Most people think that the military is all about killing other people. I, on the contrary, follow van Creveld. He states that serving in the military means more to be prepared and willing to risk one’s life then to endanger other lives. You could argue that military technology provides tools that have kinetic effects over huge distances without any risk for one’s personnel. Drones, for example, are such weapons. However, can you win a war with only drones? We have relearned the lesson that it takes “boots on the ground” to win “the better peace,” as Clausewitz carefully worded it. It takes soldiers on the ground to control an area, to protect the population, to de-escalate a situation, and to win hearts and minds.
Fred Siegel’s talk, “Liberalism and Socialism: The Twisted Path to Reconciliation,” was delivered at the 2011 Telos Conference, held in New York City on January 15–16, 2011.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2011 Telos Conference, “Rituals of Exchange and States of Exception: Continuity and Crisis in Politics and Economics.”
This work results from the development of a Master’s thesis for the Master in Communication Sciences, at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto. My thesis was under the theme “The Communication of Communist Ideology after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Limitations, Disruptions and Opportunities. The Portuguese Case: The Image of the Portuguese Communist Party in the 21st century.” Our main question is whether communism is recognized as being valid today. The thesis is based on a theoretical and methodological approach on the identity, historical background, and validity of certain vectors related to communist ideology in today’s society. The object of the work is the communist ideology, mainly the European communism and the Portuguese Communist Party. A second part of this research work is complemented with a study of the party’s image made after conducting a survey of 600 students from the University of Porto.
An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2011 Telos Conference, “Rituals of Exchange and States of Exception: Continuity and Crisis in Politics and Economics.”
Whereas the new millennium brought with it a focus on “collision rules” within global governance and corporate governance, the economic crises emerging out of 2008 turned the focus to the failure of regulatory practices. The current crises challenge not only a neoliberal hegemony but the New Deal/Great Society coordinating state model as well; as we have moved not only beyond a society of individuals to a society of organizations. We live now in a society of transnational network contracting and corporate governance practices. This society of networks can no longer be clearly associated with traditional conceptions of state, market or civil society/public versus private. Amidst this crisis, emerging legal challenges can no longer be coped with by institutions and ritualized routines of laissez-faire liberalism, social liberalism, or neoliberalism. This paper redirects focus to an increasingly disembedded style of contracting amidst multi-polar and multi-rational regimes of conflict regulation/dispute resolution. In doing so this paper starts from the prism of contracting practices and rituals: arguing that an understanding of how the discourse of “governing contracts” is continually and irreversibly implicated in the evolution of a network of heterarchical private relationships and public institutions.
This paper was presented at the 2011 Telos Conference, “Rituals of Exchange and States of Exception: Continuity and Crisis in Politics and Economics.”
Slavoj Žižek poses more than a few heavy-gauge questions in his In Defense of Lost Causes. Foremost among them, at the beginning of chapter nine: “The only true question today is: do we endorse this ‘naturalization’ of capitalism, or does contemporary global capitalism contain antagonisms which are sufficiently strong to prevent its infinite reproduction?” (421). This vast question—as well as its possible answers—develops in many ways out of the discussion in the previous chapter of the book, in which Žižek approaches Alain Badiou’s concepts of subtraction and the Event with his usual copious verve, as well as with substantial concern that Badiou’s “subtraction” means that one might have the capacity to stand “outside” the “state form,” but only in a way that is “not destructive of the state form” (402). Žižek thus concludes that Badiou has
This paper was presented at the 2011 Telos Conference, “Rituals of Exchange and States of Exception: Continuity and Crisis in Politics and Economics.”
When we consider the metaphysical foundations of our world, we must make a basic choice between a universal conception of metaphysics and a relativist one. This choice commits us to either of two possibilities for world order. With a universalist conception, world order will evolve through a gradual establishment of one universal metaphysical structure that will establish its universality everywhere. With the relativist conception, world order can only consist of a set of agreements and rituals that can be established between a number of separate spaces, each of which is organized according to its own metaphysical structure. The choice for one or the other of these perspectives is consequently a fundamental one that will have far-reaching consequences for our conception of politics in a global context.
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This work results from the development of a Master’s thesis for the Master in Communication Sciences, at the Faculty of Arts of the University of Porto. My thesis was under the theme “The Communication of Communist Ideology after the Fall of the Berlin Wall: Limitations, Disruptions and Opportunities. The Portuguese Case: The Image of the Portuguese Communist Party in the 21st century.” Our main question is whether communism is recognized as being valid today. The thesis is based on a theoretical and methodological approach on the identity, historical background, and validity of certain vectors related to communist ideology in today’s society. The object of the work is the communist ideology, mainly the European communism and the Portuguese Communist Party. A second part of this research work is complemented with a study of the party’s image made after conducting a survey of 600 students from the University of Porto. 
