Pub Talk in Public: How Trump and European Nationalists Test Democracy

By Stephan Manning.

The political climate in the U.S. and Western Europe is changing dramatically – authoritarian populists are on the rise: Donald Trump keeps winning primaries and is likely to become the Republican U.S. presidential candidate. At the same time, nationalist parties are gaining ground across Europe. Recent example: The ‘Alternative for Germany’ (AfD), a populist right-wing party that campaigns against refugees, climbed from zero to double-digit percentage figures in the latest state elections. Supporters of Trump and European right-wing populist parties have several things in common: they are mostly male, yet rather diverse in terms of age and socio-economic status; they are not loyal to any political party, yet concerned about order and national identity; they are anti-establishment and include many prior non-voters. For example, in the German state Saxony-Anhalt, the AfD received a record-breaking 24% of votes mainly thanks to prior non-voters making up 40% of their votes. Trump is betting on such voters as well, and according to him, his supporters will start ‘riots’ if the Republican National Convention blocks his nomination. Where does this nationalist movement against the establishment come from? What drives prior non-voters to ballot boxes in favor of authoritarian leadership? And what does that mean for democracy?

The Enloe Strikes Back at the Phantom Menace of Business Militarization

By Keshav Krishnamurty.

UMass Boston was honored to host distinguished guest speaker Prof. Cynthia Enloe (Clark University) during the lunch session of the AIBNE Frontier Conference on October 23, 2015. Prof. Enloe is one of the most prominent and distinguished scholars in the world to study the complex intersections of feminism, women, the military, war, politics and the international economy.

After being introduced by Prof. David Levy (UMass Boston College of Management), Prof. Enloe spoke about how she spent a lot of time thinking about the field of militarism and the processes of militarization, the processes by which anything and anybody can be infused with militaristic ideas and depends for their well-being on militarization. These processes can occur at the macro-level and micro-level, from daily life to public policy. Her talk, she said, would be about the militarization of business, a process that happens in several different ways.

Crowdsourced social order in Boston: technology replaces relationships?

By Mary Still.

Particular public crises become etched in the collective conscious: the Arab spring, in which masses mobilized by internet technology revolted against government regimes, is such an example.  September 11 is another. Hurricane Katrina, with its images of poor people floating on makeshift rafts, is a third. The Boston Marathon bombings appear to have a similar hold on our psyches, in part for the vividness of the bombing images, but also for the ensuing manhunt, an unprecedented example of swarm intelligence facilitated by technology. The uniquely inter-connected citizenry became a self-organized army that rapidly organized to restore social order.