Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: The content of actor beliefs and the way in which they form these beliefs play a central role in intentionalist accounts of political behavior, perhaps most explicitly in a widely applied class of game theoretic models. Presenting a signaling game of ethnic mobilization, this paper challenges the claim that such models constitute a rational choice version of interpretive social science and sketches a hermeneutic perspective on strategic action that suggests the importance of mental models in belief formation. History creates emotionally charged mental models that generate biased beliefs about the choice context and the costs associated with different strategies, leading to different choices of actions by agents with different mental models. In order to provide a rational interpretation of significant political events, it is necessary to specify the causal mechanisms linking history and emotion to the beliefs that drive rational choice.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Review Method: Peer Reviewed
Abstract: This article seeks to explain the influence of the democratic-peace thesis on politics by offering a new understanding of theory: as a hermeneutical mechanism of attaching meaning to political concepts. The hermeneutical mechanism is understood as a three-stage metatheoretical model in which theoretical constructions transform into social conventions and then into political convictions. By using discourse-tracing—analyzing the process in which the theoretical discourse was transformed into political discourse—the article explores two case studies in which the democratic-peace thesis played a political role: the Israeli Right and its criticism of the Oslo accords, and the American neoconservatives and their policies in the Middle East. The metatheoretical model that developed here advances our understanding of theory as offering a holistic understanding of reality, rather than a mere limited explanation of specific phenomena; highlights theory’s involvement in real-world politics; and emphasizes theory’s political capital, with the resulting moral responsibility of theoreticians.

Publication Type: Proceeding
Abstract: The hermeneutic circle provides a straight forward answer to the question when to stop researching, and, as a corollary, when to stop interviewing. The premise for accepting this answer lies in recognizing that any scientific research must start with theory, as only a theoretical framework allows for the separation of realms for systematic inquiry. First, we have to define what we are interested in, then our theory will tell us what variables we have to look for and how we suppose they relate to the phenomenon in question. In other words, the hypotheses we formulate allow us to determine what is relevant to our inquiry. Once we have separated a realm for our inquiry, we can start the process of gathering data, where speech acts are considered part of the data to be collected. In addition to collection speech acts, we must contextualize this data with other information relevant to the speaker(s) so that we can reach an understanding of her lifeworld and situate her speech. This is achieved by going for and back between the specific and the general, the concrete speech act and the political, historical, psychological, and in general institutional context in which the speaker and the speech is embedded. This conceptions leads us to gather empirical data up to the point when each single new information “makes sense,” i.e. it complements the logical structure of the lifeworld we are exploring. Each new interview must relate to and ultimately confirm what we already have found out, in a positive of negative way, and little by little we construct a contextualized understanding of the single speech act in question, which allows us to interpret each new piece information and locate it within the horizon of meanings that constitute the context or lifeworld of the speech and the speaker and the realm we have separated for our inquiry.

Publication Type: Conference Paper/Unpublished Manuscript
Abstract: With reference to a well-known Hegelian (1967: 13) phrase, it can be argued that the owl of Minerva has been most commonly expected to spread its wings with the falling of the dusk of modernity, or in other words, with the collapse of the modern nation-state. Contrarily, it seems unusually possible to observe such an inclination while treating nationalism today. Despite the common view on the evaporation of the nation-state, it is paradoxically but commonly argued that nationalism is reemerging and waxing as one of the most critical issues of our time. What is so particular about studying nationalism, and why is it necessary to enhance a critical alternative to existing theories of this idea today? Two central and interconnected reasons should be mentioned at this point: (i) disclosing the dialectical structure of modern identity formation and (ii) questioning the very idea of modernity and democracy.
Introducing a critical departure from universalist and particularist perspectives and Janus-faced dichotomizations in the existing theories of nation and nationalism, this paper intends to discuss an alternative concept, method and system under the framework of quasi-dialectical hermeneutic analysis. By disclosing the trimorphic nature of modernity through revealing a dialectical idea (nationalism), its form (nation) and practice (nation-state); the main objective of this paper is to interpret intra-subjective realm of ethnos, inter-subjective realm of demos and trans-subjective realm of cosmos as a reflection of the dialectical interpenetrations in-between self, other and the world.

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