Imagining Ourselves Beyond the Nation? Exploring Cosmopolitanism in Relation to Media Coverage of Distant Suffering

By Maria Kyriakidou

Volume 9, Issue 3, pages 481-496

Major humanitarian crises and disasters broadcasted around the world are often accompanied by an upsurge of global reactions and outpouring of aid pledges. As such, they become symbolic of a ‘global community’ and ‘cosmopolitan solidarity’. The present paper examines this kind of cosmopolitanism and the role of the media in its construction, providing an empirical dimension to a hitherto largely theoretical discussion. Drawing upon focus group discussions with audience members in Greece, the paper will explore how media disasters are being experienced by audiences and the ways this experience is implicated in their perceptions of the world and their place in it. Focusing on the constant interplay between cosmopolitan and national discourses in participants’ responses, it will be argued that cosmopolitanism and nationalism cannot be sharply juxtaposed, but cosmopolitanism is often framed through the national.

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African Lessons for the International Criminal Court: ‘Give us food. You are our king, but if you do not feed us properly we will get rid of you.‘

By Mehmet Ratip

Volume 11, Issue 1, pages 143-148

He showed his mother a picture of a gleaming flank of roast pork garnished with cherries and pineapple rings and set off with a bowl of raspberries and cream and a gooseberry tart. ‘People don’t eat like that any more,’ his mother said. He disagreed. ‘The pigs don’t know there is a war on,’ he said. ‘The pineapples don’t know there is a war on. Food keeps growing. Someone has to eat it.’

(Coetzee 1985 [1983]:16)

This quote from J. M. Coetzee’s celebrated novel Life and Times of Michael K hopes to serve as a powerful literary reminder of how food, its conditions of production, the root causes of its unequal distribution (and hence its absence in some contexts) dramatically determine whether one perceives the world as just or unjust. In this essay, I discuss the potential role of the International Criminal Court (ICC) in contributing to such food‐related perceptions of justice and injustice. I problematise the possibility of whether the ICC can assign not only individual, but also institutional responsibility for the violations of basic subsistence rights in light of some of the notorious cases of undernourishment, environmental degradation, and political turmoil in Africa. The main argument is that, in order to become a reliable international defender of justice, the ICC should focus more systematically on how massive violations of economic and environmental rights, especially the right to food, directly contribute to the perpetration of those serious crimes which are already within its jurisdiction, namely genocides, crimes against humanity, and war crimes. What I will try to emphasise is that this possible restructuring of the goals and modus operandi of the ICC would mean that the future Court should be more engaged in the field of gross violations of social and economic rights. This, I will argue, is a major requirement so that the ICC can acquire a legitimate authority in the eyes of its distant observers and interlocutors.

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Bent Twigs and Olive Branches: Exploring the Narratives of Dissident Israeli Jews

By Katie Attwell

Volume 13, Issue 1, pages 20-37

Abstract

This article explores symbolic boundaries and identity‐formation of the ‘ethnonational Us’, using narrative analysis of eleven Israeli‐Jewish dissidents. The hegemonic nationalist discourse in Israel – Zionism – constructs the dissidents’ identities as the ‘Virtuous Us’, yet these individuals genuinely try to connect with the ‘Demonized Palestinian Other’. I suggest that the dissidents attempt to use alternative national identity discourses to overcome symbolic boundaries. I highlight inconsistencies within individual dissidents’ narratives and attribute them to the employment of multiple discourses, suggesting that some discourses fail to coherently reconcile ‘national’ history with the well‐being of the Other, whilst others repel dissidents by appearing to negate or destroy their identities. The dissidents, therefore, cannot use the available discourses to fully overcome symbolic boundaries. Only the hegemonic nationalist discourse can offer a self‐evident and compelling enunciation of the dissidents’ political reality, leading one insightful dissident to conclude that there is ‘no way out’ of his dilemma.

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Invisible Americans: Migration, Transnationalism, and the Politics of Difference in HIV/AIDS Research

By Thurka Sangaramoorthy

Volume 8, Issue 2, pages 248-266

Abstract

Using the scholarship on transnationalism and citizenship, this paper examines the politics of difference in HIV/AIDS prevention programmes in the United States and their impact on Haitian migrants and immigrants. It finds that there is a tremendous amount of complex movement of knowledge production and expertise among various constituents who work in the field of HIV/AIDS, and these individuals circulate ideas and technologies of HIV/AIDS across different fields in multiple ways. Through these circulations, information about HIV/AIDS becomes entangled in the debates about relevant knowledge bases, and as a result, questions over culture and modernity. This paper traces how such discourses become framed under the rubric of risk and difference and operate at the level of situated experience. Through ethnographic fieldwork observations and interviews, this paper argues that notions of individual responsibility in HIV/AIDS risk management often become inseparable from notions of racial, ethnic and immigrant identity.

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The Emergence of a New Form of Mexican Nationalism in San Antonio, Texas

By Luis Xavier Rangel-Ortiz

Volume 11, Issue 3, pages 384-403

Abstract

This article explores the role played by a growing community of Mexican national entrepreneurs who are crafting a new form of Mexican nationalism in San Antonio, Texas. This population of Mexican business people is growing in size and influence in the city. The experiences of Mexican entrepreneurs differ from understood forms of Mexican immigration and acculturation to the United States. They differ from previous waves of affluent groups of political and religious Mexican refugees that flourished in San Antonio from 1908 through the 1940s. The integration and cultural adaptation experiences of Mexican entrepreneurs represent a new form of Mexican nationalism that engages both Mexican and American nationalisms in a bidirectional acculturation process. Blending attitudes, values, beliefs, and behaviours of both countries represent a new form of Mexican and American culture emerging in San Antonio at the beginning of the twenty‐first century. To better understand the experiences and dynamics of these business people, this study builds on Pierre Bourdieu’s principles of capital and power.

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