This dissertation explores the reconfiguration of religion in modern global society with a focus on Koreans’ use of the category of religion. Using textual and structural analysis, this study examines how the notion of religion is structurally and semantically contextualized in the public sphere of modern Korea. I scrutinize the operation of the differentiated communication systems that produces a variety of discourses and imaginaries on religion and religions in modern Korea. Rather than narrowly define religion in terms of the consequence of religious or scientific projects, this dissertation shows the process in which the evolving societal systems such as politics, law, education, and mass media determine and re-determine what counts as religion in the emergence of a globalized Korea. I argue that, ever since the Western notion of religion was introduced to East Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, religion was, unlike in China and Japan, constructed as a positive social component in Korea, because it was considered to be instrumental in maintaining Korean identity and modernizing the Korean nation in the new global context. In twentieth century Korea, the conception of religion was manifest in the representation of the so-called world religions such as Buddhism and Christianity, which were largely re-imagined as resisting colonialism and communism as well as contributing to the integration and democratization of the nation-state. The phenomenal clout and growth of Korea’s mainstream religions can be traced to an established twofold understanding that religion is distinctive, normal, and versatile, while indigenous traditions and new religious groups are abnormal, regressive, and even harmful. I have found that, since the late 1980s, a negative re-formation of religion has been widespread in the public sphere of South Korea, with a growing concern that religion may harbor a parochial attitude against the nation’s new strategies of development. Religion has been increasingly signified as antisocial, conflictual, and sectarian in newly globalized South Korea, because structuralized religious power, in particular that of Protestantism, gets in the way of autonomous evolvement of the secular societal institutions. As such, I conclude by suggesting that the definition of religion was multiply appropriated by the differences in local particularization in contemporary global society. Insofar as religion is regarded as incompatible with the changed location of the national society in the new global society, the semantics assigned to what is called religion continues to be degraded in contemporary South Korea.

This thesis examines the ideological nexus of nationalism and heritage under the social conditions of neoliberalism. The investigation aims to demonstrate how neoliberal economics stimulate the irrationalism manifest in nationalist idealisation of the past. The institutionalisation of national heritage was originally a rational function of the modern state, symbolic of its political and cultural authority. With neoliberal erosion of the productive economy and public institutions, heritage and nostalgia proliferate today in all areas of social life. It is argued that this represents a social pathology linked to the neoliberal state's inability to construct a future-orientated national project. These conditions enhance the appeal of irrational nationalist and regionalist ideologies idealising the past as a source of cultural purity. Unable to achieve social cohesion, the neoliberal state promotes multiculturalism, encouraging minorities to embrace essentialist identity politics that parallel the nativism of right-wing nationalists and regionalists. This phenomenon is contextualised within the general crisis of progressive modernisation in Western societies that has accompanied neoliberalisation and globalisation. A new theory of activist heritage is advanced to describe autonomous, politicised heritage that appropriates forms and practices from the state heritage sector. Using this concept, the politics of irrational nationalism and regionalism are explored through fieldwork, including participant observation, interviews and photography. The interaction of state and activist heritage is considered at the Wewelsburg 1933-1945 Memorial Museum in Germany wherein neofascists have re-signified Nazi material culture, reactivating it within contemporary political narratives. The activist heritage of Israeli Zionism, Irish Republicanism and Ulster Loyalism is analysed through studies of museums, heritage centres, archaeological sites, exhibitions, monuments and historical re-enactments. These illustrate how activist heritage represents a political strategy within irrational ideologies that interpret the past as the ethical model for the future. This work contends that irrational nationalism fundamentally challenges the Enlightenment's assertion of reason over faith, and culture over nature, by superimposing pre-modern ideas upon the structure of modernity. An ideological product of the Enlightenment, the nation state remains the only political unit within which a rational command of time and space is possible, and thus the only viable basis for progressive modernity.

Les intellectuels iraniens ont toujours été un groupe social important au sein de la société civile iranienne. Depuis 1990, ce champ d’intellectuels aux vois discordantes, s’élève face à la tentative d’islamisation de la société enclenchée par le pouvoir politique. Constitué en différents groupes, ces penseurs se penchent sur la potentialité d’instaurer Etat-Nation démocratique iranien. Cette recherche rend compte des différentes mouvances qui traversent la sphère intellectuelle iranienne actuelle et prend le parti de réfléchir à quatre groupes importants : les intellectuels "religieux", le cercle des philosophes, les historiens et enfin les sociologues politiques. Tous reconnaissent le risque d’une politisation du religieux et conjointement d’une certaine sacralisation du politique. Leurs réflexions construites autour d’un axe commun questionnant les notions «Etat » et « religion » révèlent un profond souci de changement. A travers cette étude qui met en parallèle les différents discours et les arguments de chacun, ce projet aborde les rapports qu’entretiennent ces intellectuels avec d’autres groupes de la société civile tels les femmes ou les étudiants. L’ambition de cette thèse est d’offrir un panorama théorique des interrogations actuelles en réfléchissant aux stratégies de ces intellectuels. / The Iranian intellectual has been always an important part of civil society. Since 1990, this intellectual field with conflicting voices, rising against islamization of society which has been enforced by political power. This intellectual stream is constituted of different groups bend over study of potentiality of establishment of democratic Iranian Nation-State. This study examines various spheres which crossing the actual Iranian intellectual domain and deliberates over four important categories: religious intellectual, philosophical circle, historians and political sociologists. All these thinkers conjointly consider the risk of politization of religion and the sacralization of politics. Their reflections are constructed around a common axe of two notions “State” and “religion”, which reveal the crucial question of change in political system. Through this approach which puts in a parallel direction different discourses and arguments beside each other, this study looks into the relations between the intellectual field and the other units of civil society. The ambition of this research is offering a theoretical panorama on present problematic of intellectual society with probing their strategies.

This dissertation explores the reconfiguration of religion in modern global society with a focus on Koreans’ use of the category of religion. Using textual and structural analysis, this study examines how the notion of religion is structurally and semantically contextualized in the public sphere of modern Korea. I scrutinize the operation of the differentiated communication systems that produces a variety of discourses and imaginaries on religion and religions in modern Korea. Rather than narrowly define religion in terms of the consequence of religious or scientific projects, this dissertation shows the process in which the evolving societal systems such as politics, law, education, and mass media determine and re-determine what counts as religion in the emergence of a globalized Korea. I argue that, ever since the Western notion of religion was introduced to East Asia in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, religion was, unlike in China and Japan, constructed as a positive social component in Korea, because it was considered to be instrumental in maintaining Korean identity and modernizing the Korean nation in the new global context. In twentieth century Korea, the conception of religion was manifest in the representation of the so-called world religions such as Buddhism and Christianity, which were largely re-imagined as resisting colonialism and communism as well as contributing to the integration and democratization of the nation-state. The phenomenal clout and growth of Korea’s mainstream religions can be traced to an established twofold understanding that religion is distinctive, normal, and versatile, while indigenous traditions and new religious groups are abnormal, regressive, and even harmful. I have found that, since the late 1980s, a negative re-formation of religion has been widespread in the public sphere of South Korea, with a growing concern that religion may harbor a parochial attitude against the nation’s new strategies of development. Religion has been increasingly signified as antisocial, conflictual, and sectarian in newly globalized South Korea, because structuralized religious power, in particular that of Protestantism, gets in the way of autonomous evolvement of the secular societal institutions. As such, I conclude by suggesting that the definition of religion was multiply appropriated by the differences in local particularization in contemporary global society. Insofar as religion is regarded as incompatible with the changed location of the national society in the new global society, the semantics assigned to what is called religion continues to be degraded in contemporary South Korea.

The purpose of this thesis is to analyze the role of the transnational actor at the national level in particular case of the American Chamber of Commerce in the Czech Republic. The study is divided into two main parts. The first, theoretical part focuses on three theoretical strands. The first chapter focuses on the development of theoretical perceptions of non-state actors in international relations since the 1970s. The goal of the first chapter is to examine concept of interdependence, global governance, the new transnationalism and transnational private governance. The second chapter focuses on multinational corporations. The analysis emphasizes the dynamics of research and development of transnational corporations and their relationship with the nation state. The goal of the third theoretical chapter is to explore the process of interest representation within the nation state. Attention is drawn to obstacles and conditions that transnational actor needs to overcome in order to successfully penetrate the process of interest representation and pursue its goals within the state. The second part of the thesis investigates activities of the American Chamber of Commerce in the Czech Republic that were carried out in an effort to amend the Public Procurement Act from 2010 to 2012. The hypotheses...

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This study analyses the practice implemented by the government of Mozambique immediately after independence, from 1975 to 1985, of placing secondary school teachers around the country. Such practice consisted of putting teachers born in the south of the country to teach either in the central, or in the northern region, on the one hand; on the another, those who were born in the centre of the country were being placed to work or in the south, or in the north; and those born in the north were being sent to teach in the central or southern part of the country. The government’s arguments in so doing were to mould a nation. The study explores whether this practices was a deliberate policy. The presupposition that it may have been a formal policy comes from the fact that during the struggle for the liberation of Mozambique, the then movement leading the war, Frelimo, had as its guiding principle to ‘kill the tribe for the nation to be born’; so people from different regions of the country were compelled to work closely together in every activity of the movement. The theoretical framework includes a discussion of the concepts of ‘ethnic group’, ‘nation’, ‘nationalism’ and ‘nation-state’. Throughout the literature review, the way nations have been historically constituted worldwide, the way African leaders tried to build their nations, the philosophy behind the idea of ‘nation-states’ they developed are discussed at length. Given that education has been considered as a key pillar to achieve this specific end, the contribution of this sector to the processes of building a nation is brought to the fore. The study is a qualitative analysis and exploratory in essence. Fifty persons – including high ranking officials and teachers – who designed and implemented or were involved in the practice, were interviewed as the main foundation of the research. The outcomes of the analysis as well as the analogy itself are multidisciplinary. It concludes that the practice was not a policy in the classical meaning, that is a core of written principles and practices approved by a competent social institution and followed in a certain community, it existed only in speeches. Secondly, that in fact the practice contributed to the nation building process, people involved in it gained awareness of the vastness and ethnic diversity of the country. Finally, it reveals that de facto the policy had unintended interpretations. Given that the majority of the people sent throughout the country were southerners – something which the headmasters of the practice apparently were not aware of –, the unbalance of educated cadres that began during the colonial period were simply perpetuated and not critically addressed. As a result, “Southern dominance” in the administration of the country (in this instance the education system) provided the basis for dissatisfaction in other areas of the country. The study agrees with Connor (1990) that nation-building is a process, and concludes that Mozambique is on the road to nation formation, to which the practice contributed to a considerable degree. / Dissertation (M (Social Science in Sociology))--University of Pretoria, 2006. / Sociology / unrestricted

La tesi si concentra sul Partito Nazionalista Cinese negli anni Venti come punto privilegiato di osservazione del cambiamento politico della Cina dopo la Prima guerra mondiale. Questo decennio rappresentò un momento di definizione identitaria sia per i comunisti sia per i nazionalisti. La storiografia ne ha sottolineato numerosi aspetti, ma si è finora occupata del periodo 1919-1928 come una preistoria degli anni Trenta piuttosto che come un autonomo segmento di storia cinese. Studi recenti hanno superato implicitamente questo approccio criticando due date periodizzanti fondamentali per il Novecento cinese: la nascita della Repubblica nazionalista (1911) e la nascita della Repubblica Popolare (1949). A metà tra queste due date, gli anni Venti sono emersi come snodo decisivo nel passaggio da impero a Stato nazionale, durante cui si definì un nuovo spazio di discussione politica. Questo processo, pur interno, subì l’influsso delle strategie internazionali di sovietici e statunitensi dando vita a una nuova visione non soltanto della rivoluzione ma anche dello Stato post-rivoluzionario. Le classi dirigenti nazionalista e comunista, durante la collaborazione, si rivelarono dinamiche e tale “competizione” si trasferì anche all’interno di ciascun movimento diventando un fattore determinante per il successo o il fallimento del partito inteso come moderna formazione politica. / The thesis focuses on the Chinese Nationalist Party in the 1920s as a special standpoint to analyze the political changes in China after the World War I. That decade was crucial for shaping the identity of nationalists and communists. Many works have already examined some aspects, but they mostly considered the years 1919-1928 as a pre-history of the Thirties rather than an autonomous part of Chinese history. Recent studies have overcome this approach by criticizing two of the main periodization in the Chinese twentieth century: the birth of the nationalist Republic (1911) and the birth of the People’s Republic (1949). Halfway, the 1920s stood out as a critical juncture in the transition from empire to nation-state. A new space of political discussion was defined. The process, albeit internal, was under the influence of the USSR and US international strategies and gave birth not only to a new vision of the revolution, but also to a vision of the post-revolutionary state. Also, the nationalist and communist leaderships turned out to be dynamic. That "competition" may be seen also within the two political movements and became a shaping factor for the success or failure of the party as a modern political formation.