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China built internment camps officially referred to as training centres within the scope of a policy for countering extremism and terrorism in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region in 2017. While the repression imposed by China on Uyghurs in these camps has attracted the response of the international community, there has been neither a public protest nor a meaningful government response to China in Turkey, despite it having been the voice of Uyghurs on international platforms before 2017. This study aims to identify the reasons for Turkey's silence on the persecution of Uyghurs by utilizing the legitimation and co-optation strategies of the authoritarian stability framework. The Turkish government's legitimation strategies of "rallying around the flag" via anti-Americanism and the economic expectations of China to boost its performance-based legitimacy are evaluated as reasons for the government's silence on the Uyghur cause. Moreover, it is also discussed how formal and informal co-optation strategies of the government with nationalist and Eurasianist parties are playing a role as a bolstering mechanism of its silence policy on Uyghurs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Despite calls for examining how authoritarian regimes employ state structures to prolong their rule and evidence that they regulate religion to shape the behaviour of religious elites, there has been little attention devoted to religious affairs ministries, which are key sites of interaction between religious actors and the state, and are often the primary institution through which regimes manage religion. This study identifies and describes eight core areas these ministries regulate that can be used as instruments for repression and co-optation of regime opponents, and state legitimation: prayer, appointments, education, religious advice and decisions, religious endowments, media, registration, and charity. In this analysis, we seek to bridge the gap between the literatures on religion, the Middle East, and authoritarianism by synthesizing recent research and analysing religious affairs ministries in the Middle East-North Africa (MENA) region. We argue that by fulfilling these functions, religion ministries are not benign bureaucracies but impactful institutions of political control. In highlighting key questions that remain unanswered, we outline a research agenda for continued advances towards theorizing how authoritarian regimes might make use of state resources to protect their rule. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Secuencia: Revista de Historia y Ciencias Sociales is the property of Instituto de Investigaciones - Dr. Jose M. Luis Mora and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In recent years, we have seen a proliferation of research on discursive legitimation, which has shed light on how legitimacy is established through communication. However, this body of work remains fragmented, and there is a need to synthesize and develop a more comprehensive and in-depth theoretical understanding of this vibrant area of research. This article aims to address this need by providing an integrative theoretical framework and outlining an agenda for future research. The framework encompasses five key elements of discursive legitimation: strategies, positions, foundations, temporality, and arenas. Drawing on this framework, we present a research agenda that highlights key topics related to these elements along with theoretical and methodological considerations cutting across them. Our contribution lies in conceptualizing discursive legitimation as a multifaceted and dynamic phenomenon, offering a complementary framework to existing models and paving the way for future studies, and placing discursive strategies—which have been the focus of prior research—in context by highlighting the critical role of key discursive elements in enabling or constraining legitimation processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The retraction of a previously published research article, often due to the discovery of fraud or scientific error, can pose considerable threat to an author's career and reputation. This paper examines legitimation strategies in the retraction notice (RN), a document in which authors formally announce their decision to retract an article. By analyzing 300 RNs published between 2010–2021 in Q1 biomedical journals, this study finds that 76% RNs contain at least one legitimation strategy, with Mortification, Full/Partial Denial, and Corrective Action being the most frequently used. Moreover, a comparison of RNs that report fraud, misconduct, error, unreliable data/results, and other similar matters shows that fraud-related RNs have the highest incidence of legitimation strategies. Authors committing fraud often employ Mortification, Disclaimer, and Reassurance, while authors reporting scientific errors put more emphasis on Good Intention and Perseverance. This study contributes to the understanding of legitimation and image repair in scientific discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rulers often use a mythologised understanding of the past to further their political interests in the present. In authoritarian societies, rulers often manipulate collective memory to justify their hold on power. When rulers manipulate specific aspects of the past, they can shape the collective memory of ordinary people and thus have a significant impact on everyday politics. Using the case of North Korea, one of the world's most authoritarian societies, I theorise everyday politics from the standpoint of the state by focusing on legitimation and collective memory. Based on the New Year statements issued by North Korean rulers between 1946 and 2019, I use thematic coding through qualitative text analysis to analyse how these rulers have portrayed specific aspects of the past in their political discourse. The article focuses on how legitimation claims about the 'Chollima Work Team' within the 'Chollima Movement' have used memory politics to shape the everyday lives of North Koreans. Because these claims have been invoked consistently in propaganda for decades, a comparative examination over time shows the propagandistic tools that North Korean rulers have drawn on for mobilisation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022, German foreign and security policy has been under intense pressure to adapt to a much more threatening geopolitical setting. Notwithstanding the leadership's decision to embrace change, the crisis has exposed some persistence in Germany's antecedent 'civilian power' paradigm, or culture of restraint. A culturalist analytical approach finds that durable historical and ideational factors in identity formation, the embeddedness of foreign policy in domestic institutions and the close association of European integration with the core tenets of Germany's identity constrain its capacity to act decisively and without equivocation, even under dramatically changed circumstances summarised in the concept of Zeitenwende. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of violence by state actors in political conflicts is often legitimised through the development of strategic narratives. The social construction of such narratives arguably relies on polarised storytelling centred on notions such as national heroism on one side and 'perpetration against the nation' on the other. The Kremlin's official justification of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine since February 2022 provides an illuminating example of this process of strategic narration. Relying on widely accepted cultural templates, Russia's state institutions and officials put forward a narrative focused on Russia's alleged heroic mission in Ukraine and the delegitimisation of the Ukrainian government and its external supporters as 'ultimate perpetrators'. This highlights the proactive framing role that state actors may have in developing a discourse legitimising violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent decades, the relationships between religion and politics, particularly between religion and the state, have been widely discussed, yet relationships between authoritarian rulers and religion have not received their due attention. This fourth article in the 2024 World Affairs special issue addresses this lacuna and argues against the conventional wisdom that these two entities are always hostile to each other. The study contends that authoritarian rulers have used three strategies vis‐à‐vis religion as an ideology and religious actors as a political force. Autocrats have adopted repression and cooptation strategies to deal with religious actors and utilized religion as a tool of legitimation. The article offers a case study of Bangladesh which has witnessed the growing salience of religion in politics since 1976, although its 1972 constitution pledged secularism as a state principle. The article examines the strategies used during three phases of military and civilian authoritarianism—1976–1981, 1982–1990, and since 2011—and discusses the relationship between the authoritarian rulers and religion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article highlights the significance of Lëvizja Vetëvendosje's (LVV) left-wing Kosovar Albanian nationalist challenge to the authoritarian and patrimonial nationalist system of Kosovo's rebel victors. LVV used the political settlement's own legitimizing metanarrative – that of Kosovar Albanian nationalism – to bolster their own legitimacy while undermining that of post-war elites drawn from organizations active in the conflict of the 1990s. A methodology based on Discursive Institutionalism makes sense of LVV's position as both a challenger of rebel victors but also as a representative of the same ideological culture that underpins Kosovo's political culture. There are two key contributions here. Empirically, this study characterizes LVV as a nationalist challenge to the rebel victor parties rather than as a distinctively nationalist or a protest party. The second contribution is theoretical: peacebuilding and political settlements theories must take a more dynamic and agency-sensitive view of legitimacy creation than they have hitherto. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article proposes a radical distinction in understanding human aggression and violence. It will seek to comprehend aggression as an inextricable and also valuable part of life. At the same time, it must be shown that human violence has nothing to do with a vital necessity but is a policy based on the assumption and imposition of a hierarchical conception of existence, from which domination and delegitimization relationships are built, devaluing the "subalterns". This perspective will be imposed by force to later be rationalized, normalized, and legitimized to the extent that in many situations violence ceases to be consciously perceived as such. Those who hold power arrogate to themselves the right to define what is to be considered violent and what will not be, imposing on the victims a double submission through the pedagogy of cruelty. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

References to the European Convention on Human Rights by Israeli courts – the European Convention on Human Rights and the European Court of Human Rights as sources of comparative law – comparative law as technique of legitimation – content analysis of use by domestic courts of European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence – European Court of Human Rights jurisprudence and deference to state [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Over the years, the ‘hilltop youth’ have acted in opposition to both Israeli state authorities and the settler leadership. Israeli society viewed them as a group acting to realize an extremist religious ideology while violating Israeli law and ignoring the state’s decisions. However, after coming to feel that their social position was making it difficult for them to realize their vision, they embarked upon a process of trying to gain political legitimacy. By turning to mass media and by disseminating messages with which the public at large could identify, they have worked to move closer to Israeli consensus opinion. We identify the steps through which this was carried out and trace its success. The process reached a significant point in 2023 when politicians identified with the hilltop youth took up important ministerial positions in government, marking their transition from actors who opposed the state to ones responsible for its decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-nineteenth century, three reigning queens ruled their countries: Victoria in England, Maria II in Portugal, and Isabel II in Spain. These were three women who had to assume political power in a moment both of the redefinition of womanhood towards domesticity and the establishment of liberal, constitutional regimes. Their queenship, therefore, was built on a close relationship with their moral and domestic attributes as women, feeding one process back into the other. This article aims to show the relevance of gender in the modern legitimization of the monarchy and its critique. Many studies have focused on Queen Victoria, comparing her successful formula to other female monarchs. This article studies the cases of Portugal and Spain comparatively to make the process more complex and diverse. For this purpose, I first point out how critical gender was in the legitimization of both queens with very similar lives and political contexts. This intricately linked relationship was apparent in the symbolic construction of their reigns but was particularly evident in the numerous political crises they would have to face. I compare their experiences to show that domesticity played a central role in shaping their queenship and political (de)legitimization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective/Context: This paper aims to analyze the vast, varied and lasting presence of the little-known revolutionary rhetoric exploited by Francisco Franco throughout the dictatorship in Spain. To this end, this rhetoric is connected with the different contexts in which it was used and with the terminology employed in those same years by thinkers or politicians linked above all to the Falange. Methodology: As this article is interested in the public discourse of Franco's regime, it has examined in detail and qualitatively the content of Franco's public speeches. For this purpose, we have resorted to the official compilations made under Franco's regime and, because of their selective and incomplete nature, also to newspaper sources. Thus, more than a history of intellectual or political ideas, this work is linked to their public and pragmatic dimension and delves into the complex practical functioning of ideologies. Originality: With few exceptions, Franco's rhetoric has not been studied in detail, and even less in the revolutionary rhetoric. The originality of this study lies in the fact that it is the first specific and analytical approach, although not quantitative, to Franco's revolutionary rhetoric. For example, it explains its unknown survival until the 1960s and even the 1970s, so that it outlived the so-called defalangization of Francoism. Conclusions: Franco's revolutionary rhetoric was characterized by great flexibility and imprecision. It underwent many changes over the years and coexisted with other central discursive frameworks, such as the Cruzada's. It was a crucial factor in the discursive legitimization of Francoism, especially in its initial years. Compared to the Cruzada, with which it complemented, it stood out for its elasticity and pretended transversality. In addition, it was connected with a legitimacy of exercise, not of origin, which was, in fact, more easily connected with the present and the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By focusing on individual settlements rather than viewing them as part of a trajectory of change, prior research on institutional settlements has not fully captured the dynamics of longer-term institutional change; yet this would be important to better understand progressive legitimation dynamics—in other words, how successive settlements may increase legitimacy in a long-term trajectory of change. This is a crucial issue, especially for peripheral actors lacking the resources, status, or power of more central ones. Our historical analysis focuses on the long-term struggle of the Cree First Nation in Canada and explains how they succeeded in increasing their dispositional legitimacy in and through the settlements. This required work in three interrelated processes: expansive argumentation, including problematizing of the state of affairs and creating discursive resonance with the prevailing discourses and values; building momentum by generating attention and exerting pressure in networks of actors; and seizing opportunities to negotiate with the other side. Thus, we challenge previous research on settlements by showing how they should not merely be seen as endpoints but rather as stepping-stones in a trajectory of institutional change. More specifically, we develop a process model explaining how progressive legitimation unfolds in a series of settlements. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There have been several overlapping crises in North Africa in recent decades. The social contract is in crisis, and this became clear during the antiauthoritarian uprisings of 2011 and 2019. In addition, the region is locked in a socioeconomic crisis that deepened after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and has been aggravated by the global impacts of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. This paper underscores the need to reflect on the legitimation of the North African elites in this context, looking at the connection between the domestic and international spheres. It also presents various legitimation strategies that take in the interaction between the domestic and external spaces. This approach seeks to enrich the debate on the relationship between authoritarianism, its legitimation and the international dimension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to provide an analytic comparative study of the international media coverage of the extradition of Mr. Saadi Gaddafi in 2014. The study compares the reports of New York Times, al-Sharq al-Awsat and Aljazeera networks regarding the extradition incident. It investigates concepts such as ideological representation and power dynamics to analyze those reports. The study employs Critical Discourse Analysis embodied in ideological representation and inter-textual meanings to reach an understanding of the societal currents which affect the texts. The findings of the paper reveal that media reports present elements of support and legitimization for the Niger Government action against Mr. Saadi Gaddafi. The study concluded that media was used to serve certain political discourses in the Middle East and in the Western powers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If there is one thing all university rankings have in common, it is that they are the target of widespread criticism. This article takes the many challenges university rankings are facing as its point of departure and asks how they navigate their hostile environment. The analysis proceeds in three steps. First, we unveil two modes of ranking critique, one drawing attention to negative effects, the other to methodological shortcomings. Second, we explore how rankers respond to these challenges, showing that they either deflect criticism with a variety of defensive responses or that they respond confidently by drawing attention to the strengths of university rankings. In the last step, we examine mutual engagements between rankers and critics that are based on the entwinement of methodological critique and confident responses. While the way rankers respond to criticism generally explains how rankings continue to flourish, it is precisely the ongoing conversation with critics that facilitates what we coin the discursive resilience of university rankings. The prevalence of university rankings is, in other words, a product of the mutual discursive work of their proponents and opponents. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We study the emergence of a new population of firms and show that legitimation is a local phenomenon and stimulates entry. However, legitimation is offset by competition as the number of firms increases. We provide evidence that the legitimation and competition effects within the municipality dominate the effects in a larger area. We also give a methodological contribution and show that the magnitude of the legitimation and competition effects is weaker than what is predicted by the conventional regressions. Finally, legitimation and competition do not act 'symmetrically': legitimation is stronger and acts more quickly than the competitive effect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explicates the strategies of legitimization through spatial proximization. Although, there is a spike of interest in war poetry in recent years, proximization and legitimization aspects of war poetry still need to be explored. Thus, it is important to investigate war poetry from such perspectives because "poetry occupies a critical place in the war resistance literary tradition" (Metres (2007, p. 5). In this article, we grapple with the ways in which legitimization strategies are operated at the level of spatial proximization. Cap argues that (2013), "spatial proximization always forces the vision of a physically destructive character of the ODCs' impact" (p.74). This article draws attention to rhetorical interplay between legitimization strategies and spatial proximization: one leads to the other. War poetry of Afghanistan uses spatial proximization as an instrument for legitimization purposes. In order to critically analyze the poetics of war, we have adopted Cap's (2012) model of proximization which contains spatial, temporal and axiological proximization. However, we have utilized only spatial proximization aspect of the model because it suits with my study. Our findings show that legitimization strategies are manifested in war poetry of Afghanistan for achieving certain political goals. This study is important because it provides critical insights to the readers concerning the rhetorical and political nature of war poetry. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Most studies on the connection between the legitimacy of an authority and its policy selection and legitimation follow a structure approach to legitimacy, which recognises an authoritative actor's selection and legitimation of a policy as determined by the subjects' collective commitment to values. Consequently, it cannot empirically explain policy variation under collective commitment to values and changes in those values. Building on existing processual theories and following the conceptualisation of legitimacy as a social process, this study proposes an integral process approach to legitimacy whereby an authority selects and legitimises a perceived legitimate policy towards subjects. Drawing on findings from a negative case methodology applied to the selection and legitimation of a tax policy by an official in Ming China, this study offers substantive content for an integral process approach to legitimacy. It develops the state legitimacy concept and contributes to emerging theories on the legitimacy dimension of fiscal state formation. Empirically, this study illustrates how the data from the nationwide field survey in mid‐late Ming China were used in tax collection at the local level and illuminates the discrepancies between the survey data and that recorded in local official tax registers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The European Parliament (EP) has been characterised as a 'working parliament without a public' rather than as a 'debating parliament'. However, this distinction was called into question when irregular migration became a sensitive topic and national political parties became polarised on this policy. Thus, this article explores whether one risk resulting from such a characterisation – a lack of public involvement – is raised by EU members in plenary debates on irregular migration issues. In particular, the analysis focuses on the purpose of EU plenaries and investigates the audience for speech acts in EP debates on irregular migration issues. The qualitative, manual content analysis of three debates shows that MEPs address their speeches to multiple audiences, including other MEPs, political groups and members of the Commission and Council, excluding national parties and voters. Speech acts aimed at EU officials, together with problem-solving argumentation, support the characterisation of the EP as a 'working parliament without a public'. It contributes to maintaining the EU communication gap. In contrast, speakers legitimate their speeches by claiming to represent the common people, to be the vox populi. The article concludes by challenging the role of plenary debates in an age of rising Euroscepticism and populism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Language Problems & Language Planning is the property of John Benjamins Publishing Co. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This article suggests that, as a field of study, we have accumulated too many routinised ways to legitimate our academic identity; that it is time to step away from comfortable clichés about our past; and to notice that the future is, at least metaphorically, now and urgent. However, while it is easy to illustrate the banalities we use to define our academic identity, it is difficult to turn the metaphor of 'the future is now' into a coherent perspective for seeing 'futures' for comparative education. Thus the second part of the article sketches choices which stabilise such a discussion and help to avoid vague visions of grand projects. The Conclusion emphasises our classic flaw – failure to notice the political framing of many of our epistemic choices, agendas of attention and action, and institutional identities – before permitting itself to be a little bit excited about 'the future'. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This work proposes to research the meanings constructed by prison authorities about the socio-educational practices implemented by institutions, organizations, and heterogeneous actors in contexts of punitive confinement, and their relationship with the construction of the prison order. Institutionalized and formalized spaces such as primary and secondary education, experiences organized by university actors, and "non-formal" educational practices, compose the contemporary educational-prison framework. The central hypothesis is that the definitions of prison managers, introducing differentiations, hierarchies and evaluations, manage to enroll educational practices as substantial devices for the construction and legitimization of the prison order. Legitimation process that gain a weak character, given by three interrelated dimensions: degrees of institutionalization, statehood and criticality that the authorities recognize in the educational actors involved. Starting from an interpretative paradigm, this paper will focus its empirical references on observations and in-depth interviews with directors of three prisons, two for men (one medium security and the other maximum security) and one for women, but it falls within the partial results of a research project carried out during the period 2018-2022, in five prisons in the south of the province of Santa Fe (Argentina). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Feminist and postcolonial international relations scholars have demonstrated that representations of Middle Eastern women are used to legitimize wars. This article explores a recent, novel instance of this phenomenon that occurred in Syria. The article argues that Western representations of Kurdish female fighters (members of the Women's Protection Units, or YPJ) helped to legitimize Operation Inherent Resolve. The article first uses content analysis to demonstrate that Western media reporting about the group, which rendered the YPJ hyper-visible, reflects a change in the discourse, which, I argue, made this foreign policy possible. This is followed by a discourse analysis of English-language documentaries, supported by Turkish-language sources, to show how specifically gendered and Orientalist narratives legitimized Western intervention. I find that rather than being depicted as they are typically, as passive, silent victims (requiring liberation), YPJ women are instead depicted atypically as agentic (as liberators). I then contrast this discourse with original translations of YPJ members' counter-articulations about their identity in their own words, and show that Kurdish female militants propose radically alternative, non- and anti-Western accounts of their politics. In light of the tension between these two discourses, the article suggests that Western accounts, although endowing agency, suppress possibilities for more subversive (postcolonial) forms of agency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

That uncertainty is a fundamental resource for decision-making processes has been known for some time, especially in organizational studies, which mostly refer to probabilistic evaluation, heuristics, cognitive biases, risk assessment and more. The article starts from the assumption that uncertainty is always uncertainty of an observer and hypothesizes that the subsystems of modern society must produce it in specific forms in order to operate (decide) and to be able to construct the reality to which they refer. In particular, three particularly evident cases of self-produced uncertainty are analyzed: science, law and politics. These subsystems create an uncertain future in the form of oscillation (respectively experiment, sentence, elections), and then entrust the result to their specific networks of observations (publications, jurisprudence, public opinion). Among other things, this requires the redefinition of the identifying concepts of these subsystems (objective reality, justice, legitimation) in a procedural (therefore decisional) and no longer substantial form. Only in this way is it possible, today, to build the reality on which society communicates. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research paper examines the concept of the Real, as proposed by Slavoj Zizek, through the study of The Aleph by Jorge Luis Borges. This short story best represents this idea of the Real as intended by the Slovenian philosopher. Yet, Borges displays the idea of the Real through a mystical perspective, whereas Zizek tends lean on psychoanalytical perspectives. Once the short story is read through Zizek, we can perceive a new interpretation of the text. Otherwise, the transformative process after encountering the Aleph remains ambiguous and irrelevant. A similar idea of this transformation is also represented in many religious readings of the concept of God. This paper tends to study this idea of the Real through the psychoanalytic theory of Slavoj Zizek. His theory makes a long journey through Sigmund Freud and Jacque Lacan. The objective of this study is to have a new understanding of the ideas that undergo ambiguities and misunderstanding, including the idea of unseen powers that dominate our life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The representational politics of European colonial cinema was effectively decisive in shaping the values and ideologies of the articulated discourse of colonialism in representing cultural encounters and racial differences. This article attempts to analyse and explore how the colonial cinema of the early twentieth century produced a biased politics of representation and persistent modes of constructing North Africans within the confines of an orientalising colonial imaginary that turns cultural encounters into a display of power and superiority. It addresses the ways cinematic representation of North Africans accentuates the homogenising discourse of domination, the legitimization of conquest and the articulation of intercultural encounters on a stereotypical and judgmental basis. While a part of this cinema kept (re)visiting the same classical tropes of exoticism and racial inferiority of the native cultures, favouring the stereotypical portrayals and racial prejudices of "others" that blatantly rest on the "us and them" dichotomy, the other part tried to introduce a sort of paradigm shift that complicates the unquestionable presence of colons in North Africa and interrogates the parameters of their colonial identity. This article argues that colonial cinema of the 1930S has introduced a range of Western protagonists and colons with complex forms of identifications, questionable moral consciousness, and conflicted colonial subjectivities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Law Applications / Revista de Aplicaciones del Derecho is the property of ECORFAN-Mexico S.C. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Drawing on institutional theory and discursive psychology, this article elucidates how actors use emotion discourse to undermine the legitimacy of consumer practices. Based on an empirical investigation of the bullfighting controversy in Spain, our work shows how activists engage in the production and circulation of compelling emotional prototypes of their adversaries. Such emotional prototypes constitute the discursive foundations of a pathic stigma, which, once established, taints the identity of the social groups associated with the practice. Our work frames the centrality of pathic stigmatization as a cultural mechanism mediating the relationship between emotion discourse and the subsequent delegitimization of consumer practices. We make three key contributions to the literature: we advance a rhetorical perspective on emotions and their role in deinstitutionalization processes; we further develop the theory of marketplace sentiments by showing how sentiments operate downstream; and we provide evidence of the sociocultural mechanisms underpinning the emotional vilification, stereotyping and stigmatization of consumer collectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What is knowledge and how can we analyse it from within social sciences as social knowledge? Our socially driven intuition tells us that knowledge is a special relation that humans have with their surrounding world. Its specificity lies primarily in the fact that it implies a direct interaction with the environment. Another important and interesting characteristic of knowledge is its tendency to replace interactions with reality with interactions between pieces of knowledge produced about that specific reality. Connected to this, regarding the issue of truth, paraphrasing both Einstein and Smith, this article argues that ‘an invisible hand’ of the realities of social phenomena makes it so, that the accepted truths of a certain society are those and only those that are functional for the survival and reproduction of that society. And for this to happen it is a must that the elite designated with the production and the legitimation of ‘the truths’ exists and produces those ‘truths’ that support the ‘general interest’ of that respective society. Most importantly is to understand that the consistency of the legitimated truths with the dominant values of the society imbedded in its social order is far more important that their consistency with the empirical observations of the reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Court-related mediation is proceeded by verbal negotiation to shorten the distance of both parties involved for the final fulfillment of dispute resolution and social harmony. Based on the transcribed mediation data on a workplace injury pretrial case, and from the perspective of Proximization Theory and Spatial-Temporal-Axiological (STA for short) model, this study investigates quantitatively and qualitatively how the mediator arbitrates in terms of spatial, temporal, and axiological proximization. During court-related mediation, the mediator intends to stimulate both sides' desires to mediate the negotiable space, proximize the mediating discourse and finally achieve persuasive functions of the mediator's discourse; the mediator's manipulation of the spatial, temporal, and axiological proximization strategies is of decreasing frequency. Among them, the spatial proximization strategies as dominant roles while the temporal and the axiological proximization ones as auxiliary roles, jointly promote the construction of "mediating space" and establish the legitimized forces in mediation discourse. This study aims at exploring how to achieve the dispute resolution by court-related mediation, total conciliation of conflicts as well as full construction of social harmony. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Following the first coronavirus case reported to the World Health Organization in Wuhan in 2019 and the ensuing city-wide lockdown that was imposed, many people attempted to leave the city, culminating in a vigorous discourse on the dominant Chinese microblogging site, Weibo. This study seeks to examine how online participants discursively delegitimated and legitimated people who left Wuhan before the lockdown. Weibo posts with the hashtag #逃离武汉 ('Fleeing Wuhan') were collected, and delegitimation and legitimation strategies deployed by users were identified. My findings reveal that the delegitimators exploited moral evaluation and impersonal authority to highlight the construed unethicality and shamelessness of people who left Wuhan, whereas the legitimators used an array of strategies, including explanation and definition, to normalize their intentions and counter linguistic hostility. These findings also provide implications vis-à-vis the clustering of delegitimation strategies as well as their linkages with emotional appeals in online discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article explores discursive legitimation of intensified conditionality in Australian social security policy, by the association of responsible consumption with a revised construction of Australian identity. Discursive rationalization of the use of cashless debit cards to constrain consumption choices by citizens is situated in representations of Australian identity and social citizenship. Against growing empirical evidence of a lack of conclusive efficacy and emergent social harms, political rationalizations for the card's introduction assert a normative Australian way of life that frames card users as 'flawed consumers,' lacking in the characteristics of imagined Australian citizenship. The compatibility of this imagined Australian identity with the values of market liberalism completes the substitution of market citizenship for its antecedent welfare state conception of citizenship based on rights. In this substitution, the idea of a right to social protection is subordinated to conditional support that promotes the sentiment that social welfare is 'un-Australian.' [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What critics and publishers now call climate fiction is a growing genre that captures significant critical attention. This essay theorizes the relation between two of the genre's features, one formal and one political, in the scale frame they address: the planetary scale of climate, or what many scientists call the Earth system. The archive that articulates these features consists of a popular, digital discourse about climate fiction, much of which appeared since Hurricane Sandy. Instead of looking at individual works or narrating their history, I read this popular "metagenre" to draw out its implicit theory of the genre. According to the metagenre, climate fiction's abstract features consist of a didactic purpose and a normative form. Climate fiction's purpose, whatever its social effects, is ultimately to contribute to planetary climate stability. Second, the genre's definitive form is (or should be) extrapolative realism. Extrapolative realist narrative builds on scientific consensus to imagine plausible futures. The striking thing about climate fiction is that its purpose and form exist in a contradictory or inversely proportional relationship. If the genre fulfills its goal by contributing to the equilibrium of the climate, then its verisimilitude will diminish. If the climate continues to destabilize, then the genre's realism will have been vindicated at the expense of its purpose. Climate fiction is unique because it promises extrapolative realism in the content of individual novels and films but does so in the constitutive and paradoxical presence of a goal that would prevent such future climates from materializing. The point of analyzing climate fiction's constitutive paradox between purpose and realism is not to revel in irony, leave the final word to ideology critique, or dismiss the popular aesthetics of climate fiction. Rather, this paradox can be generalized to the worldview or grand narrative of the Anthropocene: the contradiction between climate fiction's purpose and form sheds light on a more general temporal structure bound up with technocracy and scientific legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This text analyses the turn to secularism [laïcité] by the National Front/National Rally as a legitimation strategy, and also examines the party's place in French political debate on this issue. To do so, a thematic analysis is carried out of party programmes presented for the presidential elections since Marine Le Pen assumed leadership in 2011. It concludes by showing how, in contrast to liberal conceptions that prioritise equal rights, a substantive, identity-based version of secularism has gradually been imposed in public policies established in France. It is this vision of secularism that has allowed the party to appropriate the issue, presenting itself as the true defender of the Republic and its values in the face of a supposed threat from Muslim immigration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The collapse of the political system took place in a context of hostility towards the parties and consensus on judicial investigations. What were the long-term roots of this phenomenon? The answer to this question is difficult and requires new research on the evolution of the society, the economy, the structure of the political system and – this is a crucial point – about mentality and imaginary. A fundamental contribution in this direction can be given by the study of audiovisuals, cinema and television. In fact, they can be analysed as 'agents of history', interacting with existing patterns of behaviour and values, and as sources, documenting the deepest currents in society. How to explain the contradiction between the consensus that the major parties achieved for years and the sudden collapse of the whole system? Did movies and television programs contribute to spreading hostility towards mass parties and delegitimizing the political system? The purpose of the article is to offer a hypothesis of interpretation of these issues, using the most representative movies and television programs from the end of the 1970s to the beginning of the 1990s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using two recent films—Long Long Time Ago and Diam Diam Era—this article analyses how Jack Neo communicates a sanitized nostalgia for the "kampong spirit" through his films, which calibrates willing acceptance of the Singapore government's authoritarian rule. In supporting the state's presentist historiography, the films of Jack Neo induce a depoliticization of unpleasant memories arising from the ruling party's unpopular housing and language policies of the past. The nostalgia mediated in both films is aligned towards an imaginary geography and mental map of a First World nation, which exhorts Singaporeans to disavow "the tropics" by nostalgizing the state's modernization efforts. The cumulative thrust of an evidence-free and presentist nostalgia ostensible in both films, this work argues, satisfies the paternalistic state's obsession with the public legitimation of its ruling mandate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cross-party violence - violence between opposing partisans - is a growing concern worldwide. Understanding the predictors of the legitimization of violence against political opponents is thus becoming a vital goal. In this work, we propose two potential explanatory frameworks: affective polarization and low non-violent group efficacy. The first reflects an affective motivation to harm the out-party, while the latter reflects an instrumental motivation to deploy violence. Furthermore, while the former is frequently suggested in scholarly work as a cause for such violence, it has so far been backed only by limited empirical support. On the other hand, the latter is hardly examined in the context of interactions between opposing partisans. We tested the relationship of the two explanatory frameworks with the legitimization of cross-party violence using public opinion surveys in two real-world contexts: in 2020, in Israel (N = 500) and in the US (N = 631). Results from a regression analysis provide support for the instrumental explanation but not for the affective one. We discuss the theoretical implications of our findings for the research of affective polarization, and potential practical implications for attempts to reduce cross-party violence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In response to the threat of COVID-19, China initiated a nationwide campaign. Ideological work such as explaining the implemented policies and persuading the public always took a central role in mobilization, and it has been emphasized by Chinese government during Covid-19 as well. The legitimation discourse used in the campaign is the focus of the current study. The investigation takes into consideration the political logic of the relationship between the central and local governments as well as their working mechanism. More specifically, a total of 84 open letters written by the local governments to mobilize residents during the COVID-19 pandemic were analyzed. The study integrated the CDA perspective, legitimation theory, and campaign-style governance and examined what ideological discourses are constructed in the open letters, what type of authority is constructed for legitimation, and what is the main communication style used. In addition, the study paid attention to the patterns among the different local government ranks. The findings revealed that moral appeal and political authority were the key elements of legitimation discourse, but governments with lower ranks exhibited a trend of de-ideologization. Meanwhile, impersonal politeness and direct bold command contradictorily co-existed in open letters of basic level local governments. These finding reveal that despite the top government's centralized power, realization of ideological work in a national campaign is confined by the divergent and complicated realities of local governments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper I introduce the thesis of cultural readiness about science found in the historical analysis of the Alvarez impact hypothesis of the end-Cretaceous mass extinction. Cultural readiness posits that in some scientific domains, there are scientifically apt questions, methodologies or theories that are only developed, considered, and adopted by a scientific community once some combination of empirical and cultural factors obtains within and without that domain. I demonstrate that 21st century philosophy of the historical sciences has been motivated by a commitment to legitimization and has prioritized epistemic ingenuity and has not addressed cultural readiness. I then argue that one vehicle for cultural readiness in the historical sciences is their use of narrative explanatory forms. Narratives offer an arena to blend cultural and empirical phenomena by their characteristic elicitation of familiarity and emotionality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to explore recent developments in queer representation in 21st century African literature. Africa's history with the legitimization of homosexuality is complicit with politics of invisibility, silencing, erasure and rigid cultural ideologies. The Same-Sex Marriage Prohibition Act (SSMPA) of Nigeria which was enacted in 2014 saw a furore among both old and new generation African writers who were embittered by the systemic erasure of LGBTQIA+ lives. Wole Soyinka's portrayal of the mulatto Joe Golder in The Interpreters was the closest that an African writer had come to representing a non-straight, non-heterosexual character in the panorama of African literature. While the only accomplishment of Soyinka's character remains a sympathetic portrayal of a homosexual, it also suggests the possibility of closeted queer presence in Africa. The beginning of the 21st century witnessed a bold flourish of queer literature - Chris Abani's GraceLand (2004) and Jude Dibia's Walking with Shadows (2005) present queer protagonists who struggle to come to terms with their queerness and radicalize anachronistic notions of gender and sexuality. Later works by new generation African writers have effectively succeeded in debunking the premise that 'homosexuality is un-African' on which the draconian SSMPA had been built. Chinelo Okparanta's Under the Udala Trees (2015) reinvents the bildungsroman by placing a queer African girl as the hero of her story. Akwaeke Emezi's The Death of Vivek Oji (2020) explores the liminalities of gender and sexuality, the rites of passage that presages the fate of self-identified queer people within a social context that is hostile to sexual difference. This paper will analyze how all these works re-write the history of African queer people into the nation's body politic by strategically applying pertinent theoretical frameworks like race, gender and sexuality, biopolitics, politics of heteronormativity, and queer necropolitics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Investigaciones Historicas is the property of Universidad de Valladolid, Facultad de Filosofia y Letras and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This study explores how the fluctuations of Qatari-Bahraini ties from 2011 to 2021 have influenced Al-Jazeera's legitimization of the Bahraini regime. It also measures the extent to which Al-Jazeera Arabic (AJA) and Al-Jazeera English (AJE) included Galtung's typology of violence (ToV) and peace journalism model (PJM) in their coverage of Bahrain's 2011 uprising. A total of 424 articles were analyzed from both channels. The results found that the regime's direct violence dominated the coverage, whereas its structural and cultural violence received less attention, particularly by AJA. In addition, the number of articles framing the regime's propaganda as facts dropped across both channels following the 2017 Gulf crisis. During the same period, delegitimizing frames of the regime increased in articles from AJA and AJE. The study concludes that the deterioration of Qatari-Bahraini relations after the 2017 crisis made Al-Jazeera's coverage more critical of the Bahraini regime but not necessarily more peace journalism oriented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the effect of having a state religion on fiscal capacity. Our analysis extends the legitimization argument, which postulates that a state religion legitimizes the revenue-raising motives of the state. We then argue that the effect reduces the incentive of the state to invest in fiscal capacity. First, we build a simple theoretical model to highlight our central idea and derive our testable hypothesis. The model shows that in the presence of a legitimization effect, countries with a state religion face weaker incentives to invest in fiscal capacity, as they can raise revenue by exploiting the legitimizing power of the church. Next, we test the hypothesis in a potential outcomes model, which models the selection on observables using both recent and historical data. We show, always following our theoretical model, that countries with a state religion have lower fiscal capacity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We examine the business and management education (BME) research field along three dimensions of the legitimation code theory (LCT). These dimensions (Specialization, Semantics, and Autonomy) showed different bases for BME knowledge recognition, the extent knowledge is borrowed from other business disciplines, and factors that influence field development. The origin of LCT can be traced to sociological research in education, where perspectives of social control, position, and prestige of ideas were highlighted in the learning environment. We first identified a list of 250 highly cited articles from BME research by way of Harzing's (2013) Publish or Perish, and then categorized abstracts from these articles into research streams through the TxtViz clustering software. Next, we developed operational definitions of LCT dimensions for the BME field. We then calculated measures to position and assess characteristics of different BME research streams within the field. We expect this study to provide a theoretical framework that will contextualize BME research streams in relation to each other along different LCT dimensions, with consequent insights on within- and across-stream developmental implications. The findings should help BME researchers take a wider perspective and adopt a more cross-disciplinary approach to their work within the emerging LCT framework. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]