Ali Qadir

The domestication of foreign news: news stories related to the 2011 Egyptian revolution in British, Finnish and Pakistani newspapers:

The article studies the domestication of foreign news by identifying the different ways in which the Egyptian revolt was reported and discussed in Britain, Finland and Pakistan. The data comprise the press coverage of the 2011 events in three newspapers: The Times in Britain, Helsingin Sanomat (HS) in Finland, and the Daily Times in Pakistan. We argue that, in addition to journalists, there are other agents who contribute to domesticating foreign news items. This makes understandable the unexpected differences between the three newspapers. One might assume that coverage of the Arab Spring would have been more impartial and less emotional in Britain and Finland than in Pakistan, which is culturally closer to Egypt. The opposite was true, however. The coverage of the events in Daily Times primarily consisted of hard news. The Times and HS, on the other hand, sent their reporters onsite, and the news stories used several discursive means to bring the events experientially closer to their readers. Yet, the Egypt uprising was used as a lever in domestic politics more forcefully in Pakistan. That is because the uprising was domesticated to local politics by other actors than just journalists.

Imageries of the social world in epistemic governance

To explain why neoinstitutionalist theories have been so successful in explaining global isomorphism and to discuss how they can be extended to describe otherwise inexplicable similarities in the world, the article approaches policy-making from an epistemic governance perspective. Utilizing a constructionist view on language, the article argues that popular and political rhetoric are inextricably bound to social scientific conceptions of reality through the use of root metaphors that are, in turn, woven into convincing imageries of social reality. In addition to the well-known culturally constructed imagery of social change as driven by functional requirements of modernization, two other imageries are identified: society as a hierarchy and the social world as comprising competing blocs. These three imageries are then discussed as key discursive ingredients for both social scientific and political actors seeking to understand and change the world. Finally, the implications of the article for future research are discussed.

Taming terror: domestication of the war on terror in the Pakistan media

While media studies have focused on journalist roles in framing foreign news events for local readers to render them suitable for national audiences, there has been less attention to similar roles played by other social actors in bringing ‘home’ new models about existing realities. Therefore, this paper addresses the question of how a global catchphrase, ‘war on terror,’ acquired a national paradigm status by virtue of its use by multiple actors in the media sphere in Pakistan. We analyse all the articles mentioning the catchphrase in a leading national English daily over two years to unpack how the war on terror turned from being ‘their’ war in America to becoming ‘our’ war in Pakistan. Drawing on media studies of localization, we discuss the rhetorical modes by which the term was embedded in the Pakistani political field to give it a distinct national flavour. We refer to this process as ‘domestication’, by which the catchphrase was adopted in Pakistan by local, interested actors including media professionals. We draw particular attention to the way in which this complex process naturalizes the term by nationalizing it.

The construction and spread of global models: worldwide synchronisation and the rise of national bioethics committees

Cultural approaches to national policymaking have yielded much empirical evidence that national decision-making is greatly impacted by policy choices made in other countries. Considering that the common explanation of policy diffusion cannot explain all instances of isomorphism, this paper proposes an alternative way of operationalising interdependent decision-making. Drawing on emerging work in neoinstitutionalist world society theory, we suggest that the rise of global policy models can be explained by thinking of the world polity as a synchronised system in which national states keep an eye out on each others’ moves and, often, match them. As a consequence, global models are formed in parallel with their spread. We illustrate this argument by analysing the worldwide institutionalisation of national bioethics committees (NBCs). Using qualitative analysis of official documentation on NBCs, we trace how the institution has evolved into a widely recognised and codified format in four shifts – the appearanc...

Between secularism/s: Islam and the institutionalisation of modern higher education in mid-nineteenth century British India

This paper problematises clean distinctions between secular and religious by tracing the history of modern higher education of Muslims in British colonial India. Grounded in the interpretive research tradition and with an empirical focus on the formative mid-nineteenth century, the article argues that relational notions between singular secularism and multiple secularisms best capture this historical trajectory. The institutional imaginary of colonialism constituted a significant milieu that, on the one hand, resulted in British policies in India that were at a tangent to similar developments in England at the time and, on the other, informed Muslim agency in its own institutionalisation of higher education. Muslim educational philosophy, politics and even theology were shaped in a concrete, historical, power-laden context. One of the consequences of this was a peculiar construction of ‘secularism’ in relation to Islam – again, related but at a tangent to the same notion in Europe. With a view on contemporary Pakistan, it is argued that such relational histories must be accounted for if policy and academic discourse is to move beyond largely stale and unhelpful binaries of Islam vs. Western modernity in religious education.

Russia in world society: A comparative perspective on international references in parliamentary debates

This article explores how international references in parliaments build a synchronized world polity, even in countries that are often portrayed as being at odds with the rest of the world. The article asks whether and how Russian parliamentarians refer to the international community, and how such references compare with parliamentary debates in other countries. The “mesophenomenological” argument developed here connects World Society Theory, which demonstrates global isomorphism, with national studies of Russia, which argue for important national particularities. The empirical analysis draws on a stratified random sample of debates on draft laws in the Russian Duma from 1994 to 2013, comparable to similar samples from six other countries. The results show that: (1) Russian parliamentarians refer to the international community in the same level and the same forms as in other countries; (2) Russian policy-makers rely on the same imageries of the social world to convince their audiences as do other parliamentarians; and (3) this similarity in form remains consistent throughout the period, despite radical changes in national politics. These findings attest to the Russian Duma as a site of world culture, and to the mesophenomenological view that the world polity is highly synchronized through discourses of cross-national comparisons.

The Ideal of Utility in British Indian Policy: Tropes of the Colonial Chrestomathic University, 1835–1904

The now natural ideal of defining higher education through its societal utility is a relatively recent historical formation, and in the case of South Asia, its construction is entangled with the colonial history of the institutionalisation of modern higher education in the nineteenth century. Drawing on Robert Youngs history of the Bentham-inspired ‘chrestomathic’ University of London, this article reviews the shifting construction of practicality in British Indian higher education policy in the formative period between 1835 and 1904. The article underlines the continuities and ruptures over time in the policy rhetoric of utility as a normative ideal and points out some implications for understanding colonialism.