Marianne Kneuer

Das Spannungsverhältnis von Literatur und Philosophie aufzulösen und beide zu vereinen, das ist keine neue, aber eine selten verwirklichte Idee. Sind die Suche nach wahren Erkenntnissen und die Schöpfung von fiktiven Welten wirklich unvereinbar? Ernesto Sábato, letzter Vertreter der großen argentinischen Schriftstellergeneration, verneint dies. Für ihn ist Philosophie ein unverzichtbarer Bestandteil des Romans. Die Autorin beleuchtet das politische und intellektuelle Klima, das Sábato geprägt hat. Sie untersucht die philosophischen Strömungen, die ihn beeinflußt haben und die ästhetische Richtung, an der er sich orientierte. Diese interdisziplinäre Betrachtung vollzieht so den Weg nach, der Sábato zu seiner Idee der Synthese von Literatur und Philosophie geführt hat.

ihr Verhältnis bei Ernesto Sábato

Literatur und Philosophie

Thomas Demmelhuber

Autocracies not only resist the global spread of democracy but are sources of autocratic influence and pressure. This book presents a conceptual model to understand, assess, and explain the promotion and diffusion of authoritarian elements. Employing a cross-regional approach, leading experts empirically test the concept of authoritarian gravity centers (AGCs), defined as "regimes that constitute a force of attraction and contagion for countries in geopolitical proximity." With an analysis extending across Latin America, the Middle East, Eastern Europe, Central Asia, and Asia, these AGCs are shown to be effective as active promoters (push) or as neutral sources of attraction (pull). The authors contend that the influence of exogenous factors, along with international and regional contexts for the transformation of regime types, is vital to understanding and analyzing the transmission of autocratic institutional settings, ideas, norms, procedures, and practices, thus explaining the regional clustering of autocracies. It is the regional context in which external actors can influence authoritarian processes most effectively. Authoritarian Gravity Centers is a vibrant and comprehensive contribution to the growing field of autocratization, which will be of great interest to undergraduate and postgraduate students of comparative area studies, illiberalism, international politics, and studies of democracy.

A Cross-Regional Study of Authoritarian Promotion and Diffusion

Authoritarian Gravity Centers

Gero Erdmann

Democratization since the implosion of the communist bloc displays a mixed balance. While the neo-democracies in Central Eastern European Countries can be seen as largely consolidated, many other processes of democratization in other parts of the world such as Africa, Asia and Latin America got stuck as unconsolidated or became defective democracies, some ‘regressed’ into hybrid regimes or were even turned into autocracies. While transitology dealt with the transition from authoritarian rule, the reverse process, the transition from democratic rule, remained almost completely outside the scholarly attention. This special issue will address the problems of the regression of democracy and aims at closing the gap between research on democracy and democratization on one side and the emergence of authoritarian regimes on the other. The contributions of this volume analyse the different phenomena in which decline of democracy fans out: the loss of quality, which means a silent regression; the backslide into hybrid regimes (hybridization); and the breakdown of democracy.

Regression of Democracy?

Saskia Richter

Welche Rolle spielten die sozialen Medien – insbesondere Facebook und Twitter – bei der transnationalen Empörung nach der Finanzkrise? Das Buch analysiert diese Frage anhand der Proteste in Portugal, Spanien, USA, Großbritannien und Deutschland. Die Ergebnisse bringen Aufschluss, wie transnational die Kommunikation der Protestbewegungen in den Jahren 2011 und 2012 ausgerichtet war. Zudem wird deutlich, wozu die Aktivisten das Netz nutzten: zum inhaltlichen Diskurs, zur Organisation des Protests oder zur Verbreitung von Emotionen. Mit einem Vorwort von Bodo Hombach

Marianne Kneuer

Books

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