Search results

Chapter 8 engages in a round table discussion with Montesquieu (Persian Letters), Fanon (Black Skins, White Masks, Dying Colonialism, and the Wretched of Earth), and Camus (The Stranger) posthumously. This chapter explores the inner psyche of the subalterns as they strive to reach decoloniality. This chapter offers suggestions for decolonizing praxis.

Is liberalism premised on an unrealistically individualist anthropology? In one regularly told story about modernity, the earliest liberals grounded their arguments for political liberty in a picture of human nature that centered on our moral autonomy, perhaps epitomized best in Kantian thought. However, a range of critics have now compellingly argued that such accounts of our agency are descriptively inaccurate, and that normative social projects beginning from such flawed foundations are thus unstable. While this paper accepts this criticism of individualist anthropologies, it proposes that this need not identify a problem with liberalism overall. To make this case, this paper turns to Adam Smith, who grounded his early advocacy of liberalism in an anthropology grounded in natural theology that depicts us as morally interconnected, rather than as autonomous, and as always morally impressionable. As it will explain, Smith presumed an account of character as integrally related to and influenced by the agent’s social context, for both better and worse. Furthermore, he wove his attentiveness to this complex interaction between the agent and their context into both his economic analyses and political proposals. Smith’s social vision thus illustrates how a strong regard for individual liberty is fully compatible with a sophisticated anthropology that recognizes our malleability as moral agents – and even with political proposals that capitalize upon this malleability. Smith’s thought thus offers useful resources for contemporary proponents of liberalism who wish to value the dignity of individuals without basing that valuation in unrealistic abstractions, or ignoring the responsibilities engendered by the fact of our ongoing moral formation by our social contexts.

Using composite indices, the paper examines the nexus between militarization, globalization and liberal democracy. The democratic peace theory, the conflict inhibiting effects of international trade – a key and dominant facet of globalization – and the democracy promoting globalization hypothesis form the theoretical underpinnings of the empirical investigation.

To probe into the issue at hand, the paper adopts a dynamic panel VAR estimation procedure. Given the usual data constraints, the sample consists of 113 countries, and the estimations span the period 1995–2019.

The findings from the dynamic panel VAR estimations suggest the presence of a negative and statistically significant nexus between the level of globalization and the level of militarization. No statistically traceable nexus between globalization and liberal democracy was found.

The findings offer empirical support to the hypothesis that the strong links of interdependence shaped by globalization reduce the need for military preparedness. The results lead to a tentative inference in favor of the doux commerce thesis. Nonetheless, given that the estimations span a historically specific period – the entire post-bipolar era – the inferences that stem from the findings should be treated with caution.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the composite indices Bonn International Centre for Conflict Studies (BICC) militarization index, the globalization index of the Swiss Economic Institute (Konjunkturforschungsstelle) (KOF), LibDem, polyarchy have not hitherto been jointly used in previous studies to examine the nexus between militarization, globalization and liberal democracy.

This chapter outlines the underpinning author’s perspective to explain the approach to decoloniality and untangle the current praxis and research method from coloniality. This chapter also describes the subsequent chapters’ structure, moving from colonialism and its roots to decoloniality in practice and research.

This chapter reviews different ontological positions and uses modernism, postmodernism, structuralism, and poststructuralism to illustrate how each changes the nature of research when attempting to decolonize the research method.

This study aims to analyze the effects of e-government on corruption prevalence by using a sample of 29 European countries over the period 2012–2019.

This paper uses the panel corrected standard errors (PCSE) model to mitigate the problems of cross-sectional dependence. The PCSE model is also considered to reexamine the findings when the presence of heteroscedasticity, fixed effects and endogeneity issues are taken into account. The theoretical model incorporates one-year-lagged explanatory variables to deal with endogeneity. The autoregressive distributed lag method using the dynamic fixed effects estimator is chosen to deal with the time and country-fixed effects in the effort to measure the short- and long-run effects of e-government more precisely.

The results indicate that e-government plays a critical role in improving the population’s perception of corruption. Furthermore, e-government appears to have an effect in the short run. Notably, the estimation results show that there is a nonlinear relationship between e-government, especially user centricity and key enablers and the corruption perception index in the U-shaped curve.

The short-run and nonlinear effects of e-government on corruption prevalence suggest that the fight against corruption requires countries to pursue a consistent and continuous improvement and development of the e-government system.

The authors contribute to the literature by providing a consistent and precise answer to this relationship in the case of European countries. Another contribution of the work is to use diverse indicators to reflect e-government in a typical country, which helps us confirm the reliability and robustness of the findings.

This article problematizes the concept of freedom rooted in liberalism, examining the detention of historian Ilan Pappe by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) at Detroit Airport in the United States as an emblematic case study.

The research adopts a methodological triangulation approach, based on an analysis that combines data about the event and theories about the concept of freedom, problematizing authors who focused on the relationship between the individual and society in a liberal context, where individualism serves as the basis for specific conceptions of social relations.

Through the use of authors such as John Stuart Mill and John Locke, as well as the contributions of authors like Norbert Elias, it is argued that true freedom is relational, rooted in social interdependencies and the social construction of an individuality that is not individualistic but intrinsically linked to collective aspects.

Pappe’s case illustrates the tensions between individual freedom and collective interests, highlighting the need to reassess freedom of expression in complex political and social contexts.

This article proposes a more inclusive and interconnected view of human freedom, where individual and collective interests are negotiated within a dynamic web of social relations.