As migrações : uma leitura política e uma visão humanista

Ao ter como base geral de pesquisa – A Europa diante do fenómeno migratório - a procura de uma nova Humanização – o objectivo deste trabalho consistiu na análise de algumas formas de manifestação e do impacto deste fenómeno nas sociedades democráticas inseridas nesse espaço. A consciência que as migrações têm seguido a história do mundo e as civilizações e que a sua análise permite avaliar o destino de seres humanos que partem em busca de soluções para as suas vidas. A convicção que a configuração das migrações tem um amplo significado social, cultural e económico e que uma política de imigração fechada, repressiva ou redutora do seu verdadeiro significado pode dividir a Humanidade. O receio que gera a continuidade de uma visão unilateral do Mundo e o esquecimento das condições existenciais difíceis de alguns países de emigração. A renúncia de alguns em escutar um discurso carecido de autenticidade e em apoiar um diálogo comprometido com alguns pressupostos ideológicos pouco claros. O desejo de participar na denúncia da propagação de atitudes facilitadoras dos sentimentos racistas e xenófobos. O repúdio pelo desnorteamento ontológico traduzido pela defesa de certas atitudes persecutórias infringidas aos imigrantes clandestinos. A adopção de uma política basicamente norteada pelo controlo das fronteiras e pela exploração económica dos imigrantes. A indignação pelo esquecimento ou negligência na vigilância e aplicação dos direitos fundamentais, em concreto, o direito ao uso da liberdade, a uma vida familiar normal, situações que lesam muitos. Foram, em suma, as razões que motivaram o trabalho. Porque, igualmente o exercício da cidadania e a inserção num espaço mundial em transformação requerem a actualização da leitura das relações dos homens entre eles e com as formas espaciais; porque o papel dos imigrantes na economia contemporânea é sentido como algo fundamental, e também a importância do seu lugar na estratégia de um desenvolvimento sustentável deve ser demonstrada e respeitada, desejou-se partilhar com outros a oportunidade de defender a participação colectiva sob princípios e premissas mais humanistas, e considerados fundamentais, para a construção de uma política de imigração digna, mais abrangente e indutora de pontes abertas e não de áreas amuralhadas.

Paradise postponed? The Department of National Heritage and political hegemony

Established following the Conservative Party's election victory in April 1992, the Department of National Heritage has been heralded as an important stage in the growing recognition of the significance of the leisure industry to Britain. By combining, for the first time, responsibility for sport, tourism, the arts, libraries, heritage, broadcasting and film, and by providing them with Cabinet representation, a unique opportunity has, seemingly, been provided to develop and promote the interests of leisure in Britain. This paper takes the view that although this initiative has been broadly welcomed, there are important inconsistencies which require attention. On the one hand the selection of the portfolio appears somewhat eclectic. On the other hand, it is questionable why such a department should have been developed at all. An inspection of the implicit ideology suggests that rather than the traditional use of the state to promote leisure interests, the introduction of the department signifies a shift to the use of leisure to promote the Government's interests. Thus the new Department of National Heritage is to be used as a central feature in the legitimation of the government's political programme. Rather than emphasising its traditional quasi-welfare role, the new place for leisure and heritage is firmly in the market economy. Whilst a leisured society may be the epitome of post-industrialism, therefore, the citizen rights claim for access to leisure activities can only be secured by engaging with the market. This legitimised construction of post- modern citizenship is at the centre of a new political order where choice has been replaced by means and where the classless paradigm championed by the Prime Minister will be a classlessness of constructed omission.

Planning, conservation and political ideology: the British case

This paper examines some broad issues concerning the role that conservation policy plays in statutory planning in Britain. It argues that planning contains a number of different, often conflicting, objectives. Conservation, in contributing to one of these objectives, exacerbates this conflict. The paper further argues that since different objectives are accorded different priorities depending upon the prevailing political ideology, conservation policy is not only operating within the context of possibly opposing planning objectives, but also within a particular political environment which will separately determine the degree of importance attached to it. The British example is used to explore these themes, particularly in examining the ideological basis for the redefinition of preservation and protection away from their welfarist traditions towards issues of private rights and market supremacy. The paper concludes that rather than contributing to social welfare, planning and conservation policy is now contributing to the increasing division between rich and poor in society.

Invisible and visible language planning: ideological factors in the family language policy of Chinese immigrant families in Quebec

This ethnographic inquiry examines how family languages policies are planned and developed in ten Chinese immigrant families in Quebec, Canada, with regard to their children’s language and literacy education in three languages, Chinese, English, and French. The focus is on how multilingualism is perceived and valued, and how these three languages are linked to particular linguistic markets. The parental ideology that underpins the family language policy, the invisible language planning, is the central focus of analysis. The results suggest that family language policies are strongly influenced by socio-political and economical factors. In addition, the study confirms that the parents’ educational background, their immigration experiences and their cultural disposition, in this case pervaded by Confucian thinking, contribute significantly to parental expectations and aspirations and thus to the family language policies.

International terrorism, domestic political instability, and the escalation effect

What are the main causes of international terrorism? Despite the meticulous examination of various candidate explanations, existing estimates still diverge in sign, size, and significance. This article puts forward a novel explanation and supporting evidence. We argue that domestic political instability provides the learning environment needed to successfully execute international terror attacks. Using a yearly panel of 123 countries over 1973–2003, we find that the occurrence of civil wars increases fatalities and the number of international terrorist acts by 45%. These results hold for alternative indicators of political instability, estimators, subsamples, subperiods, and accounting for competing explanations.

On the significance of the basic structure: a priori baseline views and luck egalitarianism

This paper uses the exploration of the grounds of a common criticism of luck egalitarianism to try to make an argument about both the proper subject of theorising about justice and how to approach that subject. It draws a distinction between what it calls basic structure views and a priori baseline views, where the former take the institutional aspects of political prescriptions seriously and the latter do not. It argues that objections to luck egalitarianism on the grounds of its harshness can in part be explained by this blindness to relevant features of institutions. Further, it may be that luck egalitarianism cannot regard its own enactment as just. A related objection to Dworkin’s equality of resources, which claims that it cannot pick a particular institutional background to set the costs of resources and so is radically indeterminate, is also presented. These results, I argue, give us good reason to reject all a priori baseline views.

Impact of the 1980 election on ideological liberal organizations

Throughout this section, I sought to establish a nexus between interest group theory and empirical observations. This in turn, would provide the framework from which I would set forth a series of hypotheses concerning the impact of the deviating 1980 elections on ideological liberal organizations. What I found in fact, was not just a link but a near perfect correlation between theory and practice, each reinforcing the other and pointing to the same ineluctable conclusion: The upshot of the Reagan/New Right landslide of 1980 was a dramatic renaissance of American liberalism. A renaissance so pervasive that ideological liberal organizations stand to benefit tremendously in terms of sustaining membership and raising funds. Moreover, it promises to facilitate the formation of liberal lobbying coalitions and enhance their capacity to cultivate grass roots support.

Missão organizacional, uma questão de discurso?: por uma análise crítica

A partir do entendimento de que as grandes corporações são poderosos agentes políticos, econômicos e sociais e que suas missões organizacionais sintetizam a sua razão de ser e existir, o estudo tem como objetivo desvelar o conteúdo político e ideológico subjacente ao discurso empresarial das missões das maiores empresas do Brasil. Assim, foram analisadas as missões divulgadas nas homepages institucionais e/ ou de relações com investidores das 64 empresas que compõem a carteira teórica do Ibovespa, principal indicador do desempenho médio das cotações do mercado de ações brasileiro. Os dados foram analisados à luz das tendências de apropriação do simbolismo pela cultura organizacional, da Análise Crítica do Discurso (ACD), instrumento teórico transdisciplinar que busca compreender a relação entre linguagem, poder, ideologia e sociedade e da perspectiva foucaultiana de discurso, entendendo-o como um espaço de luta pela estabilização dos sentidos, que se pretendem hegemônicos. Os dados foram tratados de forma quantitativa, em busca das palavras de uso mais frequente e, consequentemente de maior relevância, e qualitativa, agrupando-as em categorias lexicais em função de seu significado e de seu papel na declaração de missão organizacional. Os resultados revelam a estrutura subjacente do discurso das missões, permitindo a identificação de perfis específicos de empresas segundo suas características discursivas. Além disso, o trabalho discute como o discurso empresarial se apropria da dimensão simbólica com o propósito de controlar e manipular os trabalhadores, legitimar a atuação das empresas perante a sociedade e naturalizar os preceitos da ideologia neoliberal, apresentando o sistema capitalista atual como a única, melhor e inexorável forma de organização e de produção societária.

The political economy of Mexico's dollarization debate

Includes bibliography

Political violence and economic development in Latin America: issues and evidence

Includes bibliography

La comunicazione della cooperazione allo sviluppo: gli Enti Pubblici. Analisi discorsive dei Siti Web

Our research takes place in the context of a discipline kwown as Communication for Development, sited inside the field of Communication for Social Change, characterized by the use of interpersonal ad mass communication theories and tools, applyied to international development cooperation. Our study aims at pointing out a change of paradigm in this field: our object is Public Administration’s communication, therefore, what we suggest is a shift from Communication for Development, to Development Communication. The object of our study, hence, becomes the discourse itself, in its double action of representation and construction of reality. In particular, we are interested in the discourse’s tribute to the creation of a collective immagination, wich is the perspective towards which we have oriented the analysis, through a structuralist semoitics-based methodology integrated with a socio-semiotic approach. Taking into consideartion the fact that in our contemporary society (that is to say a ‘Western’ and ‘First World’ society), the internet is a crucial public space for the mediation and the management of collective immagination, we chose the web sites of Public Bodies which are dedicated to International Cooperation has our analysis corpus. This, due to their symbolic and ideologic significance, as well as for the actual political responsibility we think these web sites should have. The result of our analysis allows us to suggest some discoursive strategies used in the web sites of Public Bodies. In these sites, there is a tendency to shift the discourses around international cooperation from the ideological axis - avoiding in so doing to explicit a political statement about the causes of injustices and un-balances which lead to the necessity of a support in development (i.e. avoiding to mention values such as social justice and democracy while acknowledging socio-economical institutions which contribute to foster underdevelopment on a global scale) -, to the ethical axis, hence referring to moral values concerning the private sphere (human solidarity and charity), which is delegated mainly to non governamental associations.

The Blue Dog Coalition: Impact of a Single-Issue Caucus from the 104th to the 110th Congress

The Blue Dog Coalition is an informal organization of legislators within the House of Representatives that strives to influence policy on fiscal responsibility, attract the attention of the electorate, They are a group that elicits wide range of reactions covering the length of the political spectrum, but despite this, their claims of special defense of fiscal conservatism within the Democratic Party have gone relatively undocumented by the academic community.This project has integrated a party literature with a caucus literature, in the attempt of building a novel framework for research. Work on polarization, the significance of parties, the purpose and history of caucuses all have been fused in such away that the Blue Dogs have created an opportunity to test broad congressional questions on a caucus-microcosm scale. Three important questions have emerged from the many possible avenues of exploration on the topic: How does admission into the Blue Dog Coalition effect voting behavior - measured by interest, ideology, and party unityscores? How does party leadership delegate prestigious committee assignments, a traditional indicator of partisan favor and influence, towards Blue Dogs? Can we use the Blue Dog Coalition as an indicator of fiscal conservatism? To each of these questions, a number of interesting results emerged. Blue Dogs, in the 104th scored higher in conservative interest group scores, more towards the center in ideological methods, and lower in party unity Dogs began to behave closer to their Democratic counterparts. In addition, membership on these select committees rose from a very small number to greater proportional parity within the Democratic Party. Perhaps most interesting, the Blue Dog Coalition does behave as a significant, independent predictor effect on NTU scores, a variable used to demonstrate fiscal conservatism. This research has shown, first and foremost, that it is useful and practical to applyold arguments within the party literature to a smaller, caucus level of analysis that is relatively untouched by the political science field. For the Blue Dogs, specifically, we have tested the validity of their claims in an attempt to reach broader questions ofdemocratic responsibility and electoral clarity. This work, and other work I have drawn upon, has barely scratched the surface on Blue Dog Democrats and other caucuses of comparable influence and popularity, and there remains a wealth of research material onthis caucus alone to be explored by scholars in the field of congressional politics.

A Sociological Study of the Political Subsystem in Yugoslavia

In this critical analysis of sociological studies of the political subsystem in Yugoslavia since the fall of communism Mr. Ilic examined the work of the majority of leading researchers of politics in the country between 1990 and 1996. Where the question of continuity was important, he also looked at previous research by the writers in question. His aim was to demonstrate the overall extent of existing research and at the same time to identify its limits and the social conditions which defined it. Particular areas examined included the problems of defining basic concepts and selecting the theoretically most relevant indicators; the sources of data including the types of authentic materials exploited; problems of research work (contacts, field control, etc.); problems of analysisl and finally the problems arising from different relations with the people who commission the research. In the first stage of the research, looking at methods of defining key terms, special attention was paid to the analysis of the most frequently used terms such as democracy, totalitarianism, the political left and right, and populism. Numerous weaknesses were noted in the analytic application of these terms. In studies of the possibilities of creating a democratic political system in Serbia and its possible forms (democracy of the majority or consensual democracy), the profound social division of Serbian society was neglected. The left-right distinction tends to be identified with the government-opposition relation, in the way of practical politics. The idea of populism was used to pass responsibility for the policy of war from the manipulator to the manipulated, while the concept of totalitarianism is used in a rather old-fashioned way, with echoes of the cold war. In general, the terminology used in the majority of recent research on the political subsystem in Yugoslavia is characterised by a special ideological style and by practical political material, rather than by developed theoretical effort. The second section of analysis considered the wider theoretical background of the research and focused on studies of the processes of transformation and transition in Yugoslav society, particularly the work of Mladen Lazic and Silvano Bolcic, who he sees as representing the most important and influential contemporary Yugoslav sociologists. Here Mr. Ilic showed that the meaning of empirical data is closely connected with the stratification schemes towards which they are oriented, so that the same data can have different meanings in shown through different schemes. He went on to show the observed theoretical frames in the context of wider ideological understanding of the authors' ideas and research. Here the emphasis was on the formalistic character of such notions as command economy and command work which were used in analysing the functioning and the collapse of communist society, although Mr. Ilic passed favourable judgement on the Lazic's critique of political over-determination in its various attempts to explain the disintegration of the communist political (sub)system. The next stage of the analysis was devoted to the problem of empirical identification of the observed phenomena. Here again the notions of the political left and right were of key importance. He sees two specific problems in using these notion in talking about Yugoslavia, the first being that the process of transition in the FR Yugoslavia has hardly begun. The communist government has in effect remained in power continuously since 1945, despite the introduction of a multi-party system in 1990. The process of privatisation of public property was interrupted at a very early stage and the results of this are evident on the structural level in the continuous weakening of the social status of the middle class and on the political level because the social structure and dominant form of property direct the majority of votes towards to communists in power. This has been combined with strong chauvinist confusion associated with the wars in Croatia and Bosnia, and these ideas were incorporated by all the relevant Yugoslav political parties, making it more difficult to differentiate between them empirically. In this context he quotes the situation of the stream of political scientists who emerged in the Faculty of Political Science in Belgrade. During the time of the one-party regime, this faculty functioned as ideological support for official communist policy and its teachers were unable to develop views which differed from the official line, but rather treated all contrasting ideas in the same way, neglecting their differences. Following the introduction of a multi-party system, these authors changed their idea of a public enemy, but still retained an undifferentiated and theoretically undeveloped approach to the issue of the identification of political ideas. The fourth section of the work looked at problems of explanation in studying the political subsystem and the attempts at an adequate causal explanation of the triumph of Slobodan Milosevic's communists at four subsequent elections was identified as the key methodological problem. The main problem Mr. Ilic isolated here was the neglect of structural factors in explaining the voters' choice. He then went on to look at the way empirical evidence is collected and studied, pointing out many mistakes in planning and determining the samples used in surveys as well as in the scientifically incorrect use of results. He found these weaknesses particularly noticeable in the works of representatives of the so-called nationalistic orientation in Yugoslav sociology of politics, and he pointed out the practical political abuses which these methodological weaknesses made possible. He also identified similar types of mistakes in research by Serbian political parties made on the basis of party documentation and using methods of content analysis. He found various none-sided applications of survey data and looked at attempts to apply other sources of data (statistics, official party documents, various research results). Mr. Ilic concluded that there are two main sets of characteristics in modern Yugoslav sociological studies of political subsystems. There are a considerable number of surveys with ambitious aspirations to explain political phenomena, but at the same time there is a clear lack of a developed sociological theory of political (sub)systems. He feels that, in the absence of such theory, most researcher are over-ready to accept the theoretical solutions found for interpretation of political phenomena in other countries. He sees a need for a stronger methodological bases for future research, either 1) in complementary usage of different sources and ways of collecting data, or 2) in including more of a historical dimension in different attempts to explain the political subsystem in Yugoslavia.

The Representation of Motherhood in Polish Cinema

The project aimed to analyse representations of motherhood in Polish cinema as a special case of a more general system within the representation of women. It concentrated on the image of the Polish Mother created during the 19th century in Polish culture under the influence of specific political, social and religious factors. Ms. Ostrowska's initial hypothesis was that this symbolic image became one of the most stable elements in Polish cinema and as her research revealed, it was valuable for the preservation of national identity but nevertheless a fiercely constraining model for Polish femininity. In order to fully understand the nature of this persistent image it was initially necessary to related it to broader contexts and issues in representation. These included the image of the Polish Mother within general mythological structures (using the notion of myth in the Barthesian sense). Following her initial research Ms. Ostrowska felt that it was most appropriate to view the myth of the Polish Mother as a dominant ideological structure in the discourse of motherhood within Polish culture. An analysis of the myth of the Polish Mother can provide an insight into how Polish society sees itself at different periods in time and how a national identity was constructed in relation to particular ideological demands stemming from concrete historical and political situations. The analysis of the film version of this myth also revealed some aspects of the national character of Polish cinema. There the image of woman has become enshrined as the "eternal feminine", with virtues which are inevitably derived directly from Catholicism, particularly in relation to the networks of meanings around the central figure of Mary, Mother of God. In 19th century Poland these were linked with patriotic values and images of woman became part of the defence of the very idea of Poland and Polishness. After World War Two, this religious-political image system was adapted to the demands of the new communist ideology. The possibility of manipulating the ideological dimensions of the myth of the Polish Mother is due to the very nature of the image, which as a symbol of civil religion had been able to function independently of any particular state or church institution. Although in communist ideology the stress was on the patriotic aspect of the myth, its pronounced religious aspect was also transmitted, consciously or not, in the denotation process, this being of great significance in the viewer's response to the female character. This appropriation of elements derived from the national patriotic tradition into the discourse of communist ideology was a very efficient strategy to establish the illusion of continuity in national existence, which was supposed to convince society of the rightness of the new political situation. The analysis of films made in the post-war period showed the persistence of this discourse on motherhood in a range of cinematic texts regardless of the changing political situation. Ms. Ostrowska claims that the stability of this discursive formation is to a certain extent the result of the mythological aspect of the mother figure. This mythological structure also belongs to the ideology of Romanticism which in general continues to prevail in Polish cultural discourse as a meta-language of national community. The analysis of the films confirmed the hypothesis of the Polish Mother as a myth-sign whose signifier is stable whereas the signified depends on the specific historical conditions in which it is set. Therefore in the famous propaganda documentary Kobiety naszych dni (Women of Our Days, 1951) by Jan Zelnik, and in other films made after the October 1956 "thaw" it functions as an "empty sign. She concludes that it would be difficult to deny that the myth of the Polish Mother has offered Polish women a special role in national life, granting them a high moral position in the social, hierarchy. However the processes of idealisation involved have resulted in a deprivation of her subjectivity and the right to decide about her own life. This idealisation also served to strengthen traditional patriarchal structures through this set of female obligations to the mother land. In Polish ideology it is not a man who demands sacrifice from a woman but the motherland, which, deprived of the institutions of male power for nearly 150 years, had functioned as a feminine structure. That is why oppressive aspects of the myth have been obscured for so long. While Polish women were doubtless able to accept the constrictions because of their sense of national duty and any misgivings were overridden by the argument of the cause, it is important to recognise that the strength of these constructions, compounded by the ways in which they spoke of and continue to speak of a certain perfection, make them persist into contemporary Poland. Poland is however no longer embattled and the signs that made these meanings are potentially empty. This space for meaning will be and is already being contested and increasingly colonised by current western models of femininity. Ms. Ostrowska's final question is whether this will help to prevent a possible resentful victimisation of the silent and noble Polish Mother.

The Language of Political Conflict: A Logico-Semantic Approach

A semantic approach towards political conflict first emerged in the 1930s and provides the methodological foundations for the description of political conflicts, in particular as the correlation between the language of description and reality. Any military or political confrontation presupposes axiological, conceptual and ideological confrontation. The form of adequate description can only be comprehended if the characteristic features of its language (structure) and thesaurus are revealed. Admitting the possibility of different descriptions implies the necessity of analysing this possible ambiguity, i.e. the characteristic features of the language which enable us to form various statements, including mutually exclusive ones. The insoluble task of finding a middle ground between the viewpoints of the conflicting parties should be replaced by soluble procedures of explaining and assessing the conflicting axiologies. For the description of conflict situations, when it is essential to represent various positions within a uniform system, an apparatus of model semantics seems to be the most appropriate one both for generating alternatives and for bringing them together in a modal system of a world in which procedures of transition from one world to another (i.e. the transworld compatibility between them) are also reflected. Reality is reconstructed not as a sort of middle ground between the mutually exclusive approaches nor as their sum, but as a result of the overlapping of various worlds and the procedures of transition from one state of affairs to another. The description of a conflict is therefore seen as a system of worlds connected by modal relations, with a system of worlds emerging as a reality to be described. This approach makes it possible to describe the processes from the points of view of the participating parties and, at the same time, to reveal their basic attitudes. The main idea of this research is shown by the problems analysed: the description of conflict as methodology; language and behaviour (general problems of semiotic description), the logico-semantic analysis of the notions of "problem and conflict", "Genesis and Chronology", "the recurrent model of the (historical) explanation and interpretation of the conflict". Zolyan used data on the Karabagh conflict to demonstrate the dependence of the structure of semio-cultural codes on current political development and considered post-soviet history as a semio-cultural problem. He sought to consider and reveal the logic of manipulations with history, and proposed the logic of preferences as a possible instrument for achieving compromise.