Nation Buidling

Often than not, Africans, probably due to their inglorious experiences of governance crisis and deficit in time past, are usually hastened by the slightest opportunity to condemn their leaders for bad management and governance currently permeating the continent"s political landscapes, while neglecting however, the problems of transculturalism, homogenization of cultures and cultural disconnections in the process of conflict resolution and peace building in Africa. While African leaders could still be adjudged culpable in the management and governance deficit in the continent, I want to begin by problematizing the bad management and leadership of trans-cultures as one of the triggers of the epileptic and deficient process and system of conflict resolution and peace building we are currently witnessing within the continent.

This article focuses on the tripled relation among visual culture, civil wars and national plan of the period from 1871 and 1885 in the Colombian twenty century; this implies a certain circulation of objects and types of visual illustration common both in Europe and America.  The aim is to examine the visual culture in the middle of big civil conflicts and the national promotion, on the basis that the production of images, in this time, reveal: 1) a specific logic about national promotion and a reflection which became visible its contradictions;  2) the configuration of a visual culture that it’s possible to understand since international clue and 3) it becomes apparent  the comprehension of national time where is strengthened a future since the common past, at the same time it is questioned, since the present characterized by the differences which imply the civil wars.

Considered out of context, the 1991 Colombian Constitution might be read as an extension of a trend in constitutional reform that has swept the world since the early 1970s, renewing state commitments to the Social Rule of Law model and human rights. Accordingly, the Colombian constitutional reform could be described as a copy-cat reform, whose failure resides in the internal ambivalences of the Social Rule of Law model and human rights discourse, and is starkly revealed in the social, political and economic reality of Colombian citizens. This paper problematizes this position: instead, the paper argues that the Colombian constitutional text should be read and evaluated on the basis of its particularities. The paper outlines reasons for studying the Colombian Constitution as a socio-juridical phenomenon, situating the constitutional text beyond its normative nature and the interpretative boundaries of the law. By adopting this approach, the paper concludes that the socialization of the nation-building project in Colombia has been an impressive achievement of the 1991 political and legal constitutional experiment, but that distinctive failures of Colombia’s constitutional reform can also be identified in this process.

In this video Ziya Gökalp, as one of founders of Sociology in Turkey, is portrayed as a sociologist proposing a centralist nation building project to Ottoman and republican political leaders; while Prince Sabahattin is depicted as a sociologist proposing a project to  transforme ing Ottoman Society into a decentralized liberal capitalist country. Somehow these two sociologists, sharing the historical time of the end of long 19th century and the beginning of 20th century, had found themselves positoned into opposite poles of Durkheimian society centeredness and top-town statist modernization versus  Le Playian individual centeredness and market oriented liberal bottom-up modernization.