Politics and Values: The Middle East and China

Standard accounts of American politics invoke an oscillation between idealist and realist inclinations. The idealists appeal to principles, which they identify as fundamental to the American polity, especially those enshrined in the founding documents: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, transformed into a broad democratization agenda. The antipode to this idealism is the realism that purports to argue with greater sobriety, unencumbered by lofty aspirations, which it replaces with a down-to-earth realpolitik. In lieu of transformative norms and principles, realists insist on the priority of national interest, raison d’état, in a line of thinking that stretches from Machiavelli at the beginning of the modern era to Morgenthau at the apex of the American century. This dialectic of idealism and realism, values and power, is not however a Washington monopoly, so Telos 171 turns both to the Middle East and to China to explore some permutations of politics and the pursuit of principles that inform them.

Introduction
Russell A. Berman

Reflections on Kurdistan, Iraq, and ISIS
Sabah Salih

The Kurdish Question: The Black Holes of Democracy
Pekka Sulkunen

The 2013 Egyptian Coup and the State of Exception
Beau Mullen

The Fertile Grounds for ISIL Terrorism
Arno Tausch

When Freedom of Expression Says “No”: The Case against Academic Boycott
Mohammed Saif-Alden Wattad

Special Section on China
Chinese Values and Western Values: Clash, Coexistence, or Consensus?

Introduction
David Pan

The “Four Nevers,” Socialist Core Values, and “Western Values”
Flora Sapio

How Universal Are Human Values?
John Lagerwey

Western, Chinese, and Universal Values
Stephen C. Angle

The Constellation of Values: A Possible Path out of the Impasse of China–West Opposition
Huimin Jin

Under Non-Western Eyes: Chinese Values and Western Values in a Twenty-First-Century Media Ecology
Min Zhou

The Graves of Law: The Work of Jurisprudence in Bachofen’s Study of Tombs
Edward Mussawir

The Production of the Subject in Late Benjamin
Matteo Calla

Order and Disorder: A Poetics of Exception
Daniel Innerarity