Scholarly Works, Political Science

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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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Countering the Cyber Threat
Brantly, Aaron F.; Henry, Shawn (The Army Cyber Institute, 2018-05-09)
The current path to national cybersecurity hides a fatal design flaw. Resident within the current national approach is the assumption that we can continue business as usual with limited sharing between the public and the private sector, the creation of information sharing and analysis centers, the National Cybersecurity and Communications Integration Center, and a range of ad hoc local, state and federal organizations each addressing a slice of a complex and highly interconnected environment. The result is a lack of integrated coordination, continued hacks, and a public increasingly weary of all things cyber. We are approaching the current challenge as if we are living in August of 2001, ignorant and oblivious to the tragedies just over the horizon. All the while the private sector treats each incident in isolation, highly focused on their slice of a broader digital ecosystem. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, Congress, the executive agencies and departments, and the judicial system in coordination with the will of the American people moved swiftly on legislation and strategies to address a complex asymmetric threat. While many of these new pieces of legislation failed in the courts, the unity of effort and the subsequent cooperative environment across all levels of government, and with the private sector, have arguably altered the national security posture and environment within the United States. Most of these changes have created a safer and more resilient domestic environment that has largely been spared the ravages of foreign-inspired terrorism. While not perfect, the current approaches adapted through years of learning, information sharing, and practice have safeguarded the homeland in an increasingly dangerous world. Lessons from the last 16 years of countering terrorism (CT) should serve as a roadmap for developing a robust, whole-of-society approach to safeguarding the homeland against the threats emanating from cyberspace looming beyond view.
Crisis, Gender Role Congruency, and Perceptions of Executive Leadership
Davidson-Schmich, Louise K.; Jalalzai, Farida; Och, Malliga (2023-01)
At a time of pandemics, international economic downturns, and increasing environmental threats due to climate change, countries around the world are facing numerous crises.What impact might we expect these crises to have on the already common perception that executive leadership is a masculine domain? For years, women executives’ ability to lead has been questioned (Jalalzai 2013). However, the outbreak of COVID-19 brought headlines like CNN’s “Women Leaders Are Doing a Disproportionately Great Job at Handling the Pandemic” (Fincher 2020). Do crises offer women presidents and prime ministers opportunities to be perceived as competent leaders? Or do they prime masculinized leadership expectations and reinforce common conceptions that women are unfit to lead? We maintain that people’s perceptions of crisis leadership will depend on whether the crisis creates role (in)congruity between traditional gender norms and the leadership expectations generated by the particular crisis.
Critical Protection for the Network of Persons
Hiller, Janine S.; Berger-Walliser, Gerlinde; Brantly, Aaron F. (University of Pennsylvania School of Law, 2022)
The world is facing a future of sensored surveillance, filled with pervasive ultra-small connected devices, added to relatively larger ones already present in appliances and everyday technology today. Sensors will be bound to people as well as the environment, and people will provide much of the data that will compose the fundamental building blocks of a decisional infrastructure. Threats emanating from incompetence, unethical conduct, criminals, and nation states will put national security at increased risk because of new levels of potential harm to individual citizens as well as potential damage to physical infrastructure. A future that includes intimate electronic connections with a person’s body creates an imperative to secure a Network of Persons (NoP), rather than of things. Sensor driven collection of huge amounts of data from individuals can impact the fundamental meaning of citizenship, affect economic prosperity, and define personal identity, all in a world composed of dwindling nodes of mediation between humans and automated systems. Intimately connected technology is increasingly interweaving persons in ways that extend the importance and relevance of critical infrastructure protections to the person. The present disjointed and fragmented approaches of Europe and the United States exacerbate the problems and elevate the importance of reconsidering designations of critical infrastructure. A new designation of a Critical Network of Persons (CNoP) does not obviate or alleviate the risks associated with the technologies; rather, it begins to shift the burden of risk mitigation and protection away from those least capable, towards the state and its partners. This paper proposes critical infrastructure protection for life critical functions in the NoP and argues that because the person is the building block for this critical infrastructure protection, the government’s duty is qualitatively different from its duty to protect other critical infrastructures. Establishing a CNoP reorients the scope and focus to that of the citizen, the person—the building block of the nation. Ensuring the security at the individual level is imperative for maintaining national security for all.
The cultural and structural motivations of cheap mobility: The case of retirement migrants in Spain and Costa Rica
Repetti, Marion; Lawrence, Jennifer L. (Pergamon-Elsevier, 2021-08-01)
Retirement migration is an increasingly common phenomenon. It involves the relocation of retirees from richer countries of the global North to places in the world where the costs of living are lower. In contrast from most other migrants, these retirees do not generally relocate to find more work opportunities. Aeromobility, namely frequent air travel, is a key aspect of their ability to be geographically mobile, which social scientists often depict as reflecting the economic advantages and consumerist culture of a new generation of older people. In addition, some experts consider older people’s carbon footprint to be particularly large due to their economic advantages and lack of ecological values (e.g., see Haq et al., 2010). The literature on retirement migration scarcely focuses on the role that aeromobility—particularly cheap flights—plays in retirement migrants’ decision to relocate and their experiences after migration. Using the cases of retirement migrants in Spain and Costa Rica, this article aims to better understand why some retired citizens of richer countries engage in lifestyles based on high-frequency travel, particularly when their migration is driven by the search for more economic security. To answer this question, we argue that values alone do not sufficiently explain social practices and individual decision-making, including the seeming prioritisation of mobility over sustainability.
Cyber Actions by State Actors: Motivation and Utility
Brantly, Aaron F. (2014-05-12)
Covert action is as old as political man. The subversive manipulation of others is nothing new. It has been written about since Sun Tzu and Kautilya. People and nations have always sought the use of shadowy means to influence situations and events. Covert action is and has been a staple of the state system. A dark and nefarious tool often banished to philosophical and intellectual exile, covert action is in truth an oft-used method of achieving utility that is frequently overlooked by academics. Modern scholars contend that, for utility to be achieved, activities such as war and diplomacy must be conducted transparently. Examined here is the construction of utility for a subset of covert action: cyber attacks.
The Cyber Losers
Brantly, Aaron F. (2014-05-22)
National security cyber activities harm human rights and democracy activists. With increasing state cyber capabilities comes heightened pressure on civil society and democracy activists.We often think of the cyber arms race from the perspective of states and corporations; however, the real losers are activists who seek to promote democracy, development, and human rights. This article examines how advances in national security activities have created a new spectrum of issues for activists not previously encountered, and posits a theory of externalities emanating from the cyber arms race.
Cyberculture’s Abstract Utopias: Silicon Valley and Cleaner, Greener, Leaner Rules for a “New Economy”
Luke, Timothy W. (University of Texas at Arlington Libraries, 2023-10-20)
The Death of Neoliberal Realism?
Wheeler, Zachariah (2020-06)
The Delicate Order of Liberalism: Resentment Politics and the Public Trust
Nelson, Scott G.; Shelton, Joel T. (University of Chicago Press, 2021-10-01)
In response to the advance of right-wing populism in many Western democracies, political economists have sought explanations for political disaffection in the socioeconomic dislocations wrought by globalization, deindustrialization, and automation. Distrust of institutions and elites has been identified as a consequence of open markets and neoliberal governance. While affirming the public trust as a cornerstone of liberal democracy, this article directs analysis of the contemporary condition to a broader set of uniquely psychosocial and cultural dynamics. We identify sentiments ranging from disillusion to defiance that are now fueling a runaway politics narrowly defined around race, ethnicity, and national identity. We examine the stakes of eroding public trust in historical and theoretical perspective through an analysis of key works of Karl Polanyi, John Maynard Keynes, and E. H. Carr. Drawing parallels to their assessments of the interwar period, we argue that today’s resentment politics is not singularly the product of economic hardship or even institutional failure, but emerges also from a breakdown of the social and cultural ties that underpin liberalism—a “delicate order” built in part on sublimated psychosocial understandings of agency and community. Democracy again hangs in the balance.

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