The Committees for the Defense of the Revolution (CDR) were one of the most important mass organizations in revolutionary Cuba. During the 1960s, the CDR developed a slew of actions among the Cuban masses, organizing cultural, political, and economic activities that shaped the revolutionary process from below. Through their work, the CDR gave meaning to their own idea of Cuban socialism. In the context of revolutionary upheaval, they were born as mass organizations to organize political surveillance against counterrevolutionary enemies. But the CDR also deployed productive power that sought to improve the lives of fellow Cubans. Organizing workers to solve local problems helped to reimagine the purpose of labor as a resource for public utility. For moments, the CDR even became the state. This article highlights the crucial role of the CDR members in the revolutionary process and their impact on the everyday lives of Cuban people.

This article is a commentary on the relationship between artificial intelligence (AI), capitalism, and memory. The political policies of neoliberalism have reduced the capacity of individuals and groups to reflect on and change the social world, meanwhile applications of AI and algorithmic technologies, rooted in the profit-seeking objectives of global capitalism, deepen this deficit. In these conditions, memory in individuals and across society is at risk of becoming myopic. In this article, I develop the concept of myopic memory with two core claims. Firstly, I argue that AI is a technological development that cannot be divorced from the capitalist conditions from which it comes from and is implemented in service of. To this end, I reveal capitalism and colonialism's historical and contemporary use of surveillance as a way to control the populations it oppresses, imagining their pasts to determine their futures, disempowering them in the process. My second core claim emphasises that this process of disempowerment is undergoing an acute realisation four decades into the period of neoliberalism. Neoliberal policies have restructured society on the basis of being an individual consumer, leaving little time, space, and institutional capacity for citizens to reflect on their impact or challenge their dominance. As a result, with the growing role of AI and algorithmic technologies in shaping our engagement with society along similar lines of individualism, it is my conclusion that the scope of memory is being reduced and constrained within the prism of capitalism, reducing its potential, and rendering it myopic.

Since the 1990s, Japan has experienced the rise of a phenomenon known as “lonely death” (kodokushi 孤独死): people who die alone and whose death goes unnoticed for a certain period of time. This has triggered public anxiety and moral panic because lonely death is often perceived as a form of “bad death” and a sign of the breakdown of family ties and neighborly relations. In the 2020s, this “feeling rule,” which associates lonely death with shame and fear, has quietly begun to be challenged by a group of post-mortem cleaning workers. By sharing their work experience and feelings through blogs, artworks, and books, the workers’ accounts of how they deal with the remnants of the deceased have turned the public perception of lonely death from an abstract, totalizing, fearful category into an understanding that such incidents have specific causes that can be faced and even prepared for. The cleaners’ emotional labor, especially their mourning for the dead, creates a sense of relatedness to the deceased, a feeling which is conveyed to the public through the cleaners’ narratives. The cleaners thereby change the feeling rules associated with the labor of dealing with the aftermath of a lonely death, turning it from “dirty work” into meaningful social action. This article contributes to an understanding of feeling rules by highlighting how individuals’ efforts, particularly, their reflections on their emotional labor, can change collective feeling rules.

Based on the discursive analysis of 28 semidirected interviews conducted in the small industrial town of Martfű, this article reflects on the role played by nationalism in the construction of political and cultural hegemony by Viktor Orbán’s Fidesz, Hungary’s ruling party since 2010. The ten themes mobilised by the respondents to express their vision of the Hungarian nation (identification, belonging, commitment, transmission, territory, uniqueness/fragility, heterogeneity/homogeneity, unity/division, east/west, and insubordination) and the issues attached to them (relationship to Hungarian minorities of neighbouring countries, relationship to the European Union, immigration, etc.) are paralleled with Fidesz’s discourse. On those subjects, Orbán’s party’s nationalism positions itself in a “central” way, managing to incarnate heterogeneous conceptions of the nation that are shared among this research’s respondents by Fidesz as well as non-Fidesz voters.

This article reconceptualizes norm conflict in international law by uncovering the experiential dimension of its definition and the intentional dimension of its resolution that has been missing from traditional accounts. The article locates the basis of recognizing norm conflict in the experienced sense of incompatibility between norms in view of their contexts rather than in the predesignated constellation of norms with contrary or contradictory functions according to their texts. Concomitantly, it argues that the justification for using certain legal techniques to resolve norm conflicts lies in the intended relationship deducible only between those norms that share the same regulatory purpose rather than between norms merely applying to the same factual situation. This reconceptualization generates a new typology of norm conflicts in light of the norms’ end goals and the means they provide to achieve them: “Ends Conflict”, “Means Conflict”, and “Unexperienced Conflict”, and suggests apposite ways to tackle them.

Under what conditions do countries lose their status as the leading global financial center? Some scholars argue that such shifts follow shortly after transitions in the distribution of other key capabilities (e.g. GDP), while others argue that path dependence or other more bespoke capabilities might be able to sustain financial leadership long after decline in other capabilities. This paper aims to understand the causes of the Anglo-American financial transition. I argue that the ability to manage political risk for investors is critical to the position of countries as financial entrepôts. In the case of British financial leadership, I argue that Britain’s position as an entrepôt hinged on its power projection capability, which enabled Britain to limit political risk for investors in ways that other states could not replicate. The gradual loss of those capabilities, in turn, saw Britain eventually become overshadowed by the United States. I support my claims with a TERGM analysis of the interwar sovereign debt network.

To date, the vast majority of post-growth thinking has been focused on explaining why a post-growth transition is needed and the policies this would entail. Less attention, in contrast, has been paid to the relations of power and structural mechanisms through which ‘growth hegemony’ is continuously reproduced, and even less to the mechanisms, counter-hegemonic strategies, and coalitions that could plausibly drive post-growth transitions in core states of the world-system. This article will explore these issues through the lens of Neo-Gramscian theory, particularly the ‘complex hegemony’ framework developed by Alex Williams. From this perspective, rather than reducing growth to capitalist relations of production (as Marxists typically do), we should instead frame it as an emergent hegemonic structure and process shaped by the reciprocally determining forces of political economy, ideology, and militarisation. I will argue that this approach provides more insight into the messiness of possible post-growth futures – which may confound neat binaries such as capitalism/socialism – as well as the mechanisms and struggles through which the world-system might be pushed in post-growth directions.

This article introduces the concept of hegemonic constituent power to argue for a greater role for the people in the process of Irish reunification through the establishment of a constituent assembly. Hegemonic constituent power contends that, ideally, constituent power should be possessed by the people; however, descriptively, this is invariably not the case. Constituent power instead is best understood as the manifestation of hegemony – the dominant power base in a given legal order that legitimates and reinforces this power through institutions, prevailing ideas and culture. Hegemony performs an important function in descriptively explaining legitimacy formation while not necessarily conferring normative legitimacy on existing power structures or those who exercise constituent power. Legitimacy and illegitimacy are both embedded in this notion of hegemonic constituent power. This allows for constituent power to perform a legitimating function and its creative potential to be unleashed while still leaving space for critical contestation over how this power was exercised. In this way, hegemonic constituent power also seeks to address critiques of constituent power as enabling populism. The article then deploys this concept of hegemonic constituent power to argue that fears of invoking the will of the people in debates on Irish reunification are misplaced.