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Eminent political scientist Alfred Stepan analyzes the subjective responses of individuals when asked how their conditions have changed and how they see the future without necessarily connecting them to the policies. His findings unequivocally show that a rising proportion of the people say their fortunes are improving while a declining proportion say the opposite. This trend also carries over to their expectations for the future economic prospects.

This chapter examines the political implications of communal vernacular online art such as memes, mashups, and more. The tensions between these communal processes, and the various claims to authority, ownership, and censorship by institutions such as nation-states and media corporations, have erupted in epic cultural clashes regarding the very nature of art, freedom of speech, and politics. Such new moves challenge dominant regimes and dominant modes of thought, and are reconfiguring people’s relationship to the nation-state, traditional media, and corporate ownership of culture.

This chapter contains an essay by Charles Turner that investigates the reluctance to accept a mythic understanding of politics. The relevance of myth is that it is particularistic and communitarian, and represents an originating act. Turner explores the concept of myth and relates its importance to the human future, knowledge, politics, Europe, Nation State, and representation of political reality in the post-World War II setting. The essay concludes by emphasizing the importance of interpretation and re-interpretation of narratives or myths to preserve a world that its inhabitants knew.

The chapter analyses how the Syrian national territory was progressively broken up into multiple local territories and divided along political and military lines (internal fronts) over the course of the conflict. This internal fragmentation fuelled the emergence of local experiments in alternative governance and the development of competing legitimacies. The fragmentation of the state’s territorial and cohesive continuity was duplicated at its borders, whose nature and management were thereby profoundly transformed. Although these borders are fragmented and porous, they paradoxically embody, for the international legal and political system, the external envelope of Syria that “contains” the war. This chapter exposes the gap that has opened up between sovereignty (for instance, the government of Damascus still sits at the UN) and territory (multiple territorially-based governance arrangements operate quite autonomously in Syria). In doing so, it argues that the conflict has brought into view the unravelling of the nation-state.

Transatlantic Studies seeks to provoke a discussion and a reconfiguration of area studies. Within departments of Spanish, Portuguese, Latin American Studies, and Iberian Studies, the Transatlantic approach critically engages the concepts of national cultures and postcolonial relations among Spain, Portugal and their former colonies in the Americas and Africa. Like its objects of study, Transatlantic Studies transgresses national boundaries instead of assuming the nation-state as a sort of epistemic building-block. But it attempts to do so without dehistoricizing the texts and other cultural products it brings under analysis. The thirty-five essays comprised in this volume are geared toward an audience of undergraduate and graduate students, as well as faculty colleagues who teach transatlantically oriented courses. They encompass nearly every decade in the last two centuries: from the Napoleonic invasion of the Iberian peninsula in the spring of 1808 and the subsequent movements of Latin American independence, through the transatlantic avant-garde, to current migration movements between Latin America, Africa, and the former Iberian metropoles. While each essay addresses a specific topic, our contributors also open up new questions for discussion and research, point to further readings, and suggest specific primary sources that can be used in the classroom.

With the two-state solution discarded by the forces at play in Palestine-Israel and beyond, ominous scenarios are either emerging by osmosis or being toyed with by pundits and leaders. The single bi-national state that has a long pedigree among intellectuals and leftwing activits has now become a more legitimate option both because of the ideological and political hegemony of the Israeli right, and because of the compelling power of the evolving reality in which the very notion of a peace process has vanishedd from the political discourse. This means a drift to a South African reality that would not have a South African solution. The idea of a unilateral disengagement along the lines of the 1967 Alon Plan, the 2006 Ehud Olmert’s Convergence Plan or Donald Trump’s Deal of the Century could re-emerge as a response to the innate drive of Zionism to preserve a state with a Jewish majority. Unilateralism, however, is no solution, for it would leave the West Bank in a state of mayehm. An enemy state would rise there possibly similar to the one in Gaza.

Chapter 2, Making Harmful Traditional Practices, examines the Ghanaian problematization of cutting as a “harmful traditional practice,” and contextualizes it within governance discourses and policies that conceptualize poverty in northern Ghana as an effect of harmful traditions. It shows that the codification of harmful traditions is embedded in the larger frameworks of modernization and development that have shifted over time. The national discourse of harmful traditions is the primary mode of problematizing northern poverty; it draws on neoliberal technologies of recognizing scarcity while shifting the responsibility for it to northern Ghanaians and their traditions. I suggest that anti-cutting campaigns employ this notion to mediate the fraught relationship between Ghana’s North and South and the place of the North in the Ghanaian polity. I suggest that the public embrace of this problematization results from the construction of northern Ghana as a counterpoint to southern civilization and modernity and a site for displacing national lack, shame, and disorder.

Imperialism—the political doctrine of world domination and infinite expansion—is actually the intellectual origin of the global financial crisis. Building upon Arendt's analysis of imperialism as one of the elements underlying the rise of totalitarianism in the 20th century, this chapter argues that modern age has seen a shift from localized and limited goals of national interest to the limitless pursuit of power after power with no certain nationally and territorially prescribed purpose and hence with no predictable direction. Limitless power entails the growth of the invisible government, which in turn leads to an erosion of the space in which human beings belong and live as citizens. One result is that nations are increasingly governed on principles of economic growth freed from political limits. The rise of such unlimited economic thinking is one underlying cause of the extraordinary economic imbalances of our age.