Name: Hisseine Faradj
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: [email protected]
Professional Status: Assistant Professor
Institution: Bronx Community College CUNY
Scheduling Preference: No Preference
Proposal Type: Paper
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Paper Title:  The Resilience of Political Islam in the face of Post-Islamism
Abstract:
The early success of Political Islam or Islamist political parties during the “Arab Spring” signaled a shift in the nature of government and politics in the region ushering the arrival of what some dubbed as the “Arab Winter.” Accordingly, the ideologization of the religion of Islam was seen as shift away from the revolutionary goals and demands of establishing secular democracies that respect human right and the rule of law to theocracies resembling the regime governing the Islamic Republic of Iran. The early success of Islamist political parties was reversed and pummeled by an amalgamation of counter revolutionary forces that consists of the regional absolutist monarchies and aspiring military dictators prompting the academic literature and debates that coined the term Post-Islamism. This paper argues that this analysis is inaccurate and misleading as currents of Political Islam or Islamism are thriving at the moment as the winners of the repression campaign against other Islamist groups. Thus, speaking about Political Islam or Islamist political parties as a unified group with a unified fate is faulty and not helpful in understanding the political phenomenon. This assessment is possible by examining the notion of divine sovereignty that is at the core of the discourse of the founding ideologues of these political movements. This paper examines the contending concepts of divine sovereignty while connecting these notions of sovereignty to the winners and losers in the contemporary political landscape of the Middle Eastern and North African.

Name: Claudia Favarato
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: [email protected]
Professional Status: Graduate Student
Institution: University of Lisbon
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Paper Title:  Consenso di irmandade: Reading Bissau-Guinean Political Thought through Comparative Political Theory
Abstract:
Broadly speaking, the sub-Saharan regions receive little attention from political theory studies. Moreover, political theory in the continent is strictly intertwined with political philosophy or political anthropology. In this sense, comparative political theory (CPT) provides the theoretical frame to integrate the canons of the discipline with political thoughts and theories from marginalised areas. Although it is arguable that the efforts of CPT in Africa have, thus far, accorded less attention to indigenous, ordinary political thought than to “big thinkers”, the discipline offers a comprehensive frame for the understanding of political power. This paper aims to expose endogenous political thought of Guinea-Bissau through the reading lenses of CPT. The main benefit of this approach is that it enables the researcher to understand local conceptions of power and political relations beyond the state. The analysis uses a deductive-inductive approach. The data from fieldwork (2016; 2019; 2020) are gathered from individuals of different ethnical groups, thus transcending the religious and ethnical differentiation. The study focused primarily on discerning the principles underpinning power in the indigenous polity, where a communitarian understanding of the individual prevails. The reliance on the past, the land (tchon) and the kinship (djorson) determine the conceptualization of the functioning of the polity, ultimately governed by rules of participatory politics and “brotherhood consensus” (consenso di irmandade, in local creole). However, the tenets underlying indigenous political thought adapted and changed in the bi-directional process of Africanisation of power, due to the overarching presence of the state. The final aim of this paper is to shed some light on the reciprocal cooccurrence between the endogenous polity and the state (semi-presidential liberal democracy) on constituting Bissau-Guinean political thought today.

Name: Michael Gamkrelidze
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: Independent researcher
Professional Status:
Institution: Independent researcher
Scheduling Preference: Saturday Afternoon
Proposal Type: Paper
Panel Title: PT 4
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Paper Title:  To science about social boundaries or social ammoriology
Abstract:
ABSTRACT: This paper is a continuation of “Democracy as a State of Social Boundaries”, presented at last year's NYSPSA 73-rd Annual Congress. The idea then was to consider social systems of various sizes and types, from a family of two members to the world community, as dynamic steady state systems, seeing the advantage of this approach in the possibility of describing social systems in non-anthropomorphic terms, free of value judgment and common to physical and biological systems. We proceeded from the fact that the state (condition, order) of the system is a mathematical concept, as well as the boundary, also common to physical and biological systems. We hope that it will gradually relieve us of the need to operate with such controversial and ambiguous terms as capitalism, socialism, democracy, liberalism, and many others. In this article an attempt has been made to outline the taxonomy of social boundaries, their nature, their interdependence, their significance, their variability, their impact on the stability of social systems, on their development, survival in competition, etc. Keywords are: sovereignty, discrete and continuous states of the social system, social boundary

Name: Geoffrey Kurtz
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: [email protected]
Professional Status: Associate Professor
Institution: BMCC-CUNY
Scheduling Preference: No Preference
Proposal Type: Paper
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Paper Title:  Maybe Even Souls: Michael Walzer on the Moral Basis of Socialism
Abstract:
Michael Walzer is unmistakably a member of the ethical socialist tradition, the tradition of non-Marxist democratic leftists like R.H. Tawney, Ignazio Silone, and Irving Howe. Yet he has refrained from offering a thick account of what Howe called “the moral basis of socialism.” In Spheres of Justice, for example, after asking “by virtue of what characteristic” human persons deserve to be equal to one another, he answers: “I don’t know.” Similarly, in his seminal essay “The Communitarian Critique of Liberalism,” he argues that political theorists need not address “the constitution of the self” because their proper concern is limited to “the connection of (already) constituted selves.” Almost always, Walzer rules out of consideration questions about the underpinnings of his political commitments. Walzer’s reluctance to take up such questions is not incidental to his political thought. He argues that his insistence on thinking “inside the cave” is what makes his thought political in character, that fully articulated answers to fundamental questions entail a “singularity” incompatible with the pluralism necessary to an egalitarian and democratic politics. Yet it seems to me that Walzer suggests more things indirectly than he affirms directly about the moral or anthropological—or even, in a sense, theological—basis of his politics (as when he writes, in Spheres of Justice, that “souls” are “maybe even” among the things human persons have in common. Moreover, he gives his readers reason to think that his political aversion to fundamental questions was no more than a prudent response to the political situation of the American left in the second half of the twentieth century. In this paper, I will try to achieve two things. First, looking at a range of Walzer’s works (especially at Spheres of Justice, his late-1980s writings on social criticism, his two books on the Bible, and his most directly socialist essays in Dissent), I will piece together Walzer’s indirect or partial answers to questions about the moral underpinnings of his politics, tracing the outlines of the moral premises that he implies or evokes. Second, I will argue that affirming a moral basis for socialism is more compatible with Walzer’s sort of social democratic politics than he recognizes, in part because the political circumstances of the democratic left today are not the same as in the period in which Walzer formulated the main lines of his thinking. I will argue that Walzer has shown, perhaps despite himself, that social democracy can and should be a radical politics, a politics that depends on root-level moral affirmations.

Name: Matthew LaValle
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: [email protected]
Professional Status: Graduate Student
Institution: SUNY Empire State College
Scheduling Preference: Saturday Morning
Proposal Type: Paper
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Paper Title: Social Organization, Social Media, & Social Capital
Abstract:
Traditional Western social organization is characterized by distinct boundaries separating the individual and the organizations which form the wider society. Sharp distinctions provide clarity of purpose, position, and power. However, contemporary society is characterized by the blurring of divisions between the individual and society, the consumer and the citizen, public and private. It is the disruptive nature of these transitions, fueled by policy and accelerated by technology, which is detrimental to social capital. Democratic processes and discourse depend on social cooperation, civic engagement, and social trust; which would appear, on the surface, to be collective activities. While collectivist perspectives tend to view individualism as a threat to such social cooperation, democratic political structures have historically flourished in traditionally individualistic societies and have struggled to take root in collectivist ones. While individualism would appear to be corrosive to social capital, it may be a necessary component of its functionality. Working on the basis of this assumption, this paper hypothesizes that voluntary cooperation actually depends on individuals having the autonomy to decide to work in concert without coercion or social pressure. However, the individualism which sustained political participation in the past becomes a detriment when the distinctions which characterize individualistic societies become obscured. For example, the difference between today’s American political participant and consumer is ill-defined. The individual citizen is driven by values, the individual consumer is driven by value. Forty years of political and policy decisions have erased the differences between those roles on a societal scale, while the proliferation of technology has distorted the distinction on the individual level. When individuals are unable to distinguish between the two roles they are unlikely to see potential political allies and are more likely to see potential economic competitors. The division between the individual and society, particularly in the United States, has been historically sustained by a robust defense of privacy, fueled by a healthy suspicion of intrusions on said privacy. Yet, the rapid digitization of human interaction, facilitated by private organizations whose business models monetize the record of private action in the form of data, has eroded the border which divides the private and public realms. The voluntary relinquishment of privacy in exchange for convenience and the ability to participate in society-at-large has led to the centralization of private and social activities into one location (digital platforms). As such forums become repositories and transmitters of our private thoughts, our places of commerce, our means of social interaction, our sources of information, and our primary means of political participation; the centralization of social and private activities disrupts societal norms while distorting our perception of individual identity, its relationship and role within our society, and the very structure of that society. Social capital is a form of trust. Trust is threatened by ambiguity and uncertainty. This paper seeks to examine the impact of the perceived ambiguity of contemporary social organization on social capital. This paper will utilize the Hofstede model of dimensionalizing culture and the work of cross-cultural psychologists to compare the relationship between individualism and democracy. Furthermore it will examine the transition of private and public activities to digital platforms as well as analyze policy trends which have blurred the distinction between business and government while comparing those trends to declines in social capital as defined by individuals such as Robert Putnam and others. The paper hypothesizes that the increasing ambiguity of American social organization will correlate with declines in social capital.

Name: Osabohien Oduwa
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: [email protected]
Professional Status: Undergraduate Student
Institution: Le Moyne College
Scheduling Preference: Friday Afternoon
Proposal Type: Paper
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Paper Title:  Your Favorite Store Lives in a Democracy, You Do Not
Abstract:
Outside forces play a significant influence on the U.S. federal government and the policies it enacts. However, there is a debate on who these outside forces actually are. In this paper, I address this question on the identity of these outside actors. Of the many conflicting arguments pertaining to finding the answer to this question, two standout and are the cornerstones of this paper, majoritarian pluralism and biased pluralism. Those who argue for majoritarian pluralism contend that the U.S. federal government is influenced by the will of the general voting populous in the country. Those who argue for biased pluralism argue that the federal government is influenced by the whims of powerful businesses. Through the use of secondary sources (academic journals, articles, excerpts from books, etc.), this paper aims to clarify that those who argue for biased pluralism provide a cogent answer to this question. The evidence for this being the case is compelling. In this paper, I focus on three different aspects of how the U.S. government functions: committee assignments, the iron triangle, and the electoral system. I focus on how committee assignments are plagued by corporate money being flooded into it thanks to committee fees. I write about how the iron triangle keeps our government regulation in a self serving loop as the very people who are responsible for regulating industries go on to work for those industries once they leave public office. I then focus on the U.S. electoral system and how corporations get into the ear of our politicians through PACs and Super PACs. This paper not only provides evidence to support the biased pluralism perspective, but also it addresses counterarguments offered by those who argue for majoritarian pluralism. This paper, then, concludes by disproving and shutting down these counterclaims and supports that it is biased pluralism that pervades the U.S. political arena.

Name: Nader Sadre
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: [email protected]
Professional Status: Adjunct Professor
Institution: Hunter College
Scheduling Preference: No Preference
Proposal Type: Paper
Panel Title: PT 1
Panel Description: Topics in Political Theory
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Paper Title:  Charismatic Pirates: Reading the Odyssey with Weber
Abstract:
My paper considers the role of mobility and liminality in Weber’s typology of authority. I ask, how does the im/mobility of the charismatic actor enhance or diminish her political status? Weber offers many examples of the charismatic figure, one of which is the ‘pirate’. He does not however thoroughly consider the mobility of the pirate as a conditioning factor on his authority. To explore this question further, I use Weber to reread Homer’s Odyssey. The Scherian episode, in which Odysseus relates his adventures to the Phaeacians, offers a rich illustration of a charismatic actor seizing authority from the king. Essential to this process is Odysseus’ mobility, his dual identity as monarch and pirate, as guest and stranger. By drawing out the relationship between authority and mobility, I hope to enrich our understanding of Weber’s account of charisma and complicate our views about the political capacity of the traveler.

Name: Yunus Sozen
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: [email protected]
Professional Status: Assistant Professor
Institution: Le Moyne college
Scheduling Preference: Friday Afternoon
Proposal Type: Paper
Panel Title: PT 5
Panel Description:
Co-author info: Eylem Dogan, MEF University, Istanbul. [email protected]
Co-presenter info: Eylem Dogan, MEF University, Istanbul. [email protected]
Paper Title:  Populism, Resentment, and Ressentiment
Abstract:
In this paper, we focus on the relationship of two polemical concepts, resentment and populism, as well their connections with democracy and authoritarianism. To inquire upon this relationship, we first overview the populism literature and the uses of the concept of resentment in that literature, covering the debates on populism’s definition, origins, and relationship with democracy and authoritarianism. We observe that, in the literature on populism, resentment is mainly utilized to describe the negative emotion that leads to the rise of the so-called ‘noxious’ political phenomenon of populism, while there is a lacuna in the study of the relationship between populism-in-power and resentment. We then make two arguments concerning the interrelations of these two concepts, utilizing the Argentinean and Turkish cases of populism-in-power as illustrations. First, we argue that populism defined as a socio-cultural phenomenon, relates better with the concept of resentment and its theoretical background than other political strategic or ideological definitions of the concept. Our second argument connects resentment with populism-in-power in a modern democratic institutional framework. Building on Tocqueville’s insight that in modern democracies, the combination of political equality with persistent inequalities of social and economic power provide a fertile ground for envy-resentment, we argue that populism-in-power exacerbates already existing resentment-generating conditions of democracy. This occurs because of the tendency for populists-in-power to hyperpoliticize socio-cultural differences, their promise of redemption in this world through politics without delivering equality of power, and their rhetoric of victimhood while in power. Finally, utilizing Ure’s conceptual framework that distinguishes among different forms of resentment, we argue that populism-in-power (especially its right-wing forms) is the vehicle that potentially transforms (or degenerates) ‘socio-political resentment’ to ‘ontological ressentiment’.

Name: Joanne Tetlow
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: [email protected]
Professional Status: Adjunct Professor
Institution: Marymount University
Scheduling Preference: No Preference
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Paper Title:  Executive Orders: Arbitrary Political Power and Locke’s Second Treatise
Abstract:
The President of the United States has too much political power. And it is not constitutional. This excessive executive power has been operating in an unfettered way both in American government and society for far too long, at least since the end of World War II. Now is the time for change. President Donald J. Trump, who has used and abused executive power in a feckless and arbitrary manner, has brought a longstanding problem to the fore. This problem is presidential lawmaking through executive orders. We need a second U.S. Supreme Court decision along the lines of Youngstown Steel Tube Co. v. Sawyer (1952), where an executive order by President Harry Truman to seize private American steel mills was declared unconstitutional and stopped dead in its tracks. It is the U.S. Supreme Court who must take the first step in not only checking executive orders, but placing them on firm constitutional grounds under the separation of powers doctrine. Then, it is up to Congress to respond by delegating more circumscribed powers to the executive within those constitutional boundaries. This is the structural, governmental part of my argument, which will focus on the constitutional jurisprudence of executive orders and the “separation of powers” doctrine. In the second part of the paper, I will argue “why” action is necessary to change the course of executive power through an analysis of John Locke’s Second Treatise of Civil Government (1690). Locke theorizes and places lawmaking power in the legislature, not in the executive. Locke sees correctly that the executive power man gives up by coming out of the state of nature to form a civil government is “the execution of the laws” not the “right to make laws.” Political power is foremost the right to make laws. That lawmaking power is legislative, the body who has the supreme power in a commonwealth, and who directs the force of the community in the execution of such laws. Thus, implementation and execution of the law are not lawmaking powers; they are administrative and operational. Other than Locke’s exception for prerogative, the executive shall not, and must not, engage in lawmaking; otherwise, arbitrary power will violate the right of self-preservation and preservation of the community, the two fundamental natural laws of political society. Also, under Locke, if the legislative is altered, the government can be dissolved. In the American context, this dissolution of government would be ending unilateral presidential lawmaking through executive orders, and returning to the republican form of government intended by the U.S. Constitution. It is entirely clear the Founders did not want a monarchy. Continuing to permit substantive lawmaking by the President of the United States endangers the liberties of the people and its democratic republic. Further, the arbitrary nature of substantive executive orders changing from President to President does not serve the purpose of law, which is to be settled, established, and known based on the consent of the governed, or popular sovereignty.

Name: Aaron Zack
Section: Political Theory
Professional Email: [email protected]
Professional Status: Adjunct Professor
Institution: John jay College and Baruch College, CUNY
Scheduling Preference: No Preference
Proposal Type: Paper
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Co-author info: none
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Paper Title:  Byung Chul Han's Theory of the Digital Personality: the Prospects for Political Mobilization in a Digital World
Abstract:
Byung Chul Han is a contemporary German social theorist. His analysis of the digital world's deconstruction and construction of our political identities has received increasing attention, particularly as more of our political and intellectual activity shifts to a digital, virtual format. Standard analyses suggest that the digital world and social media facilitate political action and mass mobilization for political ends. Han, in contrast, asserts that the shift to digital personalities and a digital world has limited the prospects for real political thought, dialogue, and mobilization. This paper will present and analyze Han's insights about the digital world's effects on political debate and mass political mobilization.