A Response to Johanne Kübler’s A Review of Zeynep Tufekci – Twitter and Tear Gas: The Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (2017, New Haven: Yale University Press)

Sociological Research and Modernity: the Rise and Fall of the Survey Subject Abstract This article examines the relationship between sociology and modern society by exploring the methodological implications of a modern ontology of society. Focusing on one of the signature methods of sociological research, the survey, we discuss how modern society has given rise to the survey subject who is able to participate in survey research. We finally consider recent developments that foreshadow the fall of the survey subject.

A Review of Zeynep Tufekci—Twitter and Tear Gas: the Power and Fragility of Networked Protest (2017, New Haven: Yale University Press)

The Backlash Against Israeli Human Rights NGOs: Grounds, Players, and Implications Abstract This article examines the recent backlash against Israeli human rights and advocacy NGOs led jointly by right-wing organizations, by mainstream media, and by the government. Contrarily to what was theorized in the literature dedicated to movement/countermovement dynamics, it suggests that the birth and rise of ultra-nationalist movements created in reaction to domestic NGOs dealing with the consequences of the occupation cannot be explained by the achievements of the latter or by the threats they pose locally to segments of the Israeli population. Rather, this article shows they are an indirect consequence of recent global developments mainly stemming from the Palestinian internationalization strategy. Yet, these developments have strong effects not only at the international level but also at the local level. One of them lies in the fact that NGOs are now presented as “foreign agents” for obliquely nurturing voices that speak up worldwide against Israeli policy.

Heritage Temples, Replicas, and Repetitions: Theorizing the Significance of Repeats as Resistance Abstract This paper discusses the potential of different Preah Vihear temple replicas to resist “discursive orders” that have been used to legitimate war in the border area between Thailand and Cambodia. The replicas of the Preah Vihear temple are embraced as “repeats” of the “original”; by this, we take off from linguistic theorizing of repetitions. The temple replicas could be considered as resistance against the very idea of one, single “original” temple. By consequence, the replicas, understood as “repeats,” have contributed to negotiate different relations of power and challenge various heritage discourses. The replicas’ appearances and the resistance that they constitute ought to have the potential to contribute to “peace-building.” However, instead of contributing to peace, the repeats, as the paper displays, have rather fueled the conflict between the two countries.

“It Was the State”: the Trauma of the Enforced Disappearance of Students in Mexico Abstract In 2014, 43 students from Ayotzinapa Rural Teachers’ College in Mexico were kidnapped by a police force and handed over to a group of drug traffickers, who subsequently killed and incinerated them. In the main protest for demanding the investigation of the crime, a series of symbolic and performative references were mobilized to represent what occurred as a cultural trauma. The objective of this paper is to demonstrate that the performances and symbols of pain that were used during the protest—during which intellectuals, artists, politicians, students, and civil society leaders participated—were able to establish the nature of the pain and the victims in the media but were not successful in garnering the same degree of support for their assertions concerning the perpetrators. This was an issue to complete the cultural trauma process.

American Bureaucracy in an Age of Oligarchy Abstract Recent scholarship on the emergence of oligarchic trends in American politics focuses on the effect of the concentration of wealth on distributions of power in electoral politics. In this literature, the authors make claims that oligarchic organization of power will have multiple and far-reaching consequences for the organization of political institutions. In this article, we examine some hypothetical consequences for American federal bureaucracy, specifically bureaucratic control, under conditions of civil oligarchy. We focus on the challenges to the arrangement of bureaucratic control institutions that oligarchic concentrations of wealth might present. We demonstrate these challenges argumentatively and graphically.

From the Transnational to the Intimate: Multidirectional Memory, the Holocaust and Colonial Violence in Australia and Beyond Abstract In Australia, public remembrance, particularly relating to national identity and colonial violence, has been contentious. In this article, we take Australia’s recent bid to join the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance (IHRA) as an opportunity to identify national, local and multidirectional dynamics shaping public remembrance of the Holocaust and colonial violence in Australia. Joining IHRA signifies a belated national commitment to Holocaust remembrance, which has traditionally been fostered in Australia by survivor communities. Significantly, the Sydney Jewish Museum (SJM) has recently ventured beyond survivor memory, positioning Holocaust remembrance as a platform to identify ongoing human rights violations against Indigenous Australians and other marginalized groups. While this multidirectional framework promotes an inclusive practice of remembrance, we argue that it may inadvertently flatten complex histories into instances of “human rights violations” and decentre the foundational issue of settler colonial violence in Australia. To explore the personal and affective work of remembering settler violence from an Indigenous perspective, we turn to two multiscalar artworks by Judy Watson that exemplify a mnemonic politics of location. the names of placescontributes to a local and national public remembrance of settler violence by identifying and mapping colonial massacre sites. In experimental beds, Watson links her matrilineal family history of racial exclusion with that of Thomas Jefferson’s slave, Sally Hemings. This transnational decolonial feminist work takes the gendered and racialized body and intimate sexual appropriation as a ground for a multidirectional colonial memory, thereby providing an alternative to the dominant Holocaust paradigm and its idiom of human rights.

Theory Travelling through Time and Space: The Reception of the Concept of Amoral Familism Abstract The American political scientist Edward Banfield formulated the concept of amoral familism in 1958, in The moral basis of a backward society and defined it as follows: ‘maximize the material, short-run advantage of the nuclear family; assume that all others will do likewise’. With this concept, he intended to explain the political ineffectiveness of the inhabitants of a small town in southern Italy. From its publication, Banfield’s book has engendered an impressive amount of controversies, remarkable for their longevity, since they initiated in 1958 and are still on-going. This article provides a critical overview and theoretical reflection on these controversies. After contextualizing in the introduction these controversies in a broader theoretical and historical context, I first provide an overview of Banfield’s research and its early reception (until the mid-1970s) in the international academic community, mainly amongst anthropologists and rural sociologists. A second section addresses the Italian reception, including the revival the concept underwent following the publication of Robert D. Putnam’s classic Making democracy work in 1993, and the importance this book attributed to the concept. A third section analyzes how within Italy scholars also provided important critical assessments of his fieldwork and critiques of his concept informed by postcolonial theory. In the conclusion, I propose to interpret the longevity of the concept and the persistence of the controversies it engendered.

Locating Transnational Memory