ASEEES Panel Anxiety (original) (raw)
Related papers
The Anxiety Dilemma: Locating the Western Balkans in the Age of Anxiety
10.5937/jrs15-25359
The paper seeks to locate the Western Balkans in the current age of anxiety. By using the concept of ontological security as its overarching theoretical frame, the paper first develops a concept of anxiety dilemma. The anxiety dilemma refers to a situation in which a social order that provides one group of people with a sense of ontological security is a perceived source of anxiety for the other group and vice versa. The paper proposes that such a dilemma characterizes the present age of anxiety. Trapped in this dilemma are the proponents and the contesters of the liberal (international) order and globalization, often referred to in the literature as cos-mopolitans and communitarians. The paper argues that the Western Balkan countries occupy an ambivalent position in this anxiety dilemma. Their governments combine liberal-democratic justification with autocratic tendencies. The paper discusses how the Western Balkans came to occupy this position. It singles out four reasons: (1) the region's authoritarian legacy; (2) ethnon-ationalism coupled with state-and nation-building projects; (3) search for external legitimacy; and (4) the EU's abandonment of the inextricable link between peace and democracy. The case of the Western Balkans yields another important observation: that local anxiety dilemmas are nested in global anxiety dilemma. The paper makes two contributions. The first one is theoretical , and it consists of furthering the concept of ontological security such that it theorizes ontological security as a systemic inter-group phenomenon. The second contribution is analytical, and it consists in locating the Western Balkans in the ongoing struggles over globalization and the liberal (international) order.
Surviving post-socialism: coping practices in East-Central Europe
2005
Abstract: This article evaluates the coping practices adopted by households in East-Central Europe following the collapse of the socialist bloc. Drawing upon the New Democracies Barometer (NDB) survey, it is here revealed that although a common assumption is that post-socialist societies have under gone a transition to greater reliance on the market, an analysis of household coping practices provides little evidence that this is widely the case.
Leszek Koczanowicz, Anxiety and Lucidity: Reflections on Culture in Times of Unrest
Society Register, 2021
In the book entitled Anxiety and Lucidity. Reflections on Culture in Times of Unrest Leszek Koczanowicz reflects upon the phenomena of fear and anxiety in essential areas of life, both for the individual as well as the community. He adopts an interdisciplinary perspective so characteristic of an insightful researcher of culture. Fear and anxiety, as he argues, are intrinsic to modernity - the inability to get rid of them is characteristic of modern man. Koczanowicz puts his thoughts on paper in a demanding fashion, which does not, however, obscure the pleasure of reading these well-written and intelligent texts. The author's knowledge is vast, which transpires in the reviewed publication.
Dialectical Anthropology, 2017
The dissolution of Soviet-type socialism has been often taken to signal various ends: the end of history, ideology, and revolution; the foreclosure of the symbolic and epistemic space of emancipation opened up by the French, Russian, and anti-colonial revolutions. Yet, the celebrations of the march of liberal democracy and capital have soon given way to alarming observations about a new wave of right-wing populism that feeds on the contradictions of inequality and freedom, largely generated by neoliberal capitalist globalization. Based on my field research in Poland, my paper engages with this familiar problem, which is often discussed as the Bcrisis^ of liberal democracy, or Bdedemocratization.^ I show how the ends of communism and revolutionary politics have contributed to the social environment of emptiness , nihilism or the void, in which right-wing groups were able to thrive and claim to be the real voice of social change and justice, as opposed to the liberal establishment. To explore the way that void has been historically and materially constituted, my paper traces the shifting conditions of collective action or revolutionary practice in Poland and Eastern Europe since the 1960s. Specifically, I focus on the tragic dissolution and absorption of the massive BSolidarity^ worker movement into neoliberal state building in the 1990s and thereby engage with the often-invoked dialectic between insurrection and constitution, or movement and institutional-ization that haunt the revolutionary struggles.