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When Benoît Assou-Ekotto’s former coach Harry Redknapp announced that the Cameroonian international had decided to end his professional football career and become an adult movie actor, the story generated astonishment and amusement in social media networks and received widespread attention from the mass media. Although the French-born footballer denied the story’s validity shortly afterward, claiming Redknapp was joking, it entertained football fans and the wider public during the spring of 2017. However, while this was one of the very few occasions on which an African footballer’s postcareer trajectory was a matter of public debate, it also revealed that former African professional footballers’ whereabouts, occupations, and living conditions are widely unknown and remain an underresearched topic.
The Renewable Energy Sources Act (EEG) in Germany aims to transition the country to a sustainable energy system. This has led to a decentralization of the energy market and a shift toward community-focused energy supply systems. Municipal energy companies (MECs), deeply rooted in their communities, are crucial in facilitating this transition and promoting innovative technologies. Websites serve as important communication tools, facilitating interaction between companies and consumers. In our study, we conducted a quantitative content analysis to examine how MECs communicate issues related to the energy transition on their web pages (N = 300). In general, our results show that the energy transition was rarely mentioned on landing pages, and while companies are improving their sustainable electricity products, renewable gas and heating tariffs have received little attention. Additionally, we identified three communication types of MECs: The transitionalists (45 %), the traditionalists (35 %), and the pioneers (20 %), with the latter being the most innovative that emphasizes issues related to the energy transition. Overall, it can be said that the MECs have not yet fully exploited their potential to position themselves as pioneers of the energy transition in their website communications.
This paper revisits Lukács’s and Adorno’s analyses of reification to articulate a diagnosis that accounts both for its tendencies towards authoritarianism and its emancipatory potentials. Despite their divergences, Lukács’s conception of the proletariat as ‘identical subject-object of history’ and Adorno’s diagnosis of ‘the end of psychology’ in the authoritarian masses seem to converge on a similar outcome. Through opposite paths, they both culminate in the elimination of the subject-object distinction, leading the critique of reification to a political impasse. However, this alternative is rooted in partial interpretations of Lukács’s and Adorno’s arguments. As I contend, one can reconstruct Lukács’s analysis in a way that portrays emancipatory subjectivity not as hostile to otherness but as driven by the material limits of reification, or what Adorno termed the non-identical. Correspondingly, in light of Lukács, Adorno’s diagnosis can be read in a way that the end of psychology, far from negating the possibility of emancipation, serves as its driving force.
Sport, diplomacy, and regionalism in Southeast Asia : the Southeast Asian (SEA) Games and ASEAN
(2024)
The biennial Southeast Asian or SEA Games, a regional sport mega-event modeled on the Olympic and Asian Games, were established by Thailand in 1959, and since then have been conducted 32 times across 10 of the region’s 11 countries. This article examines how this understudied event has operated as a forum for diplomatic representation, negotiation and communication in Southeast Asia. We make three key arguments: (1) the SEA Games have provided member countries with a means to signal national progress and membership of the regional community, as well as to define and delineate this region; (2) the SEA Games have evolved parallel to the region’s political grouping, the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), but with important differences as well as similarities; and (3) the regional perspective of the SEA Games offers insights that blur the distinction in recent scholarship between traditional ‘sports diplomacy’ (foregrounding the state) and ‘international-sport-as-diplomacy’ (foregrounding non-state actors).
Over the past decade, there has been a strong focus on studying individuals’ responses to stigmatisation, discrimination and racism, while the question of how individuals recognise and make sense of an exclusionary event, has been largely side-lined. To fill
in this gap, this study leverages an affect-theoretically informed reformulation of Essed’s (1991, Understanding Everyday Racism: An Interdisciplinary Theory. London: Sage) classic concept of ‘comprehension of racism’ to investigate how individuals understand and make sense of experiences of ethnoracial exclusion. Empirically, the article analyses 419 experiences/incidents of ethnoracial exclusion reported in 66 semi-structured interviews with highly educated, second and 1.75 generation immigrants representing three ‘groups’ of Germans who (may) experience exclusion due to their migrant background: Germans of Polish migrant background, Black Germans and Germans of Turkish migrant background. The study identifies three modes by which interviewees talked about exclusionary experiences/incidents: (1) by normalisation (interpreting an experience/incident as ‘normal’), (2) by categorisation (identifying an experience/incident as, e.g. ‘racist’, ‘discriminatory’, or ‘disadvantaging’) or (3) by indicating feelings of unease. For each of the three modes, the article outlines the role of affects and emotions in interviewees’ narratives, provides insight into the types of experiences/incidents for which the modes were used and highlights differences between the three groups of respondents.
This article brings, for the first time, two of the most pivotal distinctions in nationalism studies into extended dialogue: the civic–ethnic distinction (CED) and the nationalism–patriotism distinction (NPD). By reviewing both the evolution of those distinctions over the previous decades and the ways in which they have been used in quantitative empirical research, we argue that the CED's evolution has been a partial success story, whereas discourse around the NPD has not seen substantial development. Despite lingering inconsistencies, researchers drawing on the CED have been successful in addressing different lines of critique and in using the CED as a heuristic for investigating notions of nationhood as expressed in public perceptions. In contrast, there has been only limited dialogue between theoretical and empirical approaches to the NPD. The article illustrates how research drawing on the NPD could profit from the CED's evolution. We close by providing a conceptual roadmap to guide the path towards more terminological clarity and to construct more theoretically robust measures for nationalism and patriotism. We specifically suggest that nationalism and patriotism should be consistently understood as ideal types that citizens can simultaneously hold to varying degrees.
Search Engines and Foreign Influence: How Google and Yandex Mediate Russia’s Propaganda Abroad
(2025)
This cumulative dissertation examined how the US-based Google and Russia-based Yandex mediate the propaganda efforts of Russia’s ruling elites abroad on a case study of Belarus. The findings presented here contribute to a nuanced understanding of how algorithmic gatekeepers, particularly search engines, can be strategically appropriated or manipulated to reinforce and export state narratives beyond national borders. The main conclusion of this dissertation is that both Yandex and Google, albeit through different mechanisms and to varying extents, can serve as mediators of Russia’s propaganda efforts abroad.
Analysis of the practices, structures and processes of translocal mobility systems in Burkina Faso
(2025)
This report presents the results of the project “Migration and Translocality in West Africa (MiTra|WA)” with reference to translocal practices in Burkina Faso. Funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research, the study ran from 2022 to 2024. The general objective of the project is to analyse the multiple links between the rural areas of departure and urban reception of migrants as well as the impacts on the development of these localities.
The study employs a mixed-methods approach, combining quantitative and qualitative research methods. The quantitative component consisted of two types of surveys. First, a household survey in the migrants' area of origin (AoO) to identify the migrants’ belonging to these households. In the second phase, a telephone survey was conducted among migrants in the destination areas (AoD). Then, the focus was on socio-economic data as well as translocal interactions and network relationships. The qualitative component consisted of in-depth interviews with key actors in the different areas of departure and destination of migrants. These include migrants, local administrative officials, leaders of NGOs, associations, community and religious leaders.
The results show that migration is a phenomenon experienced by many households in rural areas. There are as many internal migrants as there are international migrants. Of the 537 households surveyed, 405 (75.4%) have at least one migrant. The age structure of migrants shows a predominantly young structure of migrants (82% who are under 40 years old). According to gender, migration is strongly male-dominated (82%). Men are more inclined to international migration (56%). Female migration is precocious. A large proportion of migrants (41%) have no level of education and are mostly single (50%). Translocality, conceptualized in this study as the multifaceted links between the places of departure, transit and residence of migrants, is apprehended through telephone contacts between migrants and their place of origin, in addition to the different forms of mobility: mobility of people, financial resources (remittances), material resources (transfers in kind), intangible resources (ideas, practices, etc.). Exchanges are often bidirectional. Telephone contacts represent 86% of migrants. Migrants visit the household in the area of origin more frequently (41.8%) than they receive household members at their destination (33.9%). More than 66.6% of migrants transfer remittances to their households in rural areas. With regard to the 4-level translocality intensity indicator (Wehner 2022), it can be concluded that over 50% of migrants are located at the two highest levels. Hence, translocality is an important feature of rural-urban migration in Burkina Faso.
For activists I met in Chennai, the capital city of Tamil Nadu in India, organic food and farming was a ‘way of life’. Stemming from my curiosity about this statement and what it meant for different actors in the regional organic agri-food networks, this research explores the interconnected lives and livelihoods of organic farmers and activists in Tamil Nadu. To engage with the social dynamics of these agri-food networks, the research focuses in on the role of the affective, feeling body. The emphasis on affect emerged in the form of memories, emotions and visceral experience, from empirical data collected between 2020 and 2022. And as the thesis demonstrates, affective dimensions, or what moves people, are important because, unlike economic, statistical or structural perspectives, they make visible the ways different actors feel socio-ecological change. Adopting the lens of Feminist Political Ecology and drawing on the fields of historical anthropology and feminist ethics, this thesis highlights: (1) the enduring nature of epistemic injustice within agri-food relations, (2) how social boundaries are built, maintained and remade through affective encounters, circumscribing what I call the ‘affective roots’ of socio-ecological change and (3) how ambiguous affective relations co-constitute organic agri-food networks, shaping anxious environmental subjectivities, that stem from socially mediated encounters with agro-chemicals, the market, the landscape and the other. Deepening our understanding of socio-ecological and agrarian change through empirical inquiry into how people feel matters, I argue, because it sheds light on injustices that are often concealed beneath the clouds of crisis.
This article argues in favour of broadening the classical paradigm of democracy that historically emerged in the West. Without disregarding the undiminished significance of the idea of liberal democracy and its deep commitment to universal human rights, the necessity of a new accentuation of the concept of democracy is accepted in view of the observable democratic processes in non-Western societies. This should help to avoid both the blind spots of Eurocentrism and the misperception of countries as democracies that are merely masking their authoritarian or despotic character. The result is a theory of popular sovereignty that seeks to grasp and combine Western and non-Western conceptions of democracy in a balanced way and is based on a genealogical and comparative perspective of the history of political ideas in the global North and South. In a second step, the theory is then tested using a few selected examples (Confucian democracy, Islamic democracy, African democracy).