Author Archives: Ricardo M. Barrera

2011 Annual Meeting – APSA

APSA invites proposals for the 2011 Annual Meeting. Proposal submissions will be accepted online until December 15, 2010.

 

The Politics of Rights

Program Co-chairs:
Frances Hagopian, University of Notre Dame;
Bonnie Honig, Northwestern University.

The 2011 APSA Annual Meeting Program Chairs offer the following theme:

Jeremy Bentham called them “nonsense upon stilts” but at the beginning of the twenty-first century, the discourse of rights has never been more pronounced or contested. Around the globe, people mobilize–and in courts, lawyers argue–on behalf of human, civil, political, ethnic minority, aboriginal, women’s, gay, alien, children’s, transgender, corporate, (sub)national, environmental, and animal rights. Some of these are established rights that advocates seek to expand for those previously excluded from their ambit. Others are new rights. At the same time, the abrogation of such rights as habeas corpus and the use of so-called “enhanced interrogation techniques” by governments in established as well as new democracies in the decade since September 11 have engendered new alliances of progressives and rule of law liberals to defend the restoration and refurbishment of rights. Movements to expand, create, defend, and entrench rights into national and international law generate counter-claims, put rights under pressure and, some argue, problematically privilege courts, legal and centralized national institutions over other more democratic or popular mechanisms of policy formation and self-governance. We propose that the discipline bring its empirical and normative lenses to reflect on the domestic, comparative, and international dimensions of the complex politics of rights….

View Full Theme Statement (*.pdf)

 

APSR: Andrew March on Sayyid Qutb

Taking People As They Are: Islam As a “Realistic Utopia” in the Political Theory of Sayyid Qutb

Abstract

This article presents an interpretation of Sayyid Qutb's political theory based on a prominent feature of his thought: the claim that Islamic law and human nature (fitra) are in perfect harmony, and that the demands of Islamic law are easy and painless for ordinary human moral capacities. I argue that Qutb is not only defending Islamic law as true and obligatory, but also as a coherent “realistic utopia”—a normative theory that also contains a psychological account of that theory's feasibility. Qutb's well-known fascination with the earliest generation of Muslims (the salaf) is an integral part of this account that serves two functions: (1) as a model of the feasibility and realism of an ideal Islamic political order, and (2) as a genealogy of the political origins of moral vice in society. Qutb's project is thus an account of exactly why and how Islam requires politics, and how modern humans can be both free and governed.

Featured Books

Secularism and State Policies Toward Religion: The United States, France, and Turkey
(2009)

Cambridge Press Page Ahmet T. Kuru
San Diego State University

Why do secular states pursue different policies toward religion? This book provides a generalizable argument about the impact of ideological struggles on the public policy making process, as well as a state-religion regimes index of 197 countries. More specifically, it analyzes why American state policies are largely tolerant of religion, whereas French and Turkish policies generally prohibit its public visibility, as seen in their bans on Muslim headscarves. In the United States, the dominant ideology is “passive secularism,” which requires the state to play a passive role, by allowing public visibility of religion. Dominant ideology in France and Turkey is “assertive secularism,” which demands that the state play an assertive role in excluding religion from the public sphere. Passive and assertive secularism became dominant in these cases through certain historical processes, particularly the presence or absence of an ancien régime based on the marriage between monarchy and hegemonic religion during state-building periods.

amazon | barnes&noble

[Section members – suggest your book below with press url]

Graduate Student Mentoring Program

image from www.apsa-section-religion-and-politics.org Brian Calfano, Coordinator (Missouri State University)

Call for section members to volunteer their time and expertise to mentor Ph.D. students in the study of religion and politics! Mentees must be Religion and Politics Section members to be eligible for the program.

Mentors and mentees make arrangements to develop a mentoring relationship with assistance from the program coordinator. Mentees looking for more general career assistance will be shepherded to the APSA mentoring program by the coordinator. All mentoring relationships are at will. Agreements concerning relationship duration, mentoring emphasis, and contact frequency are the sole responsibility of the mentor and mentee.

Coordinator is available as a reference for any questions, and will keep track of mentor/mentee relationships. Coordinator is NOT a mediator for conflicts arising between mentors and mentees.

Mentoring program will be sponsoring mixers at Midwest and APSA (through the generous assistance of Notre Dame’s Rooney Center).

We need mentors to cover all sub-fields and methodological approaches. To volunteer as a mentor, please email Brian Calfano or call 417.836.8574.

Additional Support Provided by the Rooney Center for the Study of American Democracy, University of Notre Dame.