Building Pressures (Asynchronous Session)
Featured Post-truth Politics Culture: Lab Leak Theory and Narrative Battle between the US and China View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Angie Hesham
New information platforms, robust muckraking, and cross-border publics are among the compelling social and political tendencies of our time. It is claimed that the revolution is beset by politically threatening contradictions and decadent counter-trends. One of these alarming developments is the shift to a world of post-truth politics. Promoting the Lab leak theory hypes a global China threat and aims towards undermining the Chinese communist government. To perpetuate US hegemony and undermine China global stance as a responsible player whose unprecedented economic heft has astonished the world. Bob Woodward last book on Trump, in which Trump conceded that Xi had spoken to him early and warned him of the dangers as opposed to Trump public characterization of China misleading the US on the severity of the outbreak, which Trump then escalated to the outlandish claim that this was deliberate bioweapons attack on the US and him personally One can ascribe the lab leak theory to the emerging post-pandemic theory of post-truth politics which aims to amass and shape the public option using the media. One can point to how well-practised culture war tactics used with impunity by competing US factions as well as competing media, have taken root in America's us vs them anti-China narratives. These developments permeate the fractured American psyche in the era of US decline and particularly after devastating governance failures associated with the pandemic. The focus is on the narrative battle over COVID-19 that has escalated between two competing major powers China and the US.
Genesis and Causes of Insurgency in Mizoram: A Critical Analysis View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Thelma Lalhmingthangi
Due to the outbreak of underground Mizo National Front (MNF) in midnight of 28th February 1966, Mizoram was brutally injured in its development which lasted for almost two decades. It had disturbed not only the general administration but also the development exercises as a whole. To counter insurgency, measures of grouping of villages was adopted which further exacerbated the socio-economic conditions of Mizoram. The Mizos had engaged in physical encounter for independence in 1947 itself. But the agreement of the onset of modernity in the Mizo hills caused them to be captivated in Indian Union. But a decade of lack of interest and marginalization by India developed in the alienation of the Mizos. The insurgency found expression after the neglect of the Mizos during the 1959 Famine. The political consciousness of the Mizos before independence of India and the feeling of discontent in political field was of prime importance in the context of insurgency. The present paper focuses mainly on the genesis and the factors determining the causes of insurgency in Mizoram. The paper is mainly based on secondary data and information which is collected from various books, journals, newspaper, and magazines and internet sources.
European Integration, Gramscian Hegemony, and Public Goods: The Challenging Dialectical Social Identity Dynamics of the Construction of a Supranational European Self-Identity Community View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Benedict Edward DeDominicis
The provision of public goods is closely tied to the concept of hegemony. A hegemon provides public goods. This hegemonic power domestically in the ideal-typical case is the sovereign state. Internationally the regional or global hegemon provides public goods. International hegemony is benign if it is perceived as associating with the affirmation of national self-determination to contribute to a supranational liberal political and economic community, e.g., the European Union. The EU’s supernational institutions constitute its political representation, with the EU not being perceived by the modal EU citizenry as a cloak for German neo-colonialism. International hegemony is benign if the public goods it is functionally viewed as providing allow for social creativity strategies among the nation state member components, i.e., the national components are different in their features and contributions, but equal in status. Exploitation of these social creativity opportunities permit individual social mobility into the supranational European identity of liberal and economic values. Public health is a public good and the Covid-19 pandemic illuminates the necessity of global institutional infrastructure to provide it, which requires appealing to a global public. The existing institutional infrastructure around which confronting the pandemic coalesces provide utilitarian economic and participation opportunities to utilize state obligations and capacities to engage in social creativity. State authorities promote congruent utilitarian opportunity structures emerging around the coordination of national and global policies to confront Anthropocene climate change. The instability of international hegemony from reliance on scapegoating a common foe radically problematizes the construction of a supranational community identity.
Innovators Facing a Crisis: Multinationals, State-owned Enterprises, and Private Domestic Firms View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Antonio García Sánchez, Ruth Rama
This study strives at understanding whether foreign subsidiaries are able to cooperate for innovation with local partners during good and harsh economic times. It also asks whether these companies and different types of domestic firms display similar cooperative behaviour during the 2004-2016 period. To this effect, the period is divided into three sub-periods (boom, downturn and recovery) and three logic models with panel data of a representative sample of Spanish firms are proposed. Foreign subsidiaries’ ability to cooperate for innovation is maintained throughout the business cycle. They are better at cooperating than unaffiliated firms but not significantly better than domestic business groups. State-owned enterprises strongly outperform both foreign subsidiaries and domestic private firms during the boom, the downturn, and the recovery. Unaffiliated domestic firms manage to cooperate during the boom and the recovery but not during the downturn. Predictors of cooperative innovation vary throughout the business cycle, but previous cooperative experience is always a crucial encouragement to cooperation for innovation.
The Crimean Crisis, Lycanthropy, and the “Russian Bear” in Prosper Mérimée’s Horror Tale Lokis View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Piya Pal Lapinski
On February 26, 2022, The Observer published a cartoon entitled “The Russian Bear Advances on Kyiv.” The 2022 invasion of Ukraine was preceded by Russia’s annexation of Crimea in 2014. This war over contested land and ethnic affiliations evokes the memory of an earlier war, a major crisis over borderlands in the mid 19th century that contained the roots of the present conflict—the Crimean War of 1853-1856. In 1869, French writer Prosper Mérimée wrote Lokis, a tale mixing vampirism with lycanthropy, which he read out loud to the Empress Eugenie and her friends. In Lokis, a Lithuanian aristocrat, Count Michael Szémioth, is revealed to be half-man, half-bear. The story connects Szémioth’s violence with the violence at Sevastopol in Crimea. I argue that Mérimée’s tale is a brilliant twist on the image of the “Russian Bear” which emerged in the media during the Crimean War in the lithographs of Honoré Daumier, and in Punch in Britain. The intertwined motifs of linguistics and lycanthropy in Lokis raise questions about the limits of the human, the connections between language, hybridity and violence, and the territorial conflicts between Turkey, Poland-Lithuania and Russia. My paper asks: how does the transformation of Count Szémioth in Lokis reimagine the political and cultural aftermath of the Crimean crisis and Russia’s drive to “Christianize” the region, as a result of the Russo-Turkish wars? How do the ramifications of this crisis continue to haunt us today as Russia attempts to build a “bridge” to the Crimea through Mariupol?
The Emergence of Post-Neoliberalism in India's Socio-political Landscape: Enlightenment from an International Perspective View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Debasish Das
From the onset of liberalization policies in India in 1991, Indian leaders throughout the following years could not have predicted that neoliberalism’s encroachment would penetrate so deep to the extent of turning Indian societies into a large number of hollow, morally regressive, and, programmed political units based on market-led policy mechanisms. However, this overarching progress has been struck abruptly by the recent COVID-19 pandemic that suddenly left open to the domestic population and the world at large the hidden and steady encroachment of the state on the market-led policy system that was being performed delicately with the help of gradual centralization, the rise of inflation, media control, hates speech promotion, encouraging communal disharmony among others in order to restore state control. This paper attempts to interrogate the reasons for a gradual shift from a market-led policy preference to the state-led mechanization of a market-based system which, in fact, remained ineffective, divisive, and discriminatory in the Indian socio-political context. Drawing from the examples of Latin American, North American, and European political developments post the failures of neoliberal policies, the paper identifies how India also has been and is going through the post-neoliberal phase.
