This essay explores how domestic and international dynamics conjointly shaped wars in the modern world, including those fought in the contemporary period. Building on an institutionalist theory of war and distinguishing between domestic and international transformations of the institutional order, I argue that nationalism provided the main motivations for many conflicts in the past and the present, and their dynamics broadly follow an established pattern of transitioning from an imperial to the nation-state order. This logic intertwines with a changing international system, however, that follows its own but related rhythms, influencing war ends as well as alliance patterns and providing the ideological frames that give nationalist ideals of self-rule a more specific content. Early twenty-first century wars—in Ukraine, Palestine–Israel, or Ethiopia—follow the nationalist patterns of the past quite closely but are also uniquely shaped by the emerging, multipolar international environment within which states narrowly focus on their national interests and pursue raw-realist goals.
Grounded theory and Niklas Luhmann's functional analysis share more affinities than previously acknowledged. Both emerged as reactions to functionalism in the 1960s, and each, viewed abstractly, provides guidance on how to work on sociological concepts. Yet they diverge in the kinds of concepts they address: grounded theory – especially in the Strauss and Corbin tradition – provides techniques for working on property concepts, whereas Luhmann's functional analysis provides techniques for working on problem concepts. Because qualitative research may profit most from combining these two concept types, the article argues for integrating the approaches. Grounded theory offers procedures for working on property concepts from empirical material. Functional analysis, by contrast, offers procedures for working on problem concepts from theoretical material, with property concepts identifying social phenomena through their attributes and problem concepts focusing on the theoretical problems for which specific social phenomena are constructed as solutions.
This paper argues that functional analysis enables the comparison of social phenomena that are very different at first sight. A theoretical part demonstrates how functional analysis is part of semantic analysis in Luhmann's systems theory, here expanded by integrating the analysis of corporeal expressions of meaning. This approach is then applied to a case, namely, a comparison of different semantics as solutions to the problem of defining terra as materiality at the basis on which something may grow . In Old Europe, terra was considered the stomach of plants and perceived as a mixture of four elements which, due to this mixture, made plant growth possible. With functional differentiation and the evolution of modern society, this set of expressions of meaning dissolved, and terra is now understood as soil. Functional analysis thus allows insights to be gained into the variety of social solutions for specific reference problems.
This article examines Michèle Bernstein's ‘fake novels’ in relation to Situationist critiques of everyday life and the spectacle. It argues that her narrative experiments can be understood through two related practices: ‘affective topology’ and ‘symbolic resistance’. Through a playful mode of ‘détournement’, she reconfigures bourgeois familial affects into a revolutionary ‘affective topology’, exposing both their inscription within capitalist social relations and their latent possibilities for liberation. At the same time, through metanarrative self-reflexivity, she subjects the novel form itself to ‘détournement’, disrupting chains of signification and unsettling the symbolic order of capitalism. This ‘affective–symbolic’ mechanism offers a literary articulation of the Situationist ideal of ‘total art’ and suggests a model for post-critical leftist narrative grounded in what may be described as an aesthetics of ‘soft revolution’.
