CFP—Political Community: Authority in the Name of Community

The Center for Citizenship, Civil Society, and the Rule of Law will be hosting a conference at King’s College, Aberdeen this coming June 24-27.    Here is the text of their CFP:

Call for papers – annual CISRUL workshop and PhD summer school

We confirmed in the June 2013 workshop that the term “political community” was appropriate for identifying a core set of issues that interest us at CISRUL, even though it was evident that no term will ever carry all the right connotations and none of the wrong ones.

Though we each have our own preferred approach, reflecting the wide range of perspectives in CISRUL, several of us are using the term “political community” for one whose members feel somehow represented within its structures of authority, and thus somehow obliged to their fellow-members to follow its norms and accept its decisions. A political community could also be termed a democracy but we prefer to use the term “democracy” for a form of government; our focus is more on the link between authority and community than on the precise structure of government. In a political community, authority is exercised in the name of some kind of community of members – this is the point on which for the most part we converge.

That said, we understand both “authority” and “community” in a variety of ways. We are interested in:

• established political institutions but also less formal and/or emergentstructures of authority
• nationsas the (arguably) paramount political communities of the contemporary world but alsoother forms of political community: pre-modern cities are obvious examples, but we are open to the possibility that there are political communities other than nations in the present day, even if these may be linked to or embedded within nations.

We prefer, on the whole, to reserve the term “political community” for those that claim a degree of self-sufficiency (or self-determination) and we distinguish politicalcommunities from political collectivessuch as trade unions or churches which see themselves as players in a broader arena. However, we are still very much interested in how authority is exercised internally in the name of members of such entities, as well as in how they position themselves in relation to the political communities that host them. We acknowledge, too, that political communities such as nations also see themselves as players in a broader, international arena.

Please find the full CfP and call for PhD summer school applications at http://wp.me/PASsb-45. The deadline is 28 February 2014. Funding is available for both workshop speakers and PhD summer school students.

Contact

Further details at http://wp.me/PASsb-45

Academic coordinator: Trevor Stack (t.stack@abdn.ac.uk)

Logistical enquiries:langlit.school@abdn.ac.uk