The legitimacy of Tsarist authority over the peoples of Siberia in the late 16th to early 18th centuries

The article studies the methods that substantiated the legitimacy of the power of the Russian monarch over the vast territories of Siberia. The context of this study is the Russian political culture of the late 16th to early 18th centuries. Based on information from chronicles as well as diplomatic and administrative documents, the authors identify and systematize the main political, ideological, and legal arguments that were most often used by the Russian government to justify the Tsars rule over Siberia. The arguments can be divided into two groups according to the target audience: the first group was intended for conversation with the heads of foreign countries, the second one addressed the Siberian peoples and also the Russian people broadly. In foreign policy, the representatives of the Moscow Tsar emphasized the antiquity and the strength of the bond between these territories and the Russian state. The diplomats tended to exaggerate the scale of the Russian military, socio-economic, political, and cultural (religious) development of the new territories. At the same time, they were silent about the resistance of the local population to the tsarist servicemen. At home the authorities applied other legal arguments to bolster their legitimacy. In interaction with indigenous populations, the Russian governors and service people usually forced the communities (in the form of an ultimatum) to accept the claim that the Tsar owned the Siberian lands as a fiefdom. With this the socio-political status of the Siberian peoples radically changed: they became subjects to the Russian Tsar, as kholops or yasak-payers. The Russian combatants and colonists, in direct contact with the indigenous population, informed the Siberian peoples about recent government directives and fully identified with the official claim to authority. In the eyes of the Russian population, an additional element was the religious and political idea that the Tsar had been chosen by God, from which followed the duty to expand the Russian Orthodox tsardom.

The Evolution of Tyrant Tropes in Greek Tragedy

<p>Tyranny (tyrannis) is a name given to a type of Greek monarchy that came into being in the seventh century B.C.E. The democratisation of Greece and the transference of aristocratic ideas of equality and liberty to the whole citizen population led the vilification of tyranny as the opposite of democracy and its extensive use as a foil for democracy in Athenian politics. This political idea made its way into literature, including tragedy where it was one of several important anachronistic political ideas. The demonization of the tyrant also led to the development of tropes to create the stereotype of the tyrant. These tropes are catalogued in Plato and Aristotle and widely recognised in Herodotus, but as Lanza (1977) and Seaford (2003) have pointed out, they also occur in tragedy, to the same extent as they do in prose. The tropes can roughly be split into two groups – those that are based on real power-conserving strategies and those that were created to characterise the tyrant as a moral monster.</p>

The Evolution of Tyrant Tropes in Greek Tragedy

<p>Tyranny (tyrannis) is a name given to a type of Greek monarchy that came into being in the seventh century B.C.E. The democratisation of Greece and the transference of aristocratic ideas of equality and liberty to the whole citizen population led the vilification of tyranny as the opposite of democracy and its extensive use as a foil for democracy in Athenian politics. This political idea made its way into literature, including tragedy where it was one of several important anachronistic political ideas. The demonization of the tyrant also led to the development of tropes to create the stereotype of the tyrant. These tropes are catalogued in Plato and Aristotle and widely recognised in Herodotus, but as Lanza (1977) and Seaford (2003) have pointed out, they also occur in tragedy, to the same extent as they do in prose. The tropes can roughly be split into two groups – those that are based on real power-conserving strategies and those that were created to characterise the tyrant as a moral monster.</p>

“Biggest Nationalist in the Country”

Nationalism is an ism rarely used as self-description. This article suggests that nationalist discourses are on the move, meaning the concept may be used in novel ways. In Russia, for example, the president recently identified himself as a nationalist, claiming ownership of the concept in the long-standing struggle against manifestations of oppositional nationalism. The article asks who describes themselves as nationalists in contemporary Russia, how do they define the concept, and how did it change during the years 2008–2018 when nationalism as a political idea became increasingly important in Russian politics? Drawing from Russian newspaper sources, the article suggests that diverse, self-proclaimed nationalist actors rely on narrow ethnic understandings of the concept and do not embrace the president’s interpretation of multinational nationalism.

1. Progress of a dream

‘The progress of a dream’ provides an explanation of the ‘Lahore Resolution’, which was passed by the All-India Muslim League (AIML) in 1940. The ‘two-nation’ theory paved the pathway to the creation of Pakistan at the time of Indian independence in August 1947. The spirit of struggle for Pakistan from 1940 to 1947 has been metamorphosed into the spectre of an existential crisis, as the Pakistan regime confronts challenges of consolidating a national culture and a political economy. A distinct identity for all territories was created as the heart of Pakistan’s political idea. There were fundamental challenges in comprehending the political construction of Pakistan.

7. The world outside

‘The world outside’ discusses the political idea of Pakistan that had connections to the outside world through the seas and by land. The Arabian Sea, the Bay of Bengal, the Silk Road, and the Khyber Pass served as corridors for ideas, goods, and armies for Pakistan for thousands of years. The themes of contemporary political imaginations, Cold War geopolitical relations, and post-Cold War globalization are important here. In May 1963, Zulfikar Ali Bhutto declared that Pakistan has arrived at a peaceful settlement with all neighbouring countries, except India. Ali Bhutto's statement is relevant even today as it calls for a solution to the Kashmir problem.

“There’s No Way Abraham Lincoln Could Work at Google”: Fox News and the Politics of Breaking Up Big Tech

This paper analyzes a corpus of segments from the Tucker Carlson Tonight program concerning “big tech” (focusing specifically on Google) and contextualizes this analysis within the political history of American media and technology regulation. Conservatives have long lamented the so-called liberal bias in media, but have also traditionally supported business deregulation and an antitrust approach narrowly concerned with consumer welfare. The textual analysis of Fox segments first shows that recurring complaints about the bias of Google's employees and executives is connected with its market dominance, and they frequently position corporations rather than government as the central threat to freedom. The solutions discussed, correspondingly, often favor greater structural intervention in the market to mitigate concentration’s deleterious political consequences. I show how the critique on Carlson’s show and recent attention to the issue from the executive branch represent a new manifestation of the theory of ideological evolution that Jack Balkin has called “ideological drift,” in which a political idea (in this case, the “Brandeisian” approach to antitrust law) changes valence in different material circumstances and thus finds new proponents.

Mallard, Grégoire. 2019. Gift Exchange

Mallard, Grégoire. 2019. Gift Exchange: The Transnational History of a Political Idea. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN: 978-1108453486. 280 p.

A Case Study of Critical Approach Based Ideological and Political Teaching in English Text

Based on the content of the Critical Approach and category of text in the textbook, this paper attempts to discuss how to use the Critical Approach to explore the writer’s intention in the text which also indicates the ideological and political idea in the text. In order to find out the feasible teaching method, this paper chooses the excerpts as the case study. From the detailed analysis of the case, we conclude that the Critical Approach can help us find out the ideological and political ideas in learning text.