Volume 14 (2020): Issue 2 (December 2020)

Globalization in the early 21st century can be considered as the age of inequality that splits the world into the rich North and the poor South. From the perspective of language politics, only very few discussed the division across the globe, especially, between Eurasia and the “Rest of the world.” In Eurasia, indigenous languages and scripts are used in official capacity, while the same function is fulfilled almost exclusively by non-indigenous (post/colonial) European languages in the Rest of the world. In the countries where they are spoken, non-Eurasian languages have limited presence in the mass media, education, or in cyberspace. This linguistic imperialism par excellence is a long-lasting and pernicious legacy of European (western) colonialism. The aforementioned divide is strongly associated to the use of ethnolinguistic nationalism in state building across many areas of Eurasia, while this ideology is not employed for this purpose outside the region.

This article focuses on the manifestations of Islamophobia of Czech politicians and political parties on the social networking service Twitter during the 2015 migration crisis. It utilizes the securitization theory of Copenhagen school as a theoretical framework, and through content analysis of relevant tweets aims to provide more data on what role Islamophobia played in the securitization of incoming migrants. We find that although securitization, and much more politicization, of migrants took place, obvious Islamophobia, similar to the one of the Czech Islamophobic movement, happened only in some cases. A number of those politicians who politicized or migrants and Islam usually raised their voices against radical Islamophobes.

Michael Billig's idea of “banal nationalism” is a useful concept to approach a frequently neglected aspect of Venezuelan political disputes in the past 20 years. In Billig's formulation, banal nationalism is the constant reaffirmation of a nation's identity, through the display of national symbols. After Hugo Chavez rose to power, there were changes to Venezuela's flag, coat of arms, and banknotes. This aroused disputes that served as a micro-cosmos of Venezuela's larger confrontation. This article reviews the disputes over the changes made to those national symbols. It concludes that, although political and economic issues are at stake in Venezuela's current crisis, there are also ongoing culture wars. In that sense, an analysis of Venezuela's recent crisis would be incomplete without a consideration of its banal nationalism disputes.

This article analyzes the labor gender policies and the strategies of “genderization” put forward by the Franco Dictatorship in Spain. The Franco regime understood that women were the touchstone of society and key in both biological and sociocultural reproduction. Legislative regulations and sanctioned discourses accentuated the division between productive-public and reproductive-domestic spheres, relegating women to the latter. Nevertheless, to what extent did women embrace and challenge the regime's idealistic view of gender? This article contemplates female employment within and beyond official discourse. Oral sources used in this article suggest that socioeconomic reality overflowed the narrow limits of normative femininity. Not all women could enjoy the “honor” of embodying the exalted role of “perfect (house) wife” that the Franco regime had entrusted to them. In addition, this article explores changes in the ideal of femininity throughout the dictatorship. The Franco regime underwent crucial transformations during its almost 40 years of existence. This article argues that its adaptation had repercussions on sociocultural patterns and gender policies. Francoism built its early notion of normative femininity on the ideals of domesticity and Catholic morality, but (re)shaped the meanings of womanhood and (re)adjusted the legal system to fit the new circumstances that arose in the Cold War context.