The logics approach : discourse, affect and critical explanation -- Rethinking foreign policy: including affect, encircling decisions -- Contradictory common sense : Iraq War and social logics of German foreign policy -- Constructing crisis : political logics and the madness of decision -- Affective disorder and the desire for closure : Fantasy and the fantasmatic logic.
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Abstract This essay reviews four recent books on Germany's foreign policy with emphasis on the era of Angela Merkel. The evaluation is based on their (a) added value to scholarship on German foreign policy, (b) theoretical sophistication and contribution to IR, and (c) relevance also for the post-Merkel era. I argue that the books bring in valuable insights regarding the enduring, yet also changeable role of anti-militarism and provide knowledgeable analyses of the failure of Germany's policies toward Russia. Importantly, they enrich also broader literatures, especially in their focus on discursive change and state power in the European Union context. I demonstrate that these ideas help us understand Germany's struggle to redefine its role after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, and offer more nuanced analyses of Germany's policies and their specifics, staying clear of treating the country as a priori exceptional.
This book offers a timely and trenchant addition to the vanguard of critical political thought in Central Europe. Reclaiming politics from the logic of war, the book provides a sobering cut into the political work of hybrid warfare discourse. With its theoretical sophistication and thick empirical embeddedness in the stories from the in-between zone of Czechia, this is a must-read for untangling the lazy causality between the problems with Western democracies and Russian subversive actions. -Maria Mlksoo, University of Copenhagen This is a first book-long analysis showing how the notion of hybrid warfare was used to transform security policies and discourses in an EU/NATO country. Building on current debates in International Political Sociology, Critical Security Studies, and Critical Geopolitics, it provides a novel account of how crisis, geopolitics, uncertainty, and expertise are intertwined in the social construction of threats. Based on extensive and original empirical research of large textual archive and elite interviews in the Czech Republic and Brussels, the book shows how officials, bureaucrats, journalists, activists, and experts all participate in the reshaping of security in a new geopolitical environment. Zooming on the case of Czechia and its specific Central European context, it complements the predominantly Western-centric studies of insecurity with an account of how the liminal position on an East/West boundary influences security politics. As a first study of its kind and scope, it will be of interest to academics and students interested in Central European politics, practices and discourses of hybrid warfare, as well as critical approaches to security and geopolitics. Jakub Eberle is Research Director and Senior Researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague. He works on IR theory, Czech and German foreign policy, and politics of Central Europe. He is the author of Discourse and Affect in Foreign Policy: Germany and the Iraq War (2019). Jan Daniel is Senior Researcher at the Institute of International Relations Prague. His research mostly draws on International Political Sociology and Critical Security and Peace Studies and focuses on politics of (in)security in Central Europe and the Middle East.
In: Political geography: an interdisciplinary journal for all students of political studies with an interest in the geographical and spatial aspects, Band 92, S. 102502
What do we speak of when we speak of 'hybrid warfare', a notion that has become prominent in discussions of European security? The article shows that this question is difficult to answer, as the hybrid warfare discourse is not only vague, but also consists of multiple, and at times contradictory, narratives. While talking and writing about supposedly the same thing, participants in the hybrid warfare debate often suggest markedly different ideas about the precise nature and target of the threat, offer different responses and draw upon different expertise. Grounding our argument in critical scholarship on narratives, security knowledge and hybrid warfare, we build a framework for studying security narratives around the four elements of threat, threatened value, response and underlying knowledge. This framework is utilised in a case study of Czechia, a country that has played a pioneering and outsized role in European hybrid warfare debates. We identify three narratives of hybrid warfare – defence, counterinfluence and education – which present markedly different understandings of 'hybrid warfare', and ways to defend against it. Our intervention hopes to contribute to disentangling the contradictions of the hybrid warfare discourse, itself a necessary precondition for both sound state policy and an informed public debate.