I Hate Politics

In this post I will present a cross theoretical analysis of the concept of political revolution. For this purpose I will try to shed light on how different theories explain the causality and dialectics of revolutionary movement. When discussed about the revolution, we refer to the sudden and rapid changes occurring to the previous conditions. In this sense, the concept of political revolution speaks foremost about a sudden alteration in the social order and not necessarily about the qualitative dimension of this change. Looking first at the Marxist school argument revolution is seen as a change of modes of production (Skocpol, 1981). It stems from class-divided modes of production, by transforming one mode of production into another through class conflict. According to Marx, the revolution is a sharp transition from one form of economic organization to a new one, in which new types of social relations are established. In this context, the transformation of the prod...

Which school of though better explains the causes of ethnic violence? Introduction The nature of ethnic violence has been always generating debates among scholars coming from the fields of comparative politics and international relations. The question discussed in this post will contrast several types of arguments, the rationalist argument that sees the ethnic conflict as a rational result of group and individual behavior (Steinberg 1981; Glazer & Moynihan 1975) with the premordialist argument that observe the ethnic violence as an inevitable clash based on innate antagonisms of contending groups (Smith 1986; Kaplan 1993), the constructivist, and the symbolist politics. I will try to project which of the theory provides a better answer to the questions: whether conflicts among different ethnicities are natural phenomena or and what are the factors that trigger the escalation of ethnic violence? Rational choice theory perceives ethnic conflict ...

One of the most controversial phenomena observed in the mid and especially the second half of the twentieth century is the extraordinary increase in the role of religion in public and private life. This unprecedented escalation of religious activism forced in some cases the national governments to adjust their political vector to the religious demands of society, while in others led to the overthrow of civil governments, thus transforming secular states in religious ones. Moreover, it seems that the revitalization of religious values is not a phenomenon bound to a specific type of society with a particular set of political, economic or social values but affects all types of states independent of their religion, geographic location or form of political organization. In this sense, we could follow the rise and fall of a wide variety of revivals taking place around the world throughout the twentieth century, in particular. For instance, Garfein (n.a.) notes the oc...