We recommend two new blog-posts from Faculty bloggers:
Fabiola Bazo and Max Cameron, “Peru’s general election: Volatile to the end”.
“Overall, without coherent parties this election has lacked distinctive programmatic alternatives, and campaigns have emphasized celebrity and spectacle. In part, this is because the candidates, with the exception of Humala, tend to agree on many issues.
However, Peru’s preferential congressional list system encourages this type of candidate-centred competition, with contenders competing against their peers on the same ticket as much as against rival parties. As a result, campaign spending and advertising often reaches a level of intensity that confuses and annoys voters.”
Gastón Gordillo, “Imperial Velocities and Counter-Revolution”.
“The same way that revolutions are movement and acceleration (as Paul Virilio has argued), counter-revolutions are machines of de-acceleration: they try to slow down and halt revolutionary fervors. These machines of de-acceleration work at different spatial scales: the deployment of high-speed weapons systems that can outpace enemy vectors, the production of militarized striations in space to prevent the expansion of revolutionary unrest, and the creation of striations on the internet and in networks of instant communication that aim to dissipate insurgent affects. Imperial actors are actively working on all these fronts.”