Search Results (1,442)

This article rereads Akira Kurosawa’s 1960 film The Bad Sleep Well as a modern Hamlet that relocates Shakespeare’s crisis of action from dynastic succession to postwar bureaucratic and corporate modernity. It shifts attention away from plot fidelity and toward how Hamletian functions—staged revelation, damaged legitimacy, obstructed revenge, and the demand for narrative afterlife—are adopted into a corporate world that delegates authority downward, a reworking the article calls structural-political adaptation. Drawing on Carl Schmitt’s account of sovereignty and the political taboo that gives tragic form its density, it argues that Kurosawa adapts the relation between tragedy and what cannot be directly represented. The film’s highest authority is heard on a telephone and never seen. The power of decision has receded behind a bureaucratic apparatus, where neither the avenger nor the camera can follow it. Death and its consequences change accordingly. Nishi dies without a survivor who can perform Horatio’s public function. The institution records his death as an accident and absorbs it into administrative routine. This article argues that The Bad Sleep Well shows how Hamletian action and death survive under faceless institutional power and are shaped by political taboo. Full article

The aim of this article is to examine the use of kitsch elements in architecture as a tool of propaganda in the totalitarian regime of the Third Reich. The study employs a historical-interpretative research method. It begins by outlining the mechanisms through which kitsch was utilised within totalitarian systems, before proceeding to a detailed analysis of the role of kitsch in the state’s official architecture. The findings indicate that, although the architecture of the Third Reich was generally characterised by conventional architectural standards, it exhibited features of kitsch only to a marginal extent or in respects intrinsic to the architecture of political power. These features include a lack of artistic ambition, exaggerated monumentality and excessive repetition, clarity and unambiguity of message, and deliberate distortion of reality. The article also explains the purpose served by the incorporation of kitsch as a component of the propaganda embedded in the official architecture of the Third Reich. Full article

Germany’s unconditional support of Israel is encapsulated in the dictum “Israel’s security is Germany’s raison d’état” (Staatsräson). Shaped after World War II and formally articulated by Angela Merkel in her speech at the Knesset in 2008, the confession to Staatsräson has been intensified amid Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, following the Hamas attacks on 7 October 2023. This article conceptualizes the consolidation of this extra- and paralegal doctrine through the lens of Carl Schmitt’s political theology. A politico-theological approach lays bare how modern sovereignty rearticulates divine attributes like omnipotence, supremacy and the power of decision in a secularized form at the heart of liberal constitutional orders. First, the article argues that Staatsräson operates through the selective displacement of legal constraints by subordinating specific international and constitutional norms to a politico-theologically defined superior political commitment. Second, building on the Schmittian premise that the sovereignty of decision is inseparable from the sovereignty of distinction, the article examines how the German–Israeli bond of “friends” is constituted through the designation of enemies. Friend–enemy distinctions appear on the performative level in speeches of state representatives who ritually confess Staatsräson, independently from Israel’s atrocious actions. Moreover, they materialize in directive documents like resolutions or modifications of punitive or citizenship law. In the third step, the paper therefore foregrounds the distinctly racializing components of Staatsräson in its disproportionate target of minoritized populations—above all Palestinians, Arabs, and/or Muslims, as well as anti-Zionist Jews—as threats to the political community. Finally, the article suggests moving beyond conventional framings of Staatsräson solely as a response to the Holocaust by situating it within a longer European genealogy of political–theological friend–enemy distinctions. Full article

This article summarizes the most important motivations, mechanisms, and consequences of the production of political intimacy through establishing arranged/forced marriages and marital alliances in the Gabor Roma ethnic population in Romania. In an ideal case, marital political intimacy refers to (a) a sense of closeness, belonging, solidarity, and commitment between the parent couples of the newlywed husband and wife, (b) to an intense post-wedding political, social, and economic cooperation between the parent couples, and (c) to a set of shared interests and values. Marital political intimacy is a highly valued, ethnicized type of symbolic capital that can facilitate the realization of a number of different political—and in some cases economic—plans of a parent couple marrying off their child: from upward social mobility to the search for political patronage and the desire to increase political renown and to the intention of managing political conflicts. The analysis of marital political intimacy highlights how and why Gabor Roma arranged/forced marriages and marital alliances play a key role in the organization of and ongoing (re)negotiation on intra-ethnic political relations, that is, how they can be utilized as a strategic means in political networking, hierarchy-building, and competition between individuals, families, and patrilines. This article also demonstrates that marital political intimacy-building is one of the gendered strategies used for the establishment of patriarchal coercive control over women among the Gabor Roma. Full article

Promoting the name ‘Gulf of America’ at the US federal level for a region historically identified as the ‘Gulf of Mexico’ transformed a local toponym into a global media controversy. This study analyzes how 110 preservice teachers from the Bachelor’s Degree in Primary Education at the University of Zaragoza interpret the political and ideological components of these mediatized discourses and explores the potential of this controversy for developing critical literacy. Employing a qualitative, interpretive, and critical research design, the students analyzed news articles, social media posts, memes, videos, and AI-generated responses following Cassany’s framework for critical comprehension. The content analysis of 132 narrative productions using ATLAS.ti version 9.0.20.0, generated 430 coding units organized into four categories: territory and identity (102); controversies and intentionality (99); power and ideology (142); and credibility and discourse impact (87). The results indicate an incipient shift from a naturalized reading of space toward its political interpretation: the students identify symbolic appropriations and power asymmetries, although tensions between multiperspectivity and relativism persist, alongside a partial attribution of neutrality to artificial intelligence. The controversy emerges as a useful educational context for incorporating the reading of territory, its names, and its representations into critical literacy. Full article

This examines the development of the saltpeter industry in Chile after the War of the Pacific (1879–1883), a conflict between Chile and a Bolivian–Peruvian alliance. Chile’s victory meant the annexation of the territories of Antofagasta and Tarapacá, effectively controlling the production of sodium nitrate and the global saltpeter monopoly. Industrial development was reflected through changes in foreign and Chilean capitals, technologies, and work practices. In Tarapacá, the most important investments in the 19th century were British and German. In Antofagasta, Chilean, English, German, and Croatian investments were prominent in the 19th and 20th centuries. And since 1926, American capitals have occupied the spotlight. The dominant technologies were the Shanks system between 1880–1926, the Guggenheim from 1926–1954, and the introduction of Solar Evaporation in the 1950s. Work evolved from manual artisanal labor without legal protection to mechanization under social laws. Saltpeter represented, in the social and economic history of Chile, the rise of the proletariat, communal social movements, a strong labor press, and a series of strikes and massacres. From the saltpeter era sprouted powerful literature, poetry, and music throughout the 20th century until today. The nitrate industry reached its peak between 1881 and 1917. During this period, it had to confront competition from synthetic nitrate and ceased to be the main source of revenue for the national treasury of Chile. This was followed by a period of decline and crisis from 1918 to 1931, the latter intertwined with the global financial crisis. Various state and business measures made it possible for a small number of nitrate oficinas (processing plants and settlements) in Tarapacá and Antofagasta to continue operating until the nationalization of the nitrate industry in 1971. The nitrate industry took place during the first globalization of liberalism, one that brought flows of capital, migration from Europe to the American Continent, changes to marine navigation, and the opening of various markets in Asia, Europe, and Africa. Nitrate became the most effective fertilizer for agriculture and replaced guano in crop production. In order to analyze this topic, we will utilize the results of the main monographic studies, texts used for historical and political context, and works with interpretative theses about specific periods of nitrate production. Full article

The European Union’s REPowerEU Plan (2022) targets 10 million tonnes of renewable hydrogen imports by 2030, catalyzing an unprecedented cascade of bilateral green hydrogen partnerships with countries across the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) and Sub-Saharan Africa (SSA). Despite the strategic and developmental significance of these partnerships, the literature has treated hydrogen largely as a techno-economic or single-country problem, leaving the diplomatic architecture and equity dimensions of EU–MENA–SSA hydrogen diplomacy under-theorized and unmeasured. This study addresses these gaps by integrating energy-security realism, regime-complex theory, and critical political ecology into a synthetic framework, and by introducing two novel empirical instruments: a hand-coded dataset of 26 in-scope bilateral hydrogen agreements (2020–2024) and a fully specified protocol for a Green Hydrogen Diplomacy Equity Index (GHD-EI). A longitudinal dyad-year panel skeleton (27 EU importers × 36 MENA/SSA exporters, 2015–2026, 11,664 dyad-year cells) has been constructed to host a planned multi-method quantitative sequence, structural gravity PPML, staggered difference-in-differences, synthetic control, exponential random graph models, and causal forests whose execution against fully populated covariates is reserved for a subsequent paper. This paper is accordingly framed as a data descriptor and specified analytical protocol, reporting descriptive and structural findings from the 26 in-scope agreements: a 2022 inflection synchronized with REPowerEU and COP27; importer-side concentration on Germany (34.6% of agreements) and EU-level framework partnerships (34.6%)—two distinct actors jointly accounting for 69.2%—and a small, statistically non-significant difference in mean partnership depth between MENA (n = 18, M = 3.22) and SSA (n = 8, M = 3.25) exporters (Welch t = −0.08, p = 0.94; Cohen’s d = −0.04). The comparison is likely under-powered (power ≈ 0.20–0.44) given the small SSA cell and reported here as a tentative pattern. At this stage, the study contributes a cross-regional agreement dataset, a fully specified equity-indicator protocol, and a theoretical framework for subsequently evaluating whether the green hydrogen transition advances just internationalism or reproduces green-extractivist patterns. Full article

Britain’s historical spectacles of animal performance, from Victorian circuses and travelling menageries to early visual media, did more than entertain, they shaped how humans imagined, controlled, and valued nonhuman life. Animals were transformed into objects of fascination and domination, while hunting and poaching practices reinforced imperial authority over wildlife. These performances codified visual and moral frameworks that positioned Britain as arbiter of “wildness,” embedding hierarchies of power and ethical order into the cultural imagination. This paper draws on performance studies, postcolonial ecocriticism, and visual anthropology to trace how circus rings, menageries, and early animal films laid aesthetic and ideological foundations that resonate in contemporary British environmental art and regeneration discourse. By historicising these visual legacies, it reveals how dominion, spectacle, and exploitation persist as underlying structures in Britain’s engagement with nature. Yet contemporary environmental arts are not merely reactive, they reinterpret these histories, transforming frameworks of control into imaginative possibilities for ethical, regenerative, and multispecies representation. By linking past and present, this study demonstrates that understanding the visual politics of historical animal performance is essential to imagining sustainable and inclusive futures for human and nonhuman life in Britain. Full article

The rapid advancement of artificial intelligence (AI) and growing global fragmentation are reshaping how multinational enterprises manage cross-border strategic alliances. Prior research has focused on alliance formation and resource access, yet less attention has been paid to how AI transforms the managerial capabilities required for effective alliance orchestration. This study addresses this gap by examining how AI augmentation may alter the microfoundations of dynamic managerial capabilities (DMC) in cross-border alliances. Building on DMC theory, the paper proposes an AI-augmented framework with four interrelated microfoundations: AI-enhanced managerial cognition, algorithmic social capital, hybrid human–AI capital, and AI-enabled political capital. Using an abductive research design and longitudinal case analyses of Carrefour–Google, Walmart–IBM, and Tesco–Carrefour, the study illustrates how AI may support the reshaping of sensing, seizing, and reconfiguring processes. It uses a Gioia-informed coding procedure to enhance transparency in the elaboration of theory. The findings suggest that AI may improve data-driven sensing, enable scalable coordination through algorithmic trust, enhance ambidexterity through human–AI collaboration, and support proactive regulatory positioning. However, these benefits are expected to be contingent on institutional conditions, including data governance constraints and power asymmetries. The study contributes by extending DMC theory and highlighting how AI-enabled capabilities could drive alliance performance in complex global environments. Full article

In recent years, scholarship has increasingly explored the intersections of theology, liturgy, and transgender identities. At the same time, transgender individuals continue to encounter resistance, exclusion, and stigmatization within many religious settings, where gender diversity is frequently framed as incompatible with established theological norms. Against this backdrop, this study examines the emergence of contemporary non-Orthodox Jewish prayers written by and for transgender and non-binary individuals. Drawing on a corpus of trans-specific liturgical texts, I argue that these prayers function as sites of religious and social negotiation through which marginalized identities seek recognition within existing religious frameworks. Rather than merely expressing personal spirituality, they constitute collective cultural practices that redefine the boundaries of belonging, legitimacy, and sacred personhood. Through poetic, theological, and political language, these texts challenge dominant assumptions about gender, embodiment, and religious authority while remaining intelligible within the broader Jewish liturgical tradition. The analysis demonstrates how trans prayer constructs the body not as a problem to be corrected but as a legitimate locus of sacred experience and religious meaning. In doing so, these prayers reconfigure the relationship between embodiment and spirituality, framing gender transition as a process of revelation, authenticity, and renewal rather than rupture or deviation. More broadly, they serve as mechanisms through which transgender Jews symbolically negotiate access to religious institutions, communal recognition, and theological legitimacy. I conceptualize this process as transcendent lobbying: a form of spiritual activism through which liturgical actors seek to reshape religious discourse and expand the symbolic boundaries of the sacred. Viewed sociologically, these prayers are not only theological texts but also cultural interventions that contest established power relations and create new possibilities for religious inclusion, visibility, and collective belonging. Full article

At the height of the second Trump presidency, the elaboration of violence in Latiné/x immigrant communities has taken a familiar discursive shape: as disappearance. The enforced disappearance, a name for the arrest, detention, and abduction of persons, followed by denial of the act(s), has been leveled against numerous Black and brown communities. From legal concessions granting immunity to Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to racially profile individuals, to a widespread surge in deportations, detentions, and deaths, there is a need for culturally congruent and flexible forms of solidarity that honor waywardness. For if disappearance is an attack on and through visibility, clandestine communication plots and echolocates resistance at the periphery of visibility’s enforcement. In this essay, I forward clandestine communication as a theory and tactical stratagem that maps the transmission of vernacular discourse according to fugitive strategy. Stratagems articulate tactics of trickery often found in gossip/chisme/kikis, redaction strategies, sonic upheaval, and whisper networks. But as a theory, clandestine communication charges community-engaged research with being actively political by considering the theoretical, methodological, analytical, and material tactics of fugitivity as significant to the ways we identify power and resistance in our communities. In drawing from queer, trans*, and feminist of color (QTFOC) genealogies, clandestine communication denotes flexible forms of solidarity that scaffold these fugitive vernacular practices. This theoretical paper thinks with Latiné/x immigrant communities by arguing that community defense initiatives, such as neighborhood defense workshops and rapid response networks, outline participatory and ephemeral (or less visible) ways that vernacular communities can co-create clandestine networks of care. Ultimately, this essay calls for greater consideration to be given to the everyday, defiant ways that community-engaged research is premised on the pragmatism of trust and hiddenness. Full article

This study presents an iconographic analysis of cylinder seals from the British Museum’s collection belonging to ancient Near Eastern cultures that depict big cats. A total of 542 cylinder seals were examined, from which 171 big cat representations on 101 seals were selected as the sample. The sample was analyzed using the visual analysis method. Data obtained from the analyses were coded with the MAXQDA 2024, version 24.7 software, thematic and sub-thematic categories were established, and content analysis was conducted. The results indicate that only one of the big cat figures can be identified as a leopard, while the remainder represent lions. In terms of formal characteristics, lion figures predominate, followed by hybrid forms such as griffin-lions. Most of the big cats are depicted standing upright on their hind legs with open mouths in aggressive or attacking postures, emphasizing the lion’s ferocity. The figures are generally highly stylized and possess strong representational qualities. Lions also appear in protective forms, such as sphinxes and griffins, symbolizing strength and guardianship. Additionally, heroes and rulers shown defeating lions function as visual expressions of political authority. Overall, big cat imagery on cylinder seals served as a symbolic medium conveying power, authority, protection, and sacredness within ancient societies. Full article

In this review, I synthesize recent evidence showing how climate acceleration, biosphere disruption, food and freshwater insecurity, pollution, disease, and inequality are increasingly converging into a single, interconnected sustainability challenge. I show that the Anthropocene crisis extends far beyond climate warming and its impacts alone: current national commitments remain consistent with warming of approximately 2.3–2.5 °C under full implementation, while current policies could produce up to 2.8 °C; however, the remaining carbon budget for a 50% chance of limiting warming to 1.5 °C may be exhausted within only a few years, and the oil and gas industry has committed to a 14% increase in upstream production over the period 2024–2030. At the same time, pollution remains responsible for approximately nine million deaths annually; agriculture accounts for roughly 70% of global freshwater withdrawals; and groundwater depletion, continental drying, marine heatwaves, weakening carbon sinks, and intensifying precipitation extremes are destabilizing the ecological and hydrological systems that sustain human health and food security. This review’s incremental contribution is the integration of these trends within a justice-centered sustainability framework that links Earth-system feedback, public health burdens, water insecurity, and institutional failure rather than treating them as separate environmental problems. I argue that because vulnerability is produced not by exposure alone but by unequal access to infrastructure, wealth, governance capacity, and political power, a viable response therefore requires more than decarbonization: it demands ecological restoration, food and water-centered governance, pollution and disease mitigation, and justice-based institutional reform capable of sustaining human dignity, equity, and resilience within planetary boundaries. I encourage resilience and sustainability programs around the world to fold in these additional challenges to their missions and goals. Full article

This study reexamines the Golden Calf episode (Exodus 32–33, Deuteronomy 9) through a broad literary and historical lens, highlighting its origins in Late-Bronze-Age Near-Eastern mythology, particularly the Ugaritic Baal Cycle. The episode is positioned as a polemic against Levantine polytheism, where calves symbolize a Divine progeny, conflicting with Yahwistic monotheism. Later interpretations by Judaism, Christianity, Islam, and especially the late rabbinic work Pirke de-Rabbi Eliezer (PDRE) reveal evolving theological and political critiques. PDRE notably uses the narrative to challenge Byzantine icon veneration and Islamic prophetic impeccability, reflecting eighth-century Jewish responses amidst Khazar conversion and regional religious dynamics. The text’s emphasis on repentance, prophetic fallibility, and rejection of idolatrous political power underscores a distinctive Judaic stance on religious authority and governance. This integrative approach illuminates an example of the evolving translation of a motif, both by the Bible and from it, across changing religious contexts, showing the Golden Calf as a dynamic symbol in religious identity formation, polemics, and political theology from pre-Sargonic Mesopotamia through early medieval Eurasia. Full article

Bilsk hillfort (or gorodishche in Ukrainian) is the largest fortified settlement of the Early Iron Age in Eastern Europe. Long-term excavations made it possible to determine that it was a powerful industrial, political, religious, and trade center of the forest-steppe populations. Thanks to trade relations with the ancient cities of the Northern Black Sea region, wine in amphorae, ceremonial tableware, and glassware came to the settlement. The latter were mainly represented by beads of various shapes and ornaments. In this article, for the first time, 61 unique (or 135, taking similar ones into account) glass beads found during the excavations at the Bilsk hillfort are analyzed. To establish their chronology and the assortment of receipts in the different periods of the settlement’s existence, only beads from burials and various economic complexes with reliable dating were considered. It was established that glass beads reached the Bilsk settlement through Greek-mediated exchange networks from the last quarter of the 7th century BC. Their arrival continued continuously until the end of the 4th century BC, that is, during the entire Scythian period of the fortified settlement’s existence. The beads most likely reached Bilsk through exchange networks linking the settlement with the Greek cities of the Northern Black Sea region. Three overland routes may have been involved: the Olbian, Muravsky and Chersonesan routes. Evidence from Greek ceramics and other Mediterranean or Olbian imports suggests that the Olbian route was probably the dominant channel. Full article