proposes one approach by focusing on the content of domestic laws, on the one hand, and the content of related implementing regulations, on the other. When law-regulation discrepancies occur, they illustrate the agency of senior officials in writing this intentional ambiguity into different levels of legislation, challenging assumptions about institutional weakness and lower-level bureaucratic discretion as chief drivers of implementation gaps. The paper illustrates this concept by analyzing discrepancies between Jordan’s nationality and passports laws and their related implementing regulations, particularly regarding Gaza refugees’ access to passports, investors’ access to nationality, and Palestinian-Jordanians’ subjection to nationality withdrawals. These diverse cases of intentional ambiguity demonstrate that such gaps can serve to partially exclude or include a group and can occur with noncitizen and citizen as well as more or less vulnerable groups.
Analyzing the Russian Way of War: Evidence from the 2008 Conflict with Georgia
Beehner, Lionel; Collins, Liam; Ferenzi, Steve; Person, Robert; Brantly, Aaron F. (Modern War Institute, 2018-03-20)
In the dog days of August 2008, a column of Russian tanks and troops rolled across the Republic of Georgia’s northern border and into South Ossetia, sparking a war that was over almost before it began. The war, while not insignificant, lasted all of five days. The number of casualties did not exceed one thousand, the threshold most political scientists use to classify a war, although thousands of Georgians were displaced. By historical comparison, when Soviet tanks entered Hungary in 1956 and Afghanistan in 1979–89, the fatalities totaled 2,500 and roughly 14,000 respectively.1 The Russia-Georgia conflict was a limited war with limited objectives, yet it was arguably a watershed in the annals of modern war. It marked the first invasion by Russian ground forces into a sovereign nation since the Cold War. It also marked a breakthrough in the integration of cyberwarfare and other nonkinetic tools into a conventional strategy— what some observers in the West have termed “hybrid warfare.” Finally, and perhaps most importantly, it provided a stark preview of what was to come in Ukraine in 2014. Russian “peacekeepers,” including unmarked Russian special forces—or Spetsnaz—stationed in the region carried out an armed incursion. That is, Russia used separatist violence as a convenient pretext to launch a full-scale multidomain invasion to annex territory, a type of aggression that many analysts in the West thought was a relic of the twentieth century. The 2008 Russia-Georgia War highlights not a new form of conflict but rather the incorporation of a new dimension to that conflict: cyberspace. Where states once tried to control the radio waves, broadcast television channels, newspapers, or other forms of communications, they now add to these sources of information control cyberspace and its component aspects, websites, and social media.2 This allows Russia to influence audiences around the world. Propaganda, disinformation, and the manipulation of the informational aspects of both conflict and nonconflict settings has been a persistent attribute of state behavior.3 The new dimension added to the conduct of hostilities created by cyberspace is both a challenge to conventional hybrid information manipulation tactics and a benefit. Even though the tactical gains achieved through cyberspace in Georgia by Russian non-state actors had limited impact, the strategic and psychological effects were robust. The plausibly deniable nature of the cyber side of conflict should not be understated and adds a new dimension to hybrid warfare that once required state resources to accomplish. Now, managed through forums and social media, decentralized noncombatants can join the fight. Arguably, the inclusion of cyber means into a kinetic battle, not as a standalone effect but rather as a force multiplier, constitutes a logical progression to the natural evolution of conflict and demonstrates the value of information operations (IO) during conflict.
Asymmetries in Potential for Partisan Gerrymandering
Goedert, Nicholas; Hildebrand, Robert; Travis, Laurel; Pierson, Matthew (2024)
This paper investigates the effectiveness of potential partisan gerrymandering of the U.S. House of Representatives across a range of states. We use a heuristic algorithm to generate district maps that optimize for multiple objectives, including compactness, partisan benefit, and competitiveness. While partisan gerrymandering is highly effective for both sides, we find that the majority of states are moderately biased toward Republicans when optimized for either compactness or partisan benefit, meaning that Republican gerrymanders have the potential to be more effective. However, we also find that more densely populated and more heavily Hispanic states show less Republican bias or even Democratic bias. Additionally, we find that in almost all cases we can generate reasonably compact maps with very little sacrifice to partisan objectives through a mixed objective function. This suggests that there is a strong potential for stealth partisan gerrymanders that are both compact and beneficial to one party. Nationwide, partisan gerrymandering is capable of swinging over one hundred seats in the U.S. House, even when compact districts are simultaneously sought.
Back to Reality: Cross domain deterrence and cyberspace
Brantly, Aaron F. (2018-09-01)
This paper examines cross domain deterrence strategies involving cyber incidents. By focusing on efforts to halt Russian and Chinese cyber operations against the United States this paper examines the importance of developing, maintaining and implementing (when necessary) cross domain deterrence strategies. This paper departs from more theoretic debates on the value and potential success, or lack thereof relating to cyber deterrence strategies and focuses on two cases in which cross domain retaliations were utilized to halt adversary behavior. From these two cases this paper posits a preliminary theory of cross domain deterrence applicable to cyber interactions between states and advances the debates in the field by shifting the center of gravity away from within domain responses to other mechanisms to deter adversary behavior.
Battling the bear: Ukraine's approach to national cyber and information security
Brantly, Aaron F. (Routledge, 2022-01)
Ukraine has faced substantial challenges across multiple fronts in its successful 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Among the greatest challenges Ukraine has faced is the establishment of a national cybersecurity infrastructure capable of withstanding cyberattacks and information operations against military and civilian infrastructures. Ukraine’s experience is counterintuitive to the constant refrain in cyberspace regarding asymmetric advantage. Ukraine has struggled with the help of European and NATO allies to forge multiple organizational structures capable of facilitating national information and cyber defense. This work offers detailed analysis on the construction of national information resilience and cyber capabilities by a medium-sized state under duress and coercion from an adversary state by leveraging interviews with and documents from Ukrainian ministers, general staffs, security service personnel, soldiers, journalists, civilians, and academics conducted over two years. The result is analysis that informs the underlying notions about small to medium state defenses in relation to well-resourced adversaries.
Battling the Bear: Ukraine's Approach to National Cybersecurity
Brantly, Aaron F. (2018-09-29)
Ukraine has faced substantial challenges across multiple fronts its successful 2014 Revolution of Dignity. Among the greatest challenges Ukraine has faced is the establishment of a national cybersecurity infrastructure capable of withstanding cyberattacks and information operations against military and civilian infrastructures. Ukraine’s experience is counterintuitive to the constant refrain in cyberspace regarding asymmetric advantage. Ukraine has struggled with the help of European and NATO allies to forge multiple organizational structures capable to facilitating national cyber defense. This work offers detailed analysis on the construction of national cyber capabilities by a medium sized state under duress and coercion from an adversary state by leveraging interviews with and documents from Ukrainian ministers, General Staffs, Security Service personnel, soldiers, journalists, civilians and academics conducted over two years. The result is analysis that informs the underlying notions about small to medium state cyber defenses in relation to well-resourced adversaries.
Beyond Prepper Culture as Right-wing Extremism: Selling Preparedness to Everyday Consumers as How to Survive the End of the World on a Budget
Luke, Timothy W. (University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, 2021-12-01)
Biopolitical and Disciplinary Peacebuilding: Sport, Reforming Bodies and Rebuilding Societies
Zanotti, Laura; Stephenson, Max O. Jr.; Schnitzer, Marcy H. (Taylor & Francis, 2015-03-25)
The peacebuilding political rationality established in the first years of the current century broadened the target of such efforts from state institutions to populations and adopted an array of disciplinary and biopolitical techniques aimed at changing individuals and the ways they live together. This article explores international organization discourses on sport and peacebuilding and argues that the broad consensus on sport as a peacebuilding strategy is most fruitfully explored in light of the intensification of the biopolitical and disciplinary trajectories of the liberal peace.
Biopolitics: Power, Pandemics and War
Brantly, Aaron F.; Brantly, Nataliya D. (Elsevier, 2023-01-26)
COVID-19 and the subsequent global response have had a profound impact on the public health, economic health, and political health in nearly every country. This article examines the biopolitics of power and pandemics in war. Three case studies are presented: the Spanish influenza outbreak of 1918–1920 and responses to the COVID-19 outbreak in both Syria and in eastern Ukraine. The pandemic's impact has been particularly acute in active warzones, undermining the ability of governments and organizations to enforce public health recommendations, provide for the care of patients, secure supplies, and transmit information.
Biopolitics: Power, Pandemics and War
Brantly, Aaron F.; Brantly, Nataliya D. (2022-03-24)
COVID-19 and the subsequent global response has had a profound impact on the public health, economic health, and political health in nearly every country. The impact of the pandemic has been particularly acute in active warzones where the ability to enforce public health recommendations, to provide for the care of patients, to secure supplies, and transmit information are all undermined. This paper examines the biopolitics of power and pandemics in war. The paper is rooted in three case studies, the Spanish Influenza Outbreak of 1918-1920 and the COVID-19 outbreak and response in Syria, and Eastern Ukraine. The central question posed is how does war influence the biopolitics of public health in active warzones?
The Birth of Energy: Fossil Fuels, Thermodynamics, and the Politics of Work
Daggett, Cara New (Duke University Press, 2019-08)
In The Birth of Energy Cara New Daggett traces the genealogy of contemporary notions of energy back to the nineteenth-century science of thermodynamics to challenge the underlying logic that informs today's uses of energy. These early resource-based concepts of power first emerged during the Industrial Revolution and were tightly bound to Western capitalist domination and the politics of industrialized work. As Daggett shows, thermodynamics was deployed as an imperial science to govern fossil fuel use, labor, and colonial expansion, in part through a hierarchical ordering of humans and nonhumans. By systematically excavating the historical connection between energy and work, Daggett argues that only by transforming the politics of work--most notably, the veneration of waged work--will we be able to confront the Anthropocene's energy problem. Substituting one source of energy for another will not ensure a habitable planet; rather, the concepts of energy and work themselves must be decoupled.
Bitcoin and Cryptocurrencies
Vasek, Marie; Jardine, Eric; Brantly, Aaron F. (Virginia Tech, 2018-05-18)
This panel includes three presentations: “Cryptocurrencies and Financial Crimes” by Marie Vasek; “Cryptocurrencies and Specific Drug Types” by Eric Jardine; and “Bitcoin and OPSEC for Terrorists” by Aaron Brantly. (Please note that due to technical difficulties, slides for the last presentation by Aaron Brantly were not captured on the video). The presentations were given as part of the conference "Understanding the Dark Web and Its Implications for Policy" held on May 18, 2018 at the Virginia Tech Executive Briefing Center in Arlington, Virginia.
Blood is Thicker than Water: Family Ties to Political Power Worldwide
Jalalzai, Farida; Rincker, Meg (GESIS, 2018-01-01)
This article analyzes the relevance of family ties for the recruitment of chief executives - presidents or prime ministers - with special emphasis on gender. Based on a cross-national data-set examining political chief executives from 2000-2017 in five world regions (Sub-Saharan Africa, Latin America, Asia, Europe, and North America), we test several hypotheses and present four main results. First, belonging to a political family (BPF), is an advantage to entering national executive positions around the world, for both democracies and non-democracies. Among those with a sizeable number of executives in this period, regions range from 9 percent (Africa) to 13 percent (Latin America and Europe) of executives BPF. Second, executives' family ties are more powerful (with a previous chief executive) in Asia, Africa, and Latin America and more direct (with an immediate family member) in Asia and Africa. Across the globe, women only made up 6% of chief executives in the time period. Third, females who manage to become chief executives are more often BPF than their male counterparts, particularly in Asia and Latin America. Fourth, regardless of region, family ties nearly always originate from men, not women.
Can the river speak? Epistemological confrontation in the rise and fall of the land grab in Gambella, Ethiopia
Gill, Bikrum Singh (SAGE, 2016-04)
In this paper, I focus on the role of knowledge production in the rise and fall of the Indian multinational agribusiness firm Karuturi’s efforts to become a leading global supplier of food through the initiation of large-scale industrial agricultural production in the Gambella province of Ethiopia. In particular, I interrogate a modernist epistemological framework which privileges the ‘‘developmental’’ knowledge of the Ethiopian state and the ‘‘productive’’ knowledge of Indian capital as central to the urgent task of mastering nature and bringing dormant virgin lands to life, while at the same time it necessarily discounts, through processes of racialization, displaced indigenous peoples and nonhuman life forms as beings incapable of efficient and productive economic activity. My argument in this paper is that while modernist knowledge production and mobilization has been critical to Karuturi’s construction of the Gambella land concession as a staging ground for its launch into global prominence in agro-food provisioning, it has also proved fatal to the project, as the epistemological inability to incorporate indigenous knowledge that accounts for ‘‘extra-human’’ agency left the company dramatically unaware of the particular socio-ecological dynamics of the Baro River ecosystem on whose floodplain the land concession was located.
Citizenship after Trump: Democracy vs. Authoritarianism in a Post-Pandemic Era
Klein, Bradley S.; Nelson, Scott G. (Routledge, 2022-04-01)
What is the fate of democracy at this moment in American history? In Citizenship after Trump, political theorists Bradley S. Klein and Scott G. Nelson explore the meaning of community in the context of intense political polarization, the surge of far-right nationalism and deepening divisions during the coronavirus pandemic. The book urges all Americans to consider the claims of citizenship amidst the forces consolidating today around narrow conceptions of race, nation, ethnicity and religion – each of which imperil the institutions of democracy and strike at the heart of the nation’s political culture. With the ongoing coronavirus pandemic greatly testing American democracy, the authors examine the political, economic and cultural challenges that are posed after the Trump administration’s exceedingly inept leadership response. They also explore the promise and limits of democracy relative to long-standing traditions of American political thought. Citizenship after Trump thus offers valuable and timely resources for self-critical analysis and will stimulate focused discussions about as-of-yet unexplored regions of America’s political history. With chapters on the media, political economy, fascism and social democracy, the aim of this book is to question what Americans have gotten so wrong, politically, and what kind of vision can lead the country out of a truly dangerous impasse in the years ahead.
A Comparative Assessment of Hillary Clinton’s 2016 Presidential Race
Jalalzai, Farida (SAGE, 2018-01-01)
This article assesses how Hillary Clinton’s 2016 presidential loss conforms to established findings within the gender and politics literature about the difficulties women face in running for presidential office. In many ways, Clinton’s loss was predictable, though at times she defied the conventional wisdom. The presidential glass ceiling remains fully intact in the United States now and perhaps the foreseeable future.
Conceptualizing Cyber Deterrence by Entanglement
Brantly, Aaron F. (2018-03-01)
Dr. Brantly was invited to give one of three keynote lectures for the opening of the Cyber Governance and Policy Center at the University of Oklahoma.
CoSINT: Designing a Collaborative Capture the Flag Competition to Investigate Misinformation
Venkatagiri, Sukrit; Mukhopadhyay, Anirban; Hicks, David; Brantly, Aaron F.; Luther, Kurt (ACM, 2023-07-10)
Crowdsourced investigations shore up democratic institutions by debunking misinformation and uncovering human rights abuses. However, current crowdsourcing approaches rely on simplistic collaborative or competitive models and lack technological support, limiting their collective impact. Prior research has shown that blending elements of competition and collaboration can lead to greater performance and creativity, but crowdsourced investigations pose unique analytical and ethical challenges. In this paper, we employed a four-month-long Research through Design process to design and evaluate a novel interaction style called collaborative capture the fag competitions (CoCTFs). We instantiated this interaction style through CoSINT, a platform that enables a trained crowd to work with professional investigators to identify and investigate social media misinformation. Our mixed-methods evaluation showed that CoSINT leverages the complementary strengths of competition and collaboration, allowing a crowd to quickly identify and debunk misinformation. We also highlight tensions between competition versus collaboration and discuss implications for the design of crowdsourced investigations.

Browse

Browsing Department of Political Science by Title

Results Per Page

Sort Options