Transformative realism: reflections of reality in political avant-garde and contemporary fine art film - Spanish Labyrinth, south from Granada

A turn towards documentary modes of practice amongst contemporary fine art video and filmmakers towards the end of the 20th Century, led to moving image works that represent current social realities. This drew some comparisons of these forms of art to journalism and industrial documentary. The practical research is embodied in a single screen film that responds to recent political and ecological realities in Spain. These include the mass demonstrations that led to the occupation of Madrid’s Plaza del Sol and Spain’s in 2011 and largest recorded forest fires that spread through Andalusia in August of the following year. The film, titled Spanish Labyrinth, South from Granada, is a response to these events and also relates to political avant-garde film of the 1930’s by re-tracing a journey undertaken by three revolutionary filmmakers, Yves Allegret, René Naville and Eli Lotar, in 1931. The theoretical research for this project establishes an historical root of artists’ film that responds to current social realities, in contrast to news media, in the Soviet and European avant-garde movements of the 1920s and 1930s. The main aim of this method is to argue the status of the works that I identify, both avant-garde and contemporary, as a form of art that preceded a Griersonian definition of documentary film.

Machiavelli’s Walls: The Legacy of Realism in International Relations Theory

In this paper we argue that Niccolò Machiavelli has little to do with Realism in International Relations theory. By concentrating, as Machaivelli did, on the walls that define political relations—both inside and outside the polity—we find his insights deeply rooted in the specific political contexts of Sixteenth century Italy. Others may wish to generalize from them, but Machiavelli did not. In fact, as we show, Machiavelli was mindful of the difficulties of generalizing about walls and acknowledged the dangers political actors faced in navigating between the internal and external walls of the polity. We examine the geopolitical contours of Machiavelli’s walls and seek to demonstrate how morality is present in these historical spaces. In contrast to Realists, Machiavelli was ready and willing to make ethical judgments. We argue that theorists of international politics should exercise care in reaching for Machiavelli as the iconic thinker for making sense of anarchy in world politics. This article concludes by suggesting that the ideology of Machiavellianism has obscured deeper understanding of the particular contexts of Machiavelli’s own world.

Late twentieth century congressional leaders as shapers of and hostages to political context: Gingrich, Hastert, and Lott

Most contemporary explanations of congressional leadership postulate a version of contextual theory that typically places greatest emphasis on the strength of party and downplays the personal skills of individual leaders. By analyzing the leadership of just three recent individuals—Gingrich, Hastert, and Lott—this essay demonstrates the extent to which these leaders' different styles, skills, and characteristics interacted with changing political contexts and strategic environments to impact political and policy outcomes. Context matters, but so does leadership skill. Most graphically, Gingrich—a rare transforming leader in Burns' typology—demonstrates the importance of the right person and the right conditions being in place at the same time and the ability of an individual imaginative leader to intervene exogenously to have a significant effect on policy outcomes. Yet the essay also demonstrates that even where leaders adopt more conventional transactional styles, as Hastert and Lott did, the skill and success with which they juggle political pressures emanating from different, often conflicting, contexts—skills in context—also matters.

Rethinking crises and the accretion of executive power: the “War on Terror” and conditionality evidence from seven political systems

External shocks to democratic systems are likely to threaten the stability of relations between the executive and the representative assembly. This article investigates the impact of the so-called “war on terror” on executive-assembly relations in comparative perspective. We analyze data from seven countries, which varied in terms of form of government, level of democracy, culture, social structure, and geographic location, to evaluate its effects. We find that whereas in some systems the “war on terror” altered the balance of power between the executive and the assembly, in other cases the extant balance of power was preserved. We postulate various conditions under which the constitutionally sanctioned balance of power is most likely to be preserved in times of crisis.

How can economic and political liberalisation improve financial development in African countries?

The objective of this paper is to study the interactions between Economic liberalisation, Political liberalisation and Financial development in African countries. More specifically, we seek to establish the impact of Economic, Political and institutional openness on financial deepening. The empirical approach will be two-step procedure, first using a difference in difference method to show the various aspect of financial liberalisation on economic and political freedom while the second step will be using panel data techniques from period 1990 to 2005. The estimation results can be summarised as the following, first, Economic and financial liberalisation did account significantly for the financial development performance. While political stability show a positive overall effect on financial development, the association with Political freedom is consistent only after controlling the endogeneity of Political freedom on financial development. This result indicates that the transformation of the political and economic environment has improved the performance of the financial sector.

Symposium: Editing Political Diaries

The witness seminar was held in December 1991 at the Institute of Historical Research in London. It examined some of the key issues surrounding the editing of political diaries, including what to edit, the motivation of the diarist and the value of diaries to historians. Peter Catterall of the ICBH was in the chair. The three principal speakers were Ruth Winstone, editor of Tony Benn's diaries, David Brooks, editor of the diary of Sir Edward Hamilton, and John Barnes, co‐editor with David Nicholson, of the diary of Leo Amery. Other contributors included Jad Adams (biographer of Tony Benn), Kathleen Burk (co‐author of a study of the 1976 IMF crisis), Philip Williamson (editor of the diary of William Bridgeman), M.R.D. Foot (an editor of the Gladstone diaries), and Stuart Ball (editor of the diary of Sir Cuthbert Headlam).

A dynamic role-playing platform for simulations in legal and political education

One big challenge in deploying games-based learning, is the high cost and specialised skills associated with customised development. In this paper we present a serious games platform that offers tools that allow educators without special programming or artistic skills to dynamically create three dimensional (3D) scenes and verbal and non-verbal interaction with fully embodied conversational agents (ECAs) that can be used to simulate numerous educational scenarios. We present evaluation results based on the use of the platform to create two educational scenarios for politics and law in higher education. We conclude with a discussion of directions for the further work.

'The Rich Harmonics of Past Time': Memory and Montage

This article examines John Sommerfield’s 1936 novel, May Day, a work that experiments with multiple perspectives, voices and modes. The article examines the formal experiments of the novel in order to bring into focus contemporary debates around the aesthetics of socialist realism, the politics of Popular Front anti-fascism and the relationship between writers on the left and the legacies of literary modernism. The article suggests that while leftist writers’ appropriations of modernist techniques have been noted by critics, there has been a tendency to assume that such approaches were in contravention of the aesthetics of socialist realism. Socialist realism is shown to be more a fluid and disputed concept than such readings suppose, and Sommerfield’s adaptations of modernist textual strategies are interpreted as key components of a political aesthetic directed towards the problems of alienation and social fragmentation.

Data Visualisation Does Political Things

In this paper I advance the theory of critical communication design by exploring the politics of data, information and knowledge visualisation in three bodies of work. Data reflects power relations, special interests and ideologies that determine which data is collected, what data is used and how it is used. In a review of Max Roser’s Our World in Data, I develop the concepts of digital positivism, datawash and darkdata. Looking at the Climaps by Emaps project, I describe how knowledge visualisation can support integrated learning on complex problems and nurture relational perception. Finally, I present my own Mapping Climate Communication project and explain how I used discourse mapping to develop the concept of discursive confusion and illustrate contradictions in this politicised area. Critical approaches to information visualisation reject reductive methods in favour of more nuanced ways of presenting information that acknowledge complexity and the political dimension on issues of controversy.